| She/Her/Any | Violet I write fanfiction (sometimes) and have a lot of interests, mainly musical theatre my Ao3 is violet_core My twitter is surprisingly more active @Jaredkleinman (the L is an i!) kleinsen enthusiast
TAGS!!!
Talking to the moon - Text, from my mind, rambling
Painkiller - Venting
Cupid - Aesthetic
Sweet tooth - My own works
Also included all fandoms and ships
I AM STILL TAGGING ALL MY POSTS. IT WILL TAKE A WHILE.
hey :) i'm interested in that deh miniseries you mentioned in a reblog of my post, because i also thought it should be that! what ideas do you have for it? would it be a musical? what would you change about or add to the plot? is there anything you'd take from the book or the movie?
oh i am SO glad you asked because i sure do have Ideas. gonna combine this with a related ask from my good friend @unproduciblesmackdown:
what are some of the main objectives of deh as a miniseries in your ideal vision of that. as in like this existing as a different version of deh & The Importance / Advantages / Agendas of those differences
so, The Vision:
it is absolutely a Musical with a capital M. none of stephen chbosky’s “musical with a small m” / “movie with songs” nonsense. there will be SINGING and DANCING! okay maybe not dancing in most cases but SYNCHRONIZED MOVEMENT SET to MUSIC!
it will be primarily based on the stage show re: characterization and plot, but i might steal minor details from the novel or movie (e.g. minor characters, extracurriculars, backstory details) to suit my whims. if the writers are taking my calls, i’ll also pester them for earlier drafts of the stage show and cut songs. (jared doing model UN is very real to me despite making it no further than arena stage.)
it will be an aggressively 2016 period piece. the exact opposite of the movie bringing tiktok into the picture and the novel & updated broadway script stripping away as many specific real-world references as possible. the student body will be scrolling through vine and contacting each other via snapchat and dabbing in the hallways and making deez nuts jokes and taking their phones outside during gym class to play pokémon go.
the marketing angle of “a moving story about Mental Health for anyone who’s ever needed to be Found!” that got pushed more and more with every adaptation (to the point that the movie shot itself in the foot with the dissonance between the taglines and the plot) is going straight in the trash. this is a story about “if there were two lonely kids in high school and one died and the other lied about being his friend and the internet amplified that lie a thousandfold would that be fucked up or what,” and anyone who tries to quote you will be found in the advertising materials will have their laptop taken away.
you know how michael greif said that the audience sees evan through jared’s eyes? i want to take that one step further and make jared the narrator of the story, but an unreliable one. he’ll still point out all the terrible choices evan is making for the audience’s benefit, but he’ll also lie to us about all the same things he lies to himself about, even if it contradicts what’s happening onscreen.
how i imagine the beginning of the show in this concept: a teenager sits alone, staring at his laptop screen. he says in voiceover, “dear evan hansen… hey, why are you looking at me? i’m not evan hansen. this story isn’t even about me, it’s about him. look, can we just start from the beginning?” then go to evan in his bedroom with a cast on his arm and his laptop open to write a letter.
the opening monologue is tricky to put on camera, because “actor types on a laptop while reciting what they’re typing out loud” isn’t quite as plausible on film as it is on stage and “words appear on a laptop screen while the actor recites them in voiceover” isn’t very interesting to watch. my proposed compromise: evan starts to type his letter, goes Oof Ouch My Arm, and reluctantly turns on voice-to-text to help him compose it instead.
i’ll still do waving through a window as some version of “evan moving through the halls at school begging someone to acknowledge him and getting no response,” like in the movie, but unlike in the movie where they’re all just milling around, everyone else will be moving in time with one another and to the music like in the stage show, because 1) it emphasizes that evan is On The Outside from everyone else who seems to just know What To Do In Life and 2) IT’S A MUSICAL.
i’ll make it clear that heidi is a nurse’s aide who works in a nursing home, not a nurse who works in a hospital as claimed by both the novel and movie. it’s a completely different role that implies different reasons for her studying to become a paralegal, which the movie also cut! i might bring in the extended dialogue from arena stage, when she’s explaining why she can’t pick evan up after the first day of school, that hints further at her feelings about her job:
HEIDI: Well, the truth is, we could use the money. Not to mention it’s not the worst idea in the world right now to show them I’m, you know, a team player… They’re announcing more budget cuts, which means I’m the aide for four different nurses now on two floors, which is not even… it’s not fair to the patients, first of all. I just want to say to these people sometimes, I mean, “I’m sorry, if these were your parents, is this how you would like them to be taken care of?”
EVAN: Right.
