GRAMOPHONE Review: Next To Normal – Original London Cast Recording
It took 15 years for Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s Pulitzer Prize winning musical to make it to London’s West End from Broadway – a staggering statistic in itself though its topicality with regard to mental health issues is probably more pressing now than it was back in 2010. Michael Longhurst’s Donmar Warehouse production was (even in its West End transfer) edgier, more immediate and imperative than the original Broadway staging, if memory serves, and the work of a truly brilliant cast exposed the discomfort and cynicism even more stridently.
Kitt and Yorkey’s masterwork has been described as a ‘feel everything’ musical and that it is, and then some. The brilliance is in the impulsiveness and manic energy of its narrative. Here are the Goodman family – mother, father, daughter – their unity forever fractured by the death of their infant son, Gabriel, who is at the heart of mother Diana’s bipolarism and haunts them as the rebellious teenage boy they could never let go of. The pulse of the score is 90s Rock but its varied inflections and indeed precious moments of repose reflect the instability of its characters and their troubled psyches.
There are the treatments – ‘these are a few of my favourite pills’ – and the spiralling effects of their failure but musically speaking everything is in flux. Kitt writes incredibly punchy music loaded with insidiously memorable hooks and then suddenly from nowhere offers Diana a precious moment of peace with ‘I Miss the Mountains’ where the country twang and burn of mountain air is suddenly remote from the score around it. There’s even a snatch of ‘batshit crazy’ Mozart where the highly-strung daughter’s piano studies are questioned by her jazzer boyfriend who thinks classical music too rigid. She (the amazing Eleanor Worthington-Cox) sings the song ‘Everything Else’ whose balance and beauty and memorability immediately contradict him in ways that words cannot.
As the departed son who is very much ‘present’ as an avenging angel demanding to be ‘seen’ Jack Wolfe is terrifically full-on. ‘I Am the One’ is hair-raising and frankly leaves the Broadway cast recording standing. Indeed there is a rawness about the London cast which is often as hard to listen to as to watch. Diana’s ‘So Anyway’ (heartbreaking Caissie Levy) has to be the quietest and most devastating eleven o’clock number in Broadway history. And only when the entire company welcome in the ‘Light’ is there hope. Perhaps.
