Theater: Booth Theatre / 222 West 45th Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
Next to Normal is a contemporary musical that explores how one suburban household copes with crisis. With provocative lyrics and a score featuring more than 30 original songs, the musical shows how far two parents will go to keep themselves sane and their family’s world intact.
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May 16, 2009: No show on Broadway right now makes as direct a grab for the heart — or wrings it as thoroughly — as “Next to Normal” does. This brave, breathtaking musical, which opened Wednesday night at the Booth Theater, focuses squarely on the pain that cripples the members of a suburban family, and never for a minute does it let you escape the anguish at the core of their lives.
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August 14, 2010: The Goodman household has calmed down since the last time I hung out there. Sure, Mom is still certifiably bipolar and delusional; Dad is suffocating on his own denial; and the kids — well, let’s just say they’re definitely not all right. Yet in the newly recast “Next to Normal,” the musical that won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in April, nobody is bouncing off the walls anymore or threatening to pull the audience into one collective meltdown of extreme feelings.
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April 15, 2009: There are no easy answers to be found in "Next to Normal," a startling, emotion-drenched musical about one family's attempt to cope with mental illness. The show is an impressive achievement, a heartfelt entertainment that has found its way back to New York after an invaluable out-of-town retooling.
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April 16, 2009: FOR better or for worse, "Next to Normal" is usually shorthanded as "the musical about the crazy woman." It's accurate -- the central character, Diana (Alice Ripley), has a severe bipolar disorder -- but only up to a point.
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Unlike the bipolar manic-depressive at the center of "Next to Normal," who draws no lasting salvation from her trials with different medications, this original new pop-rock musical has benefited unequivocally from treatment. Composer Tom Kitt, writer-lyricist Brian Yorkey and director Michael Greif have made a lot of smart changes en route to Broadway, giving the show a more assertive personality, a more consistent tone, sharper focus and greater depth to its relationships. While its weaknesses have not been entirely erased, they are outweighed by the intimate musical's ambition, sincerity and heightened emotional involvement.
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April 16, 2009: People don't usually yearn to be ordinary. But when events cause their lives to spiral out of control, normalcy is precisely what they pray for. Or even a close facsimile.
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It's a tough sell: a rock musical about mental illness. One or two people losing their marbles is pretty much de rigeur in a play; where would Shakespeare, O'Neill, Williams, or Tracy Letts (August: Osage County) be without it? But composer Tom Kitt and lyricist-librettist Brian Yorkey chose to devote two hours and 20 minutes (and nearly 40 songs) to this generally unappealing subject; the result, in Next to Normal, is incongruously, sometimes agonizingly beautiful.
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Alice Ripley is absolutely fierce. Like Sherie Rene Scott, Idina Menzel or Julia Murney, Ripley brings an electrifying, urgent intensity to edgy rock musicals. And Ripley’s luminous ferocity is displayed to brilliant perfection in “Next to Normal".
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