HEIDI: I just have to keep reminding myself, this is why I’m going back to school. This is why I’m taking out loans and working extra shifts when all I want is to spend time with you.
i’ll lean into the horrors of car-centric suburbia that should undergird the whole “everyone is isolated and Constantly Online” deal. the stage show kind of ignores the question of “how does evan get around if he can’t drive?” (sure, he can take the bus to therapy, and i can believe he lives within walking distance of jared, but how is he getting to and from the murphys’ house all the time? they canonically live at the end of a cul-de-sac and i just know they’re in some horrible neighborhood miles from the nearest bus stop with half-acre lots) and the novel and the movie both strike me as overly optimistic in answering that question with “well he can just walk and take the bus pretty much anywhere he wants to go, though Of Course zoe drives him around once they’re dating.” (in the movie, once the letter is leaked online, evan seemingly walks from his house to wherever that bonfire is happening to the murphys’ house in less than five minutes onscreen and probably less than half an hour in real time. i call bullshit!) this should be, in part, a story about someone who is profoundly lonely because he can’t go anywhere or see anyone without his mom driving him around and she’s never home!
once connor’s dead, he’s dead. no ghostly narration reminiscing about the real secret best friend he had all along, and no sneakily taken videos of him baring his soul in group therapy. barring the eighth grade yearbook, all we get to know about him after the first day of school is from other people’s memories.
that said, i’ll keep posthumous connor as evan’s shoulder devil. the novel made him an actual ghost and the movie didn’t even try outside of sincerely me but i’ll find a way! (i have an idea involving cynthia giving evan an old school photo of connor, since “i guess you don’t have any pictures of him,” that acts as a starting point for evan visualizing him. like the photo of michael jackson in the “get the fries, you’ll need the energy in the coming days” post.)
every iteration has leaned harder and harder into it being The Evan Hansen Show rather than evan being one otherwise ordinary member of A Community reacting to a tragedy, despite the novel’s and movie’s attempts at fleshing out that world by adding a plethora of minor characters, and this will push back against that. we’ll see everyone at school trying to be “““friends””” with zoe (ft. the long-ago cut moment of alana trying to give her a hug) and selling connor merch for five minutes and learning from jared that evan and connor were Definitely Best Friends and paying attention to evan for the first time.
for years i wished that alana could have a larger role in the story, maybe even get a solo, and then a monkey’s paw curled and gave alana twice as big a role in the movie as in the stage show, with a solo to boot, at the cost of nearly all the dialogue and characterization that made her compelling to me in the first place. (and at the cost of a good chunk of the moral ambiguity of evan’s actions, but i digress.) the novel did a better job of expanding alana’s role while maintaining her characterization, but i always felt it was a little too unsympathetic to her. somehow i’ll find the balance, and if possible i’ll also bring in the alana / naomi / isabelle love triangle that may or may not have been present in an early version of the movie, because it delights me.
i’ll find a way to make the “evan stops taking his meds because he resents taking them and wants to believe that he’s Fine once he has relationships with the murphys” subplot work as intended. the original stage show didn’t quite pull it off (hence One Hundred Years Of Discourse re: “ummm how dare they imply that getting a girlfriend cures your anxiety”) and the novel completely missed the subtext of “evan’s Not fine, actually” and the movie changed it to him skipping therapy appointments and the revised stage show cut it entirely but i KNOW it’s possible.
i’ll develop more of a relationship between evan and cynthia. we see evan bonding one-on-one with zoe and with larry, but not with cynthia, even though A Mom Who’s Always There is one of the elements that drew him to the murphys. cook chicken milanese together! have a conversation with [a parent who has plenty of time for you and doesn’t expect you to be One Of The Guys] / [a kid who actually likes spending time with you] for a change!
in the stage show, larry and cynthia mention to heidi when she comes over for dinner that evan has spent the night at their house before, but the novel and movie both cut that detail from that scene. i’ll keep that in and actually show at least one instance of him spending the night at their house.
good for you has to be in there as well, but this post about how it would have looked in stephen chbosky’s excessively literal style haunts me to the point that i don’t have any specific ideas about how to do it. (and really makes you think about how abstract the original staging is!)
and yes, jared Is gay and has feelings for evan and is working overtime on repressing it all, and when evan says “go ahead, do it, tell everyone how you wrote emails pretending to be a kid who killed himself,” jared Will react as though he heard “it’s not my fault you’re, like, in love with me or something.”
you know that post-good for you scene from the novel where zoe shows up to evan’s house at night and asks why he didn’t tell his mom about her and yells at him for being a bad boyfriend? some version of that is going in there, though i might change the timing.
the letter being posted online and the ensuing backlash will still be set to a reprise of you will be found, which the movie failed to do and suffered for. the whole point is that the internet focusing massive amounts of attention on one person or group of people has just as much potential to harm as to heal, that’s what the reprise is for! “you are not alone” can easily be a threat!
after the letter leaks, we return to the opening shot of jared sitting alone, staring at his laptop screen. he says in voiceover, “dear evan hansen… i wish that everything was different, i wish that i was a part of something, i wish that anything i said mattered to anyone.” then: “i said this story wasn’t about me. but i’m in it anyway.”
re: developing evan and cynthia’s relationship further, i really liked that the movie version of words fail switched things up so it’s larry who goes after zoe and cynthia who remains in the room with evan longest to politely ask him to leave, so i’m keeping that.
for a decade now we’ve had discourse about how deh allegedly romanticizes mental illness / lying / lying about your mental illness / substance abuse / not taking your psychiatric medication / et cetera ad infinitum. you know what it actually romanticizes? the nuclear family. you know how we can fix that? here’s the vision:
EVAN: How are your parents?
