Next to Normal

This week I report on a new musical about suicidal depression, a new play about suicidal loneliness and the revival of a classic play that hinges on suicide. And how are you today?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the novel theme of Next to Normal, the soft-rock musical about the middle-class mom who’s a clinically depressed pill freak. Sitting across the aisle during the performance I attended at Second Stage Theatre was Stephen Sondheim, the founding father of the modern musical: urban desperation and neurosis (Company); the ravages of time and old age (Follies); Grand Guignol murder (Sweeny Todd); love and physical ugliness (Passion); lunatics and presidential slaughter (Assassins); or even newly opened diplomatic relations between isolationist America and the Japanese in 1852 (Pacific Overtures).  read more »