Why ‘Next to Normal' is your grief and rage catharsis in 2025

San Francisco Chronicle​

02-06-2025

Many of us might want to yowl like a rock star, shut ourselves off in a fantasy world, alternately numb ourselves with pills and fling them in the trash or simply indulge a fit of histrionics.
To all that, Ray of Light Theatre's 'Next to Normal' says, 'Hold my beer.'
One of musical theater's sacred duties, exemplified by the production that opened Saturday, May 31, at the Victoria Theatre, is to give expression to all the chest-beating, teeth-gnashing, hair-tearing grief and rage that all of us feel but most of us suppress. Actors rip off their shells, and we sit quietly in the dark, thinking, 'Yes, that's what it's like,' and feel cleansed.
Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt's 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner begins with a facade. Diana (Anne Warren Clark) sings of her 'perfect loving family, so adoring.' But before long, she's frantically making sandwiches on the floor, while her husband and kids back slowly away and look at her like she's a crazy person.
Diana zings to life in a tango with her psychopharmacologist Dr. Fine (Courtney Merrell), with one dancing her fingers up the other's body. Under the frisky direction of Jenn BeVard, Dr. Fine grinds powders with a mortar and pestle like it's a kink, and Diana recites her side effects, including constipation, like she's a movie star giving an Oscar acceptance speech.
The pill-popping Diana doesn't just have bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression and a grab bag of other hazily defined maladies that append to her diagnosis whenever she says the right thing at the right time. She's also bearing a herculean grief that's metastasized and hobbled her, preventing her from interacting with her family in the way they crave.
In Yorkey and Kitt's brilliant writing, that mourning takes human form, singing with a voice of pure joy. It understands, condoles and boosts, and in Christian Mejia's lighting design, it's as colorful as a jar of candy. Between it and demanding, unhappy family members, why wouldn't Diana choose the former?
Yorkey and Kitt's writing keeps turning over stones to unearth the creepy-crawlies underneath. It dares to let a mother admit she doesn't love her child that much or that a wife finds her husband 'boring.' Caring for a mentally ill family member is 'just a slower suicide,' Diana's husband Dan (Albert Hodge) sings. Elsewhere, asking her what she's so afraid of, he adds, 'Can you tell me why I'm afraid it's me?'
In a show where agony succeeds agony, performers don't always find ways to show how one fresh hell is distinguished from the last, and voices aren't as tuneful as they might be. But as Diana, Clark is sensitive to microbeats within microbeats. When she remembers her younger self, singing, 'I miss the mountains,' it's as if she has a whole mighty peak within herself. When Diana realizes that in her life, 'nothing's real,' and decides to throw away all her pills, Clark combines the shock of discovery with the rage of all the time she's wasted by pretending.
If 'Next to Normal' doesn't cure Diana or elbow its way into a hunky-dory ending, nor does it force its characters to just sink deeper into a quagmire of despair. The show gives Diana and her family permission to say the status quo isn't working and make different choices — still suboptimal, but at least different. In a genre famous for happily-ever-afters and kicklines, such down-to-earth restraint is a balm and a gift.