Next To Normal

On Saturday, NEXT Ministries went to the Broadway show, "Next to Normal". It was a good show - amazingly powerful performances and a great production. Loved the music. And the voices. And the set. The plot and characters were interesting. At times it was very moving. And yet something about the show left me disappointed. It's a bit hard to pin down, since each component was well-executed, yet I have the sense that the whole was somehow less than the sum of its parts.

To some degree, it's because I couldn't quite shake the sense that the show's purpose, in large part, was didactic. You will become enlightened about mental illness!! That created some distance for me, took away some of the immediacy of the family's problems. At times, I felt like the clinical jargon was being sung too clearly, too straightforwardly. Yet I wouldn't want those fabulous voices to be muddier. Maybe I'd have preferred, perhaps, that more were left to the imagination? Or that the words had more poetry, more mystery? (It's hard with a contemporary play, dealing with contemporary issues, I suppose, because our everyday life lacks poetry - we're all foul-mouthed, self-aware realists now.)

Then too I found the ending - though relatively positive - somewhat disappointing. I didn't like labeling the husband as the co-dependent enabler type. (Oh, cliché!) And maybe because the divergent results for the two parallel relationships seemed a bit forced to me. As if the dynamics in the two relationships are so similar, that only one of them can be "allowed" to make it. Or else as if the play were designed with the thought that American audiences don't like totally bleak endings, so we'll give them one successful relationship and one failed relationship - and it won't be the one they expect! Maybe that's the problem for me in some sense, that I didn't see a reason for the young lovers' relationship to work out where the mature lovers' relationship doesn't.

As far as the plot twists go, I tried to predict them, but luckily missed the big ones - it's wonderful to be surprised! After the first one was revealed, I wanted to see the opening scenes again to see how that played out with my newfound knowledge (same reaction as for The Sixth Sense). In fact, the only things I guessed right were that the daughter would become addicted to drugs and that the husband might be able to see the son as well - those are much more minor.

Hmmm. But now, because I saw that one, I have two more plays on my radar screen - The Screwtape Letters and Love's Labour's Lost.