Story of lonely boy who feigns friendship with a dead peer has a smart premise but is wretchedly executed
By the end of its long running time, there’s something entirely unbearable about this pass-agg weepie teen-empathy musical, adapted from the 2015 stage hit. And that’s despite a satanically ingenious high-concept premise involving a letter of which even the great romdram novelist Nicholas Sparks, author of Message in a Bottle, might approve.
Ben Platt reprises his Broadway performance as Evan Hansen, the wretchedly lonely and unpopular high-schooler, nursing a broken arm in a cast and on all sorts of anxiety medication, whose therapist has got him writing tragically upbeat letters to himself, beginning “Dear Evan Hansen”. One day in a fit of gloomy honesty he types out a letter to himself in the first person, saying just how horrible his life is, rashly prints it out at school and the letter is stolen by a troubled, angry kid called Connor (Colton Ryan) who bullies Evan, sarcastically signs his cast but is perhaps himself a kindred spirit of unhappiness. When Connor takes his own life, the letter is found on him, and his anguished parents (Amy Adams and Danny Pino) wrongly assume Connor wrote it, and that Evan was his best friend; they are desperately holding on to this consolatory fantasy that Connor at least had some relationship. And foolish Evan finds himself going along with this fiction out of sympathy, but also because it makes him a huge social-media celebrity at school and gives him an in with Connor’s smart sister Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever) on whom he’s always had a desperate crush.