saw “Next to Normal” at the @costamesaplayhouse last night. my brief reflections below. / //Rating: 9/10. ///Next to Normal opened this week with a great #OClocal cast—I highly recommend seeing this smart, humorous, and emotionally intelligent musical. The musical provides a keen, fly-on-the-wall, realist style musical assemble that cuts deep into everyday family life in our present, post-truth 21st century. With a thoughtful script and scenes stripped down, allow the audience to tap into a universally riveting slice of life that’s bound by commitments of ceremonial love, while juxtaposed with sacrifice, loss, and bloodline duty. The musical, which centers around a seemingly surface-level American nuclear-family whose lives have become curated by their well-intentioned, but severely bipolar mother—and as a result, the subtle passive-emotional-armor that each family member is bound as they strive for normalcy—a concept that becomes as questionable futile in nature as in their to efforts to bottle up their existential despair at the expense of the fabricated families around them, filling the suburban tracks around them with mirrors of fearmongering fools. / But this musical is far from cliche in its treatment of external familial considerations. It navigates survive interpersonally. It invites actor/viewer alike metacognitive inventory, over social considerations. / Things I enjoyed: intangible, ontological themes, which maintain honest and an organic treatment of mental illness, grief, fear, insecurity, sex, vices, ethics, drugs, suicide, and modern psychiatry which felt more like normalization than a tired case study. The family dynamic in this #Pulitzer-winning Musical serves as a gentle, yet vital reminder of the modern American family, its plights as unhushable norms, psychological obstacles are equally common as they complex, & such personal traits are much more #NexttoNormal than the dwindling, pre-millennial, 20th-century modernist view of the American family unit... a long expired archetype that Musical like this invite us, once again, loosen the mental-grip from yesterworld’s Americana. / / #cmplayhouse #musical #nexttonormalreview #costamesa (at Costa Mesa Playhouse Page)
