Photo by Riley White
I ventured to Cambria this past Memorial Day weekend to take in a show featuring an engaging contemporary rock score, an exemplary cast of performers, and an emotionally charged topic that isn’t often the nucleus of a musical theatre production.
While the contemporary stage is rife with characters who suffer (and often sing) about the effects of mental health issues (see Dear Evan Hansen, Rent, or Every Brilliant Thing for starters), seldom do we see mental illness itself as a work’s raison d’être.
Next to Normal, with book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey and music by Tom Kitt, is a powerful depiction of bipolar disorder and the tragedy it inflicts not only on its central character but her family as well. It won three 2009 Tony Awards and, perhaps most significantly, the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
With strong vocals and inventive staging, the Cambria Center for the Arts production packs a powerful punch in its own right. Director Parker Lowrie and his team have created a streamlined setting and use lighting to drive attention and focus. Until the very end of the two-and-a-half hour production, most of the set is purposefully in shadow, only giving appropriate, full illumination to the final number, “Light.”
The first half of the show sets up the darkness of the main character’s struggles after the birth of her first child. Diana, wife to Dan and mother to Gabe and Natalie, is up and down, manic and depressive, but is under the care of a psychopharmacologist who provides lots and lots of pills.
The marvelous Veronica Surber as Diana sets the pace for the rest of the cast. Her voice is powerful and pure in songs like “You Don’t Know” and “I Miss the Mountains,” as Diana mourns her former, “normal” life. Surber’s energy fuels the fires that erupt from the show’s other five actors as their characters react to Diana’s tragic tendencies.
Dominic Logoluso and Quinlin Gallagher play Diana’s children, both fierce and intense as they sing out their youthful anger and frustrations. Logoluso, who is outstanding as Gabe, is at his best in what may be the most ironic song of the show, “I’m Alive”—dramatic and ferocious enough that he repeats it in the second act.
Gallagher is excellent playing Natalie, Gabe’s rebellious sister who is waging her own teenage battles, but who has the added worry of whether she will suffer as her mother has suffered. The potential parallel of her life’s journey to her mother’s is matched by that of her boyfriend Henry, played by Parker Lowrie with great range and precision, who provides the same comforting and constant presence that her father has provided her mother through the years.
Mother, father, daughter and boyfriend crystallize this parallel in the second act when they lovingly sing about “the promise I made to you.”
Bryce Prunty as father to Natalie and Gabe, and husband to Diana, provides the calming presence of normalcy—providing a steady ray of hope for the rest of the family. As a potentially catastrophic decision must be made about Diana’s treatment at the end of the first act, his plaintive “A Light in the Dark” is heartbreaking.
It’s the darkness of forgetting that inhabits the second half of Next to Normal. Diana is now under the care of a psychotherapist who has offered a new treatment that proves just as frustrating in its own way as all the others. Both doctors who treat Diana are played by a terrific Simón Lowrie, whose rich, operatic vocals are at times soothing and at other times shocking—as the score demands.
This production comes with the warning that it contains mature themes including drug use, self-harm, and suicide. While mental illness embraces all of these possibilities, it’s the light of potential healing that beckons us to explore the darkness.
If you or friends or family members have experienced mental illness (and I suspect most of us know someone who has), Next to Normal expresses emotions surrounding its challenges that often go unexpressed. CCAT’s production uses powerful and engaging voices to allow us to experience the journey from darkness to light.
Next to Normal runs through May 31 at the Cambria Center for the Arts Theatre.