Dear Evan Hansen: A musical that looks like The Matrix but sounds like teen spirit

Justin Swartz and Stuart Brown (Credit: Daniel Manners)

24 Feb 2025

What’s it like being a teenager in 2025? For many, quite confusing. For some, downright scary. The musical Dear Evan Hansen tenderly explores many of the existing and rapidly emerging challenges faced by a generation that’s struggling to connect and in danger of disappearing into a virtual realm saturated with emotional hyperbole and cries for attention.

There’s a war raging – an existential fight for our attention.

It’s an economic, social and psychological war that targets our emotions and salves its victims with meaningless dopamine spikes. Spikes that, like the rush from a feel-good drug, provide diminishing returns and ultimately leave us feeling empty and craving more.

This war for the soul of humanity, being fought on the battleground of social media, is explored with great tenderness, lush music and tremendous originality in Dear Evan Hansen, an American musical now playing at Artscape in Cape Town.

The show, which cleverly combines high-tech design and stellar human-scale performances, has been produced with an entirely local cast and crew.

It’s the first time the musical has been staged in South Africa, and — from the responses of the many young people in the audience when I saw its first public preview — it has its finger on the pulse of where we’re at.

Not only does it look and sound like a worthy focus for our attention, it digs deep into the heart and soul of a very real crisis facing a generation caught in the crosshairs of ceaseless distraction.

If you want some indication of what this show is going to do to you emotionally, how charged and energised with meaning the songs are, it’s worth knowing that the music is by songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the duo responsible for the lyrics in La La Land, one of cinema’s great contemporary tearjerkers.

Evan Hansen has its romance subplot, too, but it’s more focused on navigating around traditionally less song-worthy themes such as mental health, social alienation, and teen angst, despair and suicide. And it explores these tricky issues in such a way that young audiences in particular — though not exclusively — will feel seen and heard. Which bodes well for live theatre in this country, especially since the attention war has only intensified since Dear Evan Hansen was first performed in July 2015.

Stuart Brown as Evan Hansen in Dear Evan Hansen. (Photo: Daniel Rutland Manners)

Initially inspired by the drug-related death of a student at Pasek’s school, he and Paul created the musical in response to their observations of how people seemed to be using celebrity deaths as an opportunity to post comments on social media, happily insinuating themselves into narratives not their own, making someone else’s misfortune about themselves.

Central to the borderline bonkers — but not altogether unlikely — story that unfolds is the idea of social media as a place of compulsive attention-seeking behaviour, tapping into the fact that it’s where so many people go to be seen and heard.

Our online lives, in other words, have become a kind of ceaseless call for validation.

Despite this and the various other lofty concepts at its core, the show is all heart, something carefully engineered by playwright Steven Levenson’s sensitively rendered book which carefully balances the story’s hardcore emotionally triggering elements with its social relevance.

He achieves this by concocting an ever-escalating chain of events that deftly steer the musical into the terrain of original, finger-on-the-zeitgeist entertainment that has won all the major awards, garnered widespread critical acclaim and consistently endeared itself to audiences.

The set is an impressive affair designed by Niall Griffin. (Photograph: Supplied by the author)

At the centre of this tale of out-of-control digital distraction, is the titular Evan Hansen, a 17-year-old with near-debilitating social anxiety, who inadvertently and with good intensions fabricates a white lie about a fake friendship with a suicide victim. Utter chaos ensues as first Evan’s fib and then an ever-expanding compendium of cover-ups spin out of control, gaining such momentum that the lie becomes a kind of self-perpetuating galaxy of untruths, half-truths and fabrications, drawing countless people into its orbit as it circulates across the social media universe.

Stuart Brown, who plays the titular Evan, is a force of nature, capably filling a huge auditorium with nuanced and layered evidence of the character’s accumulated anxieties, his trying-to-do-right jumble of mixed feelings, his mounting confusion, and his inability to see beyond his own fears.

Brown’s role is substantial, but even bigger than the part he plays is the emotional intricacy required to see us through Evan’s evolution from walking bundle of jangling nerves to someone who must accept responsibility for his many missteps.

It’s a big ask, performance-wise, because there’s the tricky balancing act of ensuring that we in the audience never turn against Evan, despite the chaos his spiralling lies unleash on the world. If anything, Brown ensures that we fall in love with Evan.

Then again, there’s not a character on stage who is not coming to terms with the world, battling to make sense of where they fit in, worthy of love. Nor is Evan the only lonely, friendless boy at school.

