REVIEW: Next to Normal @ Palace Theatre 6/8/11

Next to Normal @ Palace Theatre 6/8/11

Not many musicals cause me to leave the theatre pondering electroshock (or electroconvulsive therapy as it’s now known), but Next to Normal certainly did. It’s a Tony Award-winning rock musical (fabulous staging and lighting for the three-level grid structure); the cast is vital and energetic. While the songs don’t linger in the mind after the show, they are all right in the same way that Baroque opera librettos are all right: they move the story along.

Opening night Alice Ripley, as Diana, offered a husky, slightly “off” voice that fitted with the character’s more than slightly “off” perspective. It’s easy to see why she won the 2009 Tony for Best Actress in a Musical. Curt Hansen’s Gabe radiates energy, animal magnetism, that makes it easy to see why Diana can’t ignore her son. Emma Hunton as Natalie owned the sense of loss and pain “normal” children feel in a family besieged by mental illness. Asa Somers copes as Diana’s husband, Dan, a staunchly supportive husband who may be less than he seems. Michael McElroy, playing both of Diana’s doctors, embodies the hope doctors and patients share. His duet with Diana (and light changes thereof) rocks. Preston Sadleir (Henry) plays Natalie’s confused boyfriend as the couple play out a younger version of her parents’ dynamic.

Much of the story turns on just how desperate a situation must be before electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is considered; very little turns on the trust that the couple in the musical gives to the doctor who assures them that it will work and that they should sign informed consent forms. The results bring into question the doc’s values. I looked ECT up on Wikipedia (I know, but where else?) and found that it’s one of the treatments that, although it’s been around since 1938, has never been subjected to controlled (or even retrospective) studies that ask questions about matters such as “what’s the long-term survival rate?”

Next to Normal doesn’t offer as scathing an indictment of ECT as Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but it does show that if it works at all, the cost (years of memory) may be worse than the disease. At least Ernest Hemingway is reported to have thought so: shortly after a round of ECT at the Mayo Clinic, he shot himself. For Hem, he just wasn’t “Hem” without his memories. “Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient. It’s a bum turn, Hotch, terrible.” (quoted in A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, ch. 14, 1967).

Next to Normal ends on a more hopeful note, but Diana’s response is also drastic. Overall, the show brings light to the problem of treating mental illness and suggests one reason it’s a problem is that no one wants to discuss it. This show seems to have fixed that.

Next to Normal continues through Sun 6/19 at Playhouse Square as part of the KeyBank Broadway Series. Tickets are on sale now at the PlayhouseSquare Ticket Office, online at http://PlayhouseSquare.org and by phone at 216-241-6000.

 

Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.

Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.

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