Review: The Phoenix Theatre Company’s DEAR EVAN HANSEN is a bittersweet production

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The production runs through August 2nd at The Phoenix Theatre Company's Hormel Theatre.

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Guest contributor David Appleford’s review of The Phoenix Theatre Company ’s production of Dear Even Hansen.

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The great ache at the center of DEAR EVAN HANSEN is the simple, shattering idea that no one really knows what their children are going through. The musical says it out loud, over and over. It’s a world where one teen after another insists that their parents have no idea who they are. And yet the adults who are busy, flawed, but trying, keep believing that they do. It’s this gap between the ages, the space between the public face and the inner monologue, that gives the show its tremble. This production presented by The Phoenix Theatre Company and directed and choreographed with sensitivity by Michelle Chin gently underlines that tremor.

At its core is a true story, or at least the seed of one. It was something songwriter Benj Pasek experienced during his high school years in Pennsylvania where the suicide of a classmate revealed a community’s need for a comfort food narrative more than truth. Years later, alongside writing partner Justin Paul and book writer Steven Levenson , that memory bloomed into a musical that has since won the Tony, a Grammy, and audiences from Broadway to Phoenix.

In this bittersweet production running now at the Hormel Theatre until August 2, Mason Ballard takes the role of Evan Hansen with precision. Evan is a high school senior with a broken arm, a broken sense of self, and a mother who works double shifts and night classes. Played with moving restraint by Elyse Wolf , she’s a woman balancing maternal hope with financial exhaustion. Their home is full of love, but rarely at the same time.

Evan is the kind of boy who disappears into corners. His therapist has given him a daily writing exercise. He’s to write letters to himself, beginning “Dear Evan Hansen” and ending, “Sincerely, your best and dearest friend, me.” The story turns catastrophically wrong when one of those private letters is found in the pocket of a classmate who takes his own life. That boy is Connor Murphy (Connor Dunning), the troubled son of a wealthy family. The letter, mistaken for a suicide note addressed to Evan, sends a grieving mother (Jenny Hintze) and father ( Rob Watson ) searching for meaning, and accidentally casts Evan as their son’s secret best friend.

Evan doesn't correct them. The lie feels like kindness. And then it snowballs.

What begins as a nervous, impulsive attempt to soothe a broken family becomes a viral sensation, carried on Instagram posts and YouTube tributes. Evan, the boy who couldn’t get a single signature on his arm cast, becomes the voice of the unheard. It’s a world where digital performance passes for emotional truth.

Scenic designer Michael Downs smartly envelops the stage in what seems like a cascading lattice of movable screens giving us glimpses of emails, social feeds, and news alerts that flutter constantly in the background, its effectiveness enhanced further by Daniel Perelstein Jaquette’s sound, John A Mitchell ever changing lighting, and Anthony Churchill ’s video design. It’s as though the characters are wading waist-deep through a flood of information, but are never quite certain which voice is real. When Evan types, his thoughts ripple outward, projected all around him. This is a world where emotions go public before they’re allowed to be private, revealing the toxic nature of social media more effectively than perhaps the writers originally intended.

Hatty Ryan King is magnetic as Zoe Murphy, Connor’s younger sister and the object of Evan’s yearlong crush. With an open vulnerability and an edge of resistance, King makes Zoe more than just a narrative device, she’s the conscience of the piece, suspicious of Evan but aching to believe him.

Casting Director Chelsea Anderson has chosen well, with good performances all round from an eight-person lineup, including Evan’s two school colleagues, Griffin Slivka as droll, cynical, and highly sarcastic Jared, and Madison Norwood as the intensely practical, though melodramatic. Alana. But it’s Ballard who carries the evening with a performance that’s as jittery and vulnerable as a tuning fork. Every line he delivers sounds like it might collapse mid-sentence. His physicality is a symphony of tics, shirt pulls, and nervous head-jerks. He moves like a boy whose inner dialogue is louder than the world around him.

However, one of the more uneasy truths at the center of the show is a troubling one: the book. Evan is written as a young man whose anxiety renders him fragile and sympathetic, yet the story asks us to overlook how deliberately he exploits that sympathy. His invention of a close relationship with a deceased classmate becomes a ladder toward both popularity and emotional validation, even romance, and while the lie grows increasingly elaborate, the consequences never truly catch up with him. He’s never held accountable when he should.

The music by Pasek and Paul is infectious, polished, and emotionally accessible. The excellent opening number (inexplicably cut from the film), Anybody Have a Map? , unfolds as a duet between two mothers (Hintze and Wolf) grappling with the universal bewilderment of parenting teenage boys. What follows arrives in glossy waves of feeling. The songs are handsome, heartfelt pop ballads, many with big, grandstanding finishes such as Waving Through a Window and You Will Be Found are guaranteed to have audiences on their feet, but they tend to announce emotion rather than uncover it. Effective in the moment, for first-timers to the show they can sound interchangeable when heard as a whole, like encountering an artist’s full album for the first time before repeated listening allows individual tracks to distinguish themselves.

Yet despite its narrative flaws, what writer Levenson gets right is that we all want to be understood in one way or another, and to matter. Yes, the plot hinges on a lie that explodes into a phenomenon with no eventual comeuppance when there should be, something that may well divide audiences, but at least it’s not a lie born of malice.

In the end, what lingers the most is the realization that these kids live their lives in entire emotional universes that the adults, busy in their own orbit, barely see. And in this production, it's a truth director Chin succeeds in circling again and again.

The Phoenix Theatre Company -- www.phoenixtheatre.com -- 1825 N Central Avenue, Phoenix, AZ -- Box office: 602-254-2151

Photo credit to Brennen Russell: Mason Ballard as Evan Hansen

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/phoenix/article/Review-DEAR-EVAN-HANSEN-at-The-Phoenix-Theatre-Company-20260613)._