A Musical Film that Would Be Better Without the Music

A review of 'Dear Evan Hansen'.

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Dear Evan Hansen premiered on Broadway in 2016 to critical acclaim. It won the Tony Award for Best New Musical, and Ben Platt won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his performance as the titular character. Evan Hansen, a lonely, anxious teen, gets a chance at everything he’s wanted—popularity at school, the girl of his dreams, and a stable, two-parent home—all thanks to a lie. 

Critics praised the musical for spurring conversations about mental health, suicide awareness, and the effects of technology on teenagers. I had the good fortune to see Dear Evan Hansen during its original Broadway run, and all the actors gave moving performances with emotional weight. A film adaptation seemed inevitable for a musical this acclaimed and popular, and, sure enough, last weekend, Universal released Dear Evan Hansen in cinemas. One would hope that in 2021—with teens’ social media use and mental health challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns—that the movie adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen might be similarly impactful. Unfortunately, it is not.

The basic plot of both the musical and movie is this: Through a series of plot contrivances, Evan is mistaken for the best friend of Connor Murphy, a classmate who committed suicide. Misunderstanding turns to deliberate fabrication. Evan leads a massive social media campaign to remember Connor, becomes a second son to the Murphy family, and wins the affection of his crush, Connor’s sister, Zoe.

Only Ben Platt and Colton Ryan—who understudied as Connor on Broadway—reprise their roles for the film. The rest of the cast is replaced by Hollywood actors with varying levels of singing talent. Platt’s vocal performance is as resonant as it was five years ago, but he looks too old now to play a high schooler. The de-aging CGI used to disguise that might work, except the director incessantly relies on close-ups of characters’ faces. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Jason Gibson

    I don't really like broadway plays.

    Started Hamilton on disney+ and shut it off. Have zero interest

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  2. Avatar photo
    Dguaspari

    "impactful"?

    Editors, please.

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  3. Avatar photo
    MarqueG68

    Thanks for this write-up, even though I'm not a particular fan of musicals generally.

    That out of the way, two recommendations to those who happen to like the genre and already have AppleTV+:

    - The sitcom musical series "Schmigadoon" was surprisingly enjoyable. The two main characters played by Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key go for a couples camping weekend and find themselves trapped in an alternate reality of an "Oklahoma" style musical come to life. There's a lot of decent singing and dancing--and self-aware comedy about the ridiculous and campy situation. (It also has a highly stylized cinematography, probably thanks to the directing work of Barry Sonnenfeld, familiar to fans of Coen Bros films.)

    - The near-musical almost family film "CODA", which is an acronym for "child of deaf adults." (If it hadn't been for some sexualized language in a few spots, I would say it was a family film. But it isn't really appropriate for the wee ones.) It's very well done coming-of-age story of high-school girl Ruby Rossi, told against the backdrop of a family that is held together by their deafness. Ruby has a natural talent for singing that leaves her non-hearing family completely baffled. She is discovered by her school choir teacher when she signs up for his elective class to be close to a boy she's smitten with.

    CODA has an innocence to it that I've missed in movies for some time--at least in movies with high cinematic production values. There's a lot of singing, but not much dancing: It isn't a musical. The acting by Emilia Jones in the role of Ruby is particularly impressive, as she had to learn American sign language to match the deaf cast who play her family.

    Anyone who fondly remembers Marlee Matlin from the 1986 hit "Children of a Lesser God" will probably enjoy this movie, I would think, not least thanks to Matlin's role as Ruby's mother.

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    Aylene Wright

    Hmm, perhaps I shouldn't be looking forward to the inevitable actual big screen adaptation of Hamilton after all? (I haven't seen the Disney Plus version but most of that was just a video of an actual stage performance, although I understand some scenes were shot just for the video version.)

    BTW, I think one of the best recent movie adaptations was "Chicago" in which the music numbers were mostly framed as "Roxie's fantasies" or actual in-story stage performances by the characters. The Minelli version of "Cabaret" also worked because most of the musical numbers occur at the actual cabaret.

    And many of the classic movie musical adaptations such as "the King and I", "Oklahoma", "the Sound of Music", etc, came across well to me when I saw them. Even "Gigi", despite the very archaic storyline that is rather problematic to modern sensibilities as it's basically about a barely pubescent young girl being trafficked to a much older playboy by her own family. (Which I only realized last year. 😬)

    However, I think a lot of that is because the classic movies already come across as slightly kitschy and removed from reality, so further removing them from reality by adding music and dancing, really isn't that jarring. And the aforementioned Chicago is actually set in the 1920s, not modern day Chicago.

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    1. Avatar photo
      MarqueG68

      "Chicago" was the first cinematic musical I actually enjoyed. The other classics I never really got into, even though the Rogers and Hammerstein-type classics had great production values for their time.

      Come to think of it, I guess "The Wizard of Oz" was my first one... But I really, really couldn't get into the movie versions of any Andrew Lloyd Webber numbers.

      Think I'll give "Cabaret" a try if its included somewhere in my media subscriptions.

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        Aylene Wright

        Warning that Cabaret is definitely not a family flick / show, though. A lot of sexual references in both the "stage on a stage" and the movie plot (which actually brings in some elements not even found in the original stage production, and perhaps even more obscenely, turns the original British protagonist into an American!)

        recall there was a revival that was supposedly even edgier.

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