‘Dear Evan Hansen’ brings slices of life to Hancher Auditorium

Previous generations found touchstones in “A Chorus Line,” then “Rent,” followed by “Spring Awakening” and “Hamilton.”

Gen Y and Z found themselves drawn to “Dear Evan Hansen,” which ran on Broadway from 2016 to 2022 and swept up six Tony Awards, including Best Musical. The 2024-25 national tour of this tour de force is coming to Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City from Dec. 6 to 8.

It’s the story of Evan Hansen, a high school senior with social anxiety and few friends, who would rather be on his computer than speak to anyone face to face or even on the phone. But when a letter he wrote falls into the wrong hands, he gets caught up in a social media frenzy spinning off another family’s tragedy.

If you go

What: National tour of “Dear Evan Hansen”

Where: Hancher Auditorium, 141 E. Park Rd., Iowa City

When: Dec. 6 to 8, 2024; 7:30 p.m. Dec. 6; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Dec. 7; 2 p.m. Dec. 8

Tickets: $80 to $115 adults; $45 to $115 students and youths; Hancher Box Office, (319) 335-1160 or 1-(800) HANCHER or hancher.uiowa.edu/2024-25/dearevanhansen

Show’s website: dearevanhansen.com/

“At the core, it’s about this young boy who obviously struggles with a good bit of anxiety and just navigating the social constructs of being 17, and he finds himself in a web of lies that he has accidentally created,” Hatty Ryan King, 26, said in a recent Gazette phone interview with fellow actor Jeff Brooks, 43.

“But then, more than that, I feel like the show is about our need for connection and our need to — as the show says — step into the sun and let yourself be seen. Because if you never step into the sun, you’ll never feel connected to people around you, and you’ll never give them an opportunity to see you.”

King plays teenager Zoe Murphy and Brooks plays her father, Larry Murphy. Their characters are in the midst of a family crisis that launches an emotional roller coaster everyone rides throughout the show.

“We know the other shoe’s gonna drop at some point,” Brooks said, “but we gotta stick through it with this kid ’til the end and see where he goes and how he gets there, and if he’s gonna be OK.”

A moment in time

So why did this particular musical resonate with teen- and young adult audiences?

“There’s a lot of musicals that take a very honest look at what it’s like to be both a young person and an adult, and a parent and a school-aged person,” King said. “I just feel like ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ is one of those musicals that takes this very honest look at all of those things. It has the melancholy and the hardships that come along with it, but there’s also so much humor and so much light that is able to be made of all of these very real situations.”

“I was at the age that these characters were, when this musical was coming out. That’s part of what I was so drawn to. It just felt so real and so honest, and therefore, I was able to just enjoy it so much more. I didn’t feel like it was pandering,” she said. “I just felt like it was a very frank look at what that experience is like.”

It also has a more modern visual feel than older musicals, Brooks noted.

“Some of the things that we got used to seeing were big sets and big drops and big showy things on stage,” he said. “ … ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ strips away a lot of that form, and it is presented in a very void-like, formless world where light and information fills the entire stage. The audience is brought into a piece that they’re able to discern, not by sets, but by light and information being fed to them. So it’s very contemporary in that aspect.”

It also deals with how quickly social media moves. The play, however, remains rooted in 2016.

“It’s crazy to say it — 2016 was only eight years ago,” King said, “but in some ways, that’s like a whole other time period from 2024, just considering how quickly technology does change.”

References to Facebook being the most up-to-date social media platform provides perspective, letting viewers know they’re seeing a period piece, Brooks said. “And that’s an interesting experience for any audience.”

Zoe Murphy

King’s character, Zoe, is the youngest of two children in the economically well-off Murphy family, where all is not as rosy as it seems.

“Considering the fact that her brother, Connor, is a bit of a problem child, I think Zoe grows up learning to take care of herself, because her brother takes so much of her parents’ attention,” King said. “And in that way, I think she really fosters a sense of independence, and she really fosters her own inner world. …

“I do think that sense of independence transfers over to her life at school, and I think sometimes she has a hard time connecting with her own peers, and maybe she’s a bit of a wallflower because of that.

“She gets mixed up in this whole story, because she becomes Evan’s love interest.”

They’re a bit like kindred spirits.

