Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt’s Next to Normal is a difficult show to do well. All aspects of it are technically challenging: the show is sung-through so staging must be complex to keep the audience’s attention, the score itself is very vocally demanding and features lots of high notes and intricate lyrics, and even the show’s subject matter must be handled delicately lest a production come off as thoughtless or even actively harmful. Despite this, UMMTS has risen to the task admirably and produced one of their most impressive shows to date.
Diana Goodman (Alexia Mourao) is, it would seem, the archetypal American mother. She lives in the suburbs of an unnamed city, together with her husband Dan (Bill Burrows) and two children, seventeen-year-old Gabe (Callum Baillie) and sixteen-year-old Natalie (Tess McElherron). This is peeled away almost immediately, however, as by the end of the first number Diana is on the table frantically making sandwiches while the rest of the family watch on, concerned. It soon becomes apparent that Diana suffers with bipolar disorder, and has been seeing a psychopharmacologist named Dr Fine (Tommy Schofield) with limited results. Halfway through the first act, the song “He’s Not Here” reveals that the Gabe we have been seeing to that point is not real: Gabe died in infancy and Diana has been seeing hallucinations of him as a teenager.
From there, the show chronicles Diana’s continued attempts to break the cycles she has found herself stuck in. She switches doctors, goes off her medication, even tries electroconvulsive therapy, and this last has the unintended side effect of erasing huge chunks of her memory, including that of Gabe. Soon she is wondering if her grief over her son’s death can be overcome at all, medication or no.
Music directors Will Savage and Liv Young, together with their band, completely capture the driving rock melodies of the show’s score, while director Amari Creak and assistant director Iona Lyall reflect Diana’s increasingly fractured mind by dividing the stage into three discreet areas, with Dr Madden’s office stage right, Natalie’s bedroom stage left, and the family dining room between them. It’s an effective setup that allows for some dynamic and interesting choreography from movement director Lucy Hobbs, particularly in songs such as “I’m Alive” that transition between different locations, or the upbeat but frenetic dance sequences in “My Psychopharmacologist & I”. The set itself is sparse but effective, letting the actors take centre stage and clearly directing the focus to them.
Which is just as well, because the performances in this show are some of the best I have ever seen from UMMTS – already an incredibly high bar, but one that the cast clears easily. Alexia Mourao is electric as Diana, swinging between the character’s highs and lows with equal believability and delivering stunningly impressive vocals that drip with unsaid emotion in both aggressive power ballads (“Didn’t I See This Movie?”) and quieter, more contemplative moments (“I Miss the Mountains”). Bill Burrows as her husband Dan is endlessly sweet and endlessly charming, doggedly determined to support the woman he loves even when she believes that she is hurting him, and again his range in both singing and acting is on display through the fast-paced, frantic pain-hiding of “It’s Gonna be Good” and the earnest declarations of love in “A Promise”.
Tommy Schofield brings a much-needed sympathetic quality to Dr Madden – in the wrong hands the character can come across as detached and unlikeable through his pushing of the medication and ECT onto Diana, but Schofield’s performance makes clear his genuine wish to help her and frustration at his perceived inability to do so. Natalie’s arc is conveyed wonderfully through Tess McElherron’s performance: in “Superboy and the Invisible Girl” she vents to her friend-turned-boyfriend Henry (Sam Jones) about how clear it is to her that she was never anything more than a replacement for Gabe in her parents’ eyes, a fact Diana herself admits to Dr Madden later in the show. McElherron’s singing is powerful and affecting, and she perfectly sells the concept of a child forced to grow up too fast, in the shadow of someone who isn’t even there.
Jones, like Burrows, is incredibly likeable as Henry – despite what his outward appearance and smoking habit would suggest, he is by far the most stable and reliable character in the show, an ocean of calm amid the family slowly deteriorating, and Jones’s charisma and endearing earnestness are a necessary and welcome respite. Lastly there is Calum Baillie as Gabe – or, more accurately, the hallucination of Gabe that Diana sees. As is to be expected, Baillie’s vocals are fantastic, hitting soaring high notes with seeming ease, but his acting is just as impressive: arguably Gabe is the villain of the show, suave and seductive as he attempts to keep Diana clinging to his memory and prevents her from moving on, and Baillie plays this excellently.
Next to Normal has faced some criticism in the years since its release for its apparent anti-medication messaging, and it is certainly true that the show depicts the absolute worst-case scenario for a sufferer of bipolar disorder. In the real world, ECT is only used as a last resort, once all other treatment options have been exhausted, and even then its success rate is fairly high. And yet the worst-case scenario is still entirely plausible; you can throw all the statistics in the world about the apparent efficacy of medication or ECT at someone in that position, but human beings are messy and complicated even at the best of times and are will not process each piece of information entirely rationally. We should not expect that of people in Diana’s position, people who have already had to endure so much through their condition and whose efforts to recover have seemingly only made things worse.
And indeed, the show itself is a surprisingly optimistic one, all told. While much of it is spent watching the characters fall apart and struggle with the possibility that their suffering is insurmountable, the play’s ending actually provides a glimmer of hope: Diana and Dan agree to put some distance between each other so that they can give their son the grief they never truly afforded him, and in the reprise of “I am the One”, Gabe is finally referred to by name for the first and only time. Dan begins seeing a psychiatrist recommended to him by Dr Madden, and Natalie and Henry begin their relationship in earnest.
The shared thread between the characters is letting go, most obviously in Diana finally coming to terms with Gabe’s death and moving away from the hallucination’s constant presence, but visible too in Dan deciding to take some time away from Diana and in Natalie overcoming her simmering resentment towards her late brother. The final words of the show reaffirm its thesis statement: that when it seems that the worst will never end, that the trauma and tragedy of life will hang over us forever, that the dark is all we have – there will be light.
