What looks to be your average dysfunctional family of four gets a lot weirder when middle-aged mother Diana Goodman (Alice Ripley, Tony Award winner for her portrayal of the same role in “Next To Normal” on Broadway) begins frantically laying down slices of bread on the floor.
“What are you doing?” her husband Dan (Asa Somers) asks.
“I’m … making sandwiches,” she replies.
With music by Tom Kitt and book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey, “Next To Normal” became the eighth musical to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Currently on national tour under the direction of Michael Greif, it runs at the Ahmanson through Jan. 2.
From the sandwich episode, which Dan calls “only a blip,” unravels a long history of medication and treatment for Diana’s bipolar disorder.
But it’s when Diana brings out a cake to celebrate the birthday of someone who’s already dead (I won’t reveal who ““ you won’t see it coming), that it becomes apparent there’s more than a “blip.”
Diana is ushered onto a rocky course of psychotherapy that the rest of the play follows.
Ripley, who plays Diana, sings in a dark and anguished voice that sounds like the belting diva version of lonely folk music. It makes for less vocal clarity but more manic feeling. It also marks a brave intrusion of the strange, the next to normal,” into conventional big musicals.
The set has a clinical, frontal design. Rectangular spaces delineated by steel partitions and platforms transform with lightning and minimal prop change to indicate the home, the psychiatrist’s office, the high school their daughter Natalie (Emma Hunton) attends or any other location.
Rows of light bulbs line the background and make the set feel as agitated as life in the Goodman family.
A sparse number of live musicians are positioned in three partitions in the set. On keyboard, drums, guitar, violin and cello, they deliver composer Kitt’s raw yet melodic rock score.
The musical is an unapologetic acