Review: ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ in Philly is a fresh, tightly paced show full of good performances

Welcome home, Dear Evan Hansen.

Almost six years after its Broadway debut at the Music Box Theatre, Dear Evan Hansen, a musical with Philly roots, is having its Philadelphia premiere at the Forrest Theatre, where it’s running through Aug. 28.

On Wednesday, the national touring show played its official opening night for Philadelphia before a packed, emotional crowd. This openhearted Evan Hansen is fresh, tightly paced, and full of good performances. It’s a musical that changed history, opening up the genre to new themes and ideas, and this production shows why.

First slated to play Philly in April 2021, the national tour of Evan Hansen was pandemic-postponed not once but twice. Benj Pasek, coauthor with Justin Paul, is from Ardmore; the musical is based on an incident at Friends’ Central School in Wynnewood when Pasek was a student there. The musical has garnered a warehouse-full of awards, including the 2017 Tony for best musical and a 2018 Grammy for best musical theater album.

Star of this show? Is it Anthony Norman as agonized, hinky Evan? He is great, believable as the tic-laden, squirming teen, not unlike Freddie Highmore as Shaun Murphy in The Good Doctor. Norman rounds off his high notes with unsteady warbles, all self-doubt and isolation. Norman’s Evan symbolizes the human world around him, where personal expression is strangled, awkward, raw.

Is it Nikhil Saboo as Connor? Oh, he is really, really good, and he just about steals the show. In one sense Connor exits early, but in another he’s everywhere, and Saboo leans into it with relish, slacker hairstyle, joyful dancing (especially in the mad-happy “Sincerely, Me”), big grin, and brutal truth-telling. The audience loved him.

Many are the good turns, from Pablo David Laucerica as Jared to Alaina Anderson as Zoe Murphy. Evan Hansen is a drama of two families, of bad parenting and its consequences, of class conflict, and the Hansen and Murphy families are sharply delineated, particularly with Lili Thomas, as Evan’s mom, in “Good for You” and “So Big/So Small.”

But the true star of this show is the eloquent set by David Korins. Before us swirl images from social media — faces, messages, ice cream, cat pics. Whirrs, beeps, and shutter clicks signal ever-renewed posts and threads. Evan Hansen portrays the impact of social media, how they can connect, threaten, engulf with spiraling text, reposted images, arguments, a cacophony of voices.

Many in the audience knew all the songs, cheering at “Waving Through a Window,” “You Will Be Found,” and other high points; many attendees had seen the controversial 2021 film version, much inferior to this show. Still others, like the folks next to me, had come to find out what all the fuss was about. While this production does bear the marks of a traveling show — some unequal singing, and a second act that doesn’t sustain the momentum of the first — this Evan Hansen deserves the fuss.

As we exited, one woman said to another, “I’m feeling so many things right now … it really reminds you of how you felt when you were in high school.” She meant the dangers and divisions such feelings can evoke. For that alone, Dear Evan Hansen at the Forrest is a homecoming to celebrate.

Dear Evan Hansen. Through Aug. 28 at the Forrest Theatre, 1114 Walnut St. Tickets: $59-$177. 215-853-1999, https://www.kimmelculturalcampus.org.