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Next to Normal
by Eric Grunin If you saw Alice Ripley give the performance of a lifetime in Next to Normal, you might wonder if the tremendous impact of the show wasn't perhaps dependent on having such a force of nature for its power. I'm pleased to report that the answer is no: the Gallery Players in Brooklyn have mounted a straightforward production that demonstrates the solid excellence of the piece. If you didn't see it on Broadway, definitely check this out. The story takes place in an American suburb and is centered on two couples. Diana (Carman Napier), in her late 30s, was diagnosed as bipolar many years ago, and her husband Dan (Chris Caron) has been doing his best to be supportive ever since. Their daughter Natalie (Lindsay Bayer), a brilliant and talented high school senior, acquires a new boyfriend, Henry (John Wascavage), who is sweet but a bit of a stoner. We watch as the younger couple reflects and refracts the experiences of the older one. Diana is struggling through a bad patch that may be getting worse, and at one point Natalie warns Henry that she herself might end up as crazy as her mother. Additionally, Diana is preoccupied with her 18-year-old son Gabe (Luke Hoback), and the dramatis personae is rounded out by various men of medicine, most notably Dr. Madden (Benjamin Sheff). It's notoriously difficult to talk about this story without giving away key plot points, so let's just say that it follows Diana as she tries to gain mental stability, with variable success. It's not maudlin, sentimental, or polemical, it finds places to be witty without being glibly clever, and in the end it's moving without being manipulative. It well deserved its 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The performers are all good to excellent. Napier is strong as Diana without sounding like she's mimicking Ripley, and has a grasp of the character; she also got all the jokes to land in the first scene with the doctor, which is harder than it looks. Bayer made an exceptionally strong impression as Natalie; virtually every time she began singing it grabbed us authentically and immediately and wouldn't let go. (She actually got me tearing up in her verse in the opening number, but maybe that was just me.) Caron convincingly plays Dan as both wanting to do the right thing and being a bit of a jerk, and Hoback was the right kind of live wire as Gabe. Bayer and Wascavage had great chemistry together, a genuinely appealing take on them as a couple. Other chemistry was more elusive: Diana and Dan never seemed to feel love or even warmth towards each other, but when Gabe and Diana faced each other at close quarters, their body language conveyed something rather closer than mother and son. (Yes, it was a tiny bit creepy.) Napier's singing was significantly better and more passionate when directed at Caron than to the audience. But the interpersonal relationships of this show are exceptionally tricky, and director Michael Bello deserves credit for getting even this close. The musical was originally presented on a large three-story set, while in this production's set (by Anne Sherer) has only a few steps separate one level from another. It turns out that the story really does depend on the multi-platform concept, but director Bello manages to make things clear enough most of the time. The only major traffic problem was the opening number in Act 2, which was fairly confusing due to the lack of sufficient separation between the middle level (Diana, and later Natalie) and the lower level (doctors). The rest of the physical production was generally good. A back wall of family photographs located us inside Diana's head, and costumes (Heather Carey) were simple and effective. But perhaps makeup could get Napier looking appropriately older (she appeared closer to 29 than 39), and the food props were distractingly weird: "bread" that was too obviously foam rubber, and a "birthday cake" which seemed as high as it was wide, looking very much like a hatbox. The band had a great rhythm section, but the strings had some surprisingly sour moments, and the synth patch used to emulate a piano needs to sound more like the real thing. Lighting design (Scott Cally) was good, and though I'm not sure what the vertical strip lights on the audience's right were meant to represent, somehow they contributed. There were a couple of times where it would have been good if they had dimmed the secondary characters, such as when Dan sings to Diana over the birthday cake, or Dan's solo number as he mops the floor near the end of Act 1. The one truly serious technical deficiency was the sound. Bayer's microphone kept dropping out, poor equalization frequently degraded intelligibility, and in "My Psychopharmacologist and I" Napier's voice was sometimes completely swamped by the background parts, which almost ruined the middle section of the song. (Sound design is credited to Jacob Subotnick, but equalization and balance are the responsibility of whoever was actually at the soundboard during the performance.) Fortunately in a house this small you get a fair amount of direct sound from the actors--even when Bayer's mic quit you could still hear her reasonably well. Even with all these small imperfections, the show is powerfully moving, and the audience was just as torn up as they should have been. So again, if you've never seen this show you should definitely check this out. If you're a student of musical theater, and have only seen the Broadway production, you too should see it, because it will show you what works easily and what needs special attention to come off. Next to Normal 
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