Dear Evan Hansen – Assembly Rooms Ballroom
What a contrast. Barely had The Love-Hungry Farmer packed away his lonely Irish farmhouse before Captivate Theatre arrived in the same Assembly Rooms Ballroom and filled it with the sound, energy and emotional punch of Dear Evan Hansen.
This was my first time seeing the musical. I knew several of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul's songs independently but seeing them finally placed within Steven Levenson's story was something of a revelation.
At its centre is Evan Hansen, played here by Shlok Ramakrishnan, an isolated, socially anxious teenager whose therapeutic exercise of writing letters to himself becomes disastrously entangled with the death of fellow student Connor Murphy. A misunderstanding becomes a lie, the lie gives a grieving family something desperately needed ...