When we first meet Connor (played by Michael Stray), the lonely slacker with a permanent dark cloud hanging over his head, he’s at home with his family, but instead of enjoying breakfast together, everyone is metaphorically elsewhere. His mother is busy, his father immersed in work online, his sister on her cellphone. Connor stares, blankly, dispassionately, darkly, grimly, into his cereal bowl, unknowable and unreachable. To his parents, he’s on drugs, spaced-out, non-communicative. To his sister, he’s just plain mean.

And at school, there’s the barrelling bundle of ambitious energy, Alana (a vivacious Ntshikeng Matooane), who willingly helps engineer a distorted online pseudo-narrative that exploits the death of a boy she barely knew because it plays neatly into her own need for acknowledgement and acceptance.

Dear Evan Hansen is directed by Greg Karvellas, a director with a knack for combining intimate and affecting storytelling with the ambitious dynamics of a large-scale musical. (Photo: Supplied)

With just a handful of characters, the musical makes the point that loneliness and a general sense of disconnection are as much side-effects of contemporary life as they are symptoms of mental illness. And it astutely captures not only a sense of a generation of youngsters in distress, but of parents unable to connect with or get through to those they love most in the world.

As two moms each struggling in their own way to understand their children, Lucy Tops and Sharon Spiegel Wagner powerfully convey a heartache that is at once painfully personal and utterly universal: how do we live with the misery of knowing that our own children are slipping through our fingers?

All of this very precisely plotted intrigue is sensitively packaged by Greg Karvellas, a director with a knack for combining intimate and affecting storytelling with the ambitious dynamics of a large-scale musical.

That scale hinges to a very significant extent on the stupendous set designed by Niall Griffin. It’s something quite beyond anything I’ve seen created for a musical in this country, a kind of oversized immersive digital landscape that brings the musical’s overarching message front and centre: various screens and LED lighting effects ceaselessly flash and whizz and ultimately come alive with video projections and images and fragments from multitudinous social media posts and tweets, rants and shout-outs that constitute a non-stop virtual reality.

It’s not mere ostentation. Rather, this gigantic piece of technology underscores a scary truth at the heart of the musical: that we have invested so much of ourselves in an unreality that it threatens to consume us. We’re inescapably caught in the matrix, a digitally concocted, virtual environment that sublimates authentic human connection.

This technological whizz-bang superstructure embeds itself as part of the storytelling, and becomes a kind of monstrous character perpetually whirring and flashing and digitising across most of the stage.

From the dripping digital code to the screens smothered with images and text and emoticons to the disembodied voices, there’s a sense of imminent overwhelm, as if these elements are actively trying to distract and confuse us, and in the process claim our attention.

Griffin’s set is not merely the subtext, but the meaning itself.

In the face of such overwhelm, though, the show is a powerful offering of salvation. One of the key songs, “You Will Be Found”, spells out its message of hope: that no matter what the anguish, how dark the despair, there is a way out, that you — specifically teenagers who feel hopeless and alone — will get through it.

Justin Swartz and Stuart Brown in a scene from the musical. (Photo: Daniel Manners)

That may be a lot of wishful thinking, but it suggests where the guts of this production lie: it is theatre that wants to positively change the world. It is meant to be a balm that soothes against a growing repertoire of mental health concerns percolating up among young people addicted to screens, their attention won by powerful algorithms that, as historian Yuval Noah Harari says, increasingly know us better than we know ourselves.

What’s less hopeful is that, in the decade since this show premiered in Washington D.C., things have got worse.

It’s notable that the cast employs reliable American accents, connecting Dear Evan Hansen back to the country where an authoritarian form of anti-empathy is at this very moment being written into law via a series of executive proclamations, while at the same time a fascist oligarchy is paving the way for society’s greater dependence on and integration with artificial intelligence systems that nobody understands.

We have no way of predicting the consequences of such anti-humanist developments — never mind the potential fallout among teenagers trying to figure out where they fit in, or even who they are.

Going to watch a musical might not seem like an act of protest, but in this day and age attending live theatre is in many respects revolutionary.

To survive the matrix you could do worse than attending a performance of Dear Evan Hansen, a very real, very human, quite brilliant act of storytelling. Being entertained in this way is about taking time out to be among real people in real time, as you’re swept away by very real human emotions conveyed by actual human actors. That feeling in your heart, those tears down your cheeks? Those are reminders that you’re human, too. DM

Dear Evan Hansen is playing at Artscape, Cape Town, from until 9 March 2025 and transfers to Montecasino’s Teatro, Johannesburg from a run from 15 March to 13 April.

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