ZOE: Divorced.
EVAN: I’m sorry.
ZOE: Don’t be. They’re actually happier now.
and there Will be some kind of reconciliation between evan and jared, though i haven’t figured out how exactly that will go or where along the spectrum from “former friends who are now politely reacquainted” to “officially dating six months before evan meets zoe at the orchard” they’ll land by the end.
since 2017 i’ve probably watched or listened to a hundred different versions of jared’s scene in good for you and i have Never seen or heard anyone do it the way gabriel vernon nunag does it. go here with me, starting at 1:44
the low quiet way he delivers his first few lines here is a stark contrast not only to the rest of his performance, which is loud and high-energy for most of the show, but to the way many other actors play this scene. they start escalating much sooner, while he doesn’t start shouting until halfway through “i can tell everyone everything!”. then, after evan tells him to go ahead and tell everyone, there’s a longer-than-usual beat of silence in which he stumbles backward and looks down and away from evan. he says “fuck you, evan” while so obviously crushed and crying that evan reaches for him as if to apologize, and he still manages to look evan in the eye to call him an asshole before running away.
the pain that fills my lungs when jared kind of tenses during the kiss and he just is so obviously at a deep loss when he says “look at you… helping the murphys.” is immeasurable and will not leave
ok and am i the only one who thinks that part in gfy where alana and heidi are singing together and jared is like, intensely not looking at them, is supposed to be him trying not to cry? because thats what it feels like
last thing i swear but also…. how jared is the first of the three to leave during the ending of gfy? at least the way its shot he’s really the only one completely in the dark and theres a lot i could say about that but…
ok the breakdown comment made the air leave my chest … i have never heard that wow
from the 10/5/17 performance:
jared like, stomps his foot and screams silently during good for you, he starts crying and you wont see it if you dont look for it but man. that fucked me up.
from the 10/17/17 performance:
Will. Fucking. Roland. Holy shit, this guy needs more credit. I wouldn’t have even noticed if it didn’t literally happen ten feet in front of me, but during Good For You, when Heidi comes back in and he isn’t at all the focus or even in the light, Jared absolutely breaks down. Like, his body heaving as he desperately holds back tears, teeth clenched, clutching his chest, leaning against the wall on the edge of the stage. And just before he turns back and starts singing again, he pulls himself together and lets out this furious shout and it hurt my soul
wow i totally forgot this was documented… it’s almost impossible to find clips of this happening because bootleggers usually zoom in on heidi during this moment but you can see a little bit of jared breaking down (very blurrily lol) starting at 3:20 in this clip
two thoughts on jared inviting evan over to drink while his parents are out of town that weekend:
he’s trying to do the same thing zoe was doing during only us — asking evan to spend time with him one-on-one, no parents around, and trying to build a relationship with him that doesn’t revolve around connor.
only us happens on a sunday night, and based on alana’s question of “where were you last night?”, this scene happens the next day, monday. that puts the kickstarter deadline a week away on the following monday, and good for you & ywbf reprise have to happen before the deadline. which means jared spent at least some of that weekend grappling with his big heartbreaking fight with evan and the public posting of The Letter & corresponding backlash alone in a house with an unmonitored liquor cabinet.
【Spring is for Gardening】 Happy Kleinsen and May season for everyone!!
This is a new story series I am currently working on🥰 post-canon, all short comics, all fluff, it will be ideal if I could update every 2 weeks or sth like that, but don’t get hope up too much🥺
❇️Hope you enjoy it🌱 Enjoy the best spring weather plzzzz!!!!
Heyy you are PhantasmalSkeleton on ao3 right? I drew fanart of your Behaviorism fic :)
"I haven't heard this name in years..." THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH THIS IS SO COOL WHAT. God this is such a gorgeous art piece, oh dear. I absolutely adore the work with color you did here. Ford, all warm and sunbathed (smiling!!!!!) covered by the cold blue shadow with Bill residing in it. BILL LOKING AT THE SCENIC ROUTES OF HIS MIND!!!!! Them shining brighter under him is such a nice visual touch. Oh man oh god. Thank you so much I'm so touched, this is so beautifully rendered too. I really need to link this in the fics notes.
jared being like no evan we're not friends we're family friends is so fucking funny when he spends the entirety of the show demonstrating that he knows evan really well he's just really fucking mean about it. talking about evan's report on daisy buchanan. trying to talk him down from the panic attack. being evan's point of contact for everything. and he wants to continue to get to know him better. it's why he invites evan to his house to get wasted. it's why he volunteers to write those fuckass emails. it's why he helps him start that fucking charity when he knows if they just let the situation fade into obscurity they would be in the clear. everything he does, he does for evan. and that's why he feels so betrayed when evan starts to cut him out. because he denies being evan's friend so hard he ends up manifesting it.
jbbartram-illu
2087
baratheonpilled
dededos