“I think she is drawn to Evan because he’s a little different than everyone else that she’s surrounded by,” King said. “I think she likes that his flaws and his anxiety and his messiness are a bit on the surface. I think she’s charmed and attracted to that.

“I think she knows him on a very deep level. I think she feels strongly connected to him, and in some ways, maybe even similar to him. And I think that’s why she’s able to see him for who he is,” which softens the blow when she gets burned by his downward spiral.

King sees elements of her high school self in Zoe — common ground she can bring to the role. They both do their own thing, march to the beat of their own drum, and don’t really care what others think. They both also value honesty, even if they don’t always choose the right moment to speak their mind.

“But I do think she has a huge heart, and I think she does genuinely care about her family, even though they drive her crazy,” King said. “And I think she does genuinely care about Evan, so I definitely relate a lot to Zoe, and I do take a lot of inspiration from her, as well.”

Even though King is about a decade older than Zoe in real life, channeling her inner high schooler involved recalling the anxiety of being alone with a boy for the first time, or being mad that her parents just don’t understand her.

“To view her from this standpoint of being my mid-20s has actually been a really lovely healing experience,” King said. “I’m really grateful for that.”

An Alabama native who moved to Nashville as a tween, she was bitten by the theater bug when she saw a school play in sixth grade and knew she just had to explore that realm. She’s grateful for a mother who was so supportive of her theatrical dreams that she drove her “all over tarnation” for classes and community theater, before King headed off to study theater in college.

Larry Murphy

If young people may relate to Zoe and Evan, adults will relate to father Larry Murphy, said Brooks, who grew up in a small town in central New York and discovered his calling at age 13, when his family went into the city and saw “Damn Yankees” on Broadway.

His own father was the school’s baseball coach and his mother directed music for the school plays, and since they didn't want to leave their baby with a sitter for afterschool activities, his mother set up his crib next to the stage.

“I like to say that I grew up on stage or adjacent to a stage,” Brooks said.

But back to Larry.

“Larry is a family man, first and foremost, but he is a successful lawyer,” Brooks said. “They live a very nice existence … that Larry has worked very hard to cultivate. This is the man who has a riding lawn mower for a very small lawn. He uses it once a week to make sure that his lawn is very nice and cut. … You need to stay on top of these things, and you need to be efficient, and you need to do this, you need to do that. And if you do all these things, you will succeed. Larry has lived by this mantra his entire life, and it has worked for him.”

It may or not be working for Zoe, but “it definitely did not sit well with Connor,” Brooks said. “He and his son do not see eye to eye on anything at the moment that we see them in the piece. While we are dropped into a moment of a relative peace in the Murphy household, it is very, very quickly upended, and you see the dark underbelly of what this family has been going through and how they’ve been hanging on by a thread.

“A lot of parents will relate to Larry’s predicament. … (His) journey through this piece is one of those where he starts to release a little bit of that as he moves forward and realizes that he has been holding on too tight … and they don’t have to do everything the right way that he believes everything needs to be done. So this journey for Larry is really lovely to do every night.”

Decompressing

The playwright has made sure that coming off the show’s emotional roller coaster isn’t as hard as it may seem for the actors.

“The show is really written in a beautiful way that it doesn’t leave you in the in the lowest of lows. It really does pick you back up,” King said. “The finale is such a beautiful full-circle moment. The Murphys — at the beginning, they’re clearly not OK. And then you see them very broken, and then you see them starting to come back together. And then you see them broken again. But in the end, they have this lovely moment together where you can see it’s going to be OK. I think you see that for all of the characters.

“So personally, I take a lot of comfort in that last scene that really just shows us, ‘Hey, this bad thing happened, but it’s all going to be OK, and these characters are going to make it.’ And that, for me, does the job of tying up all the loose ends every night.”

Hearing audience reactions buoys their spirits, as well, and allows them to go off stage and immediately begin giving each other high-fives and hugs, which helps keep them "in a good, healthy mental state,” King said.

A veteran of big, showy musicals, “Dear Evan Hansen” has been “a unique experience” for Brooks.

“This is one of those shows that asks your audience to lean forward and be a part of this intimate connection between people in a scene. It’s very much a play with music,” he said. “This has been a novel experience for me, to be able to be a part of something so intimate and so real and so grounded.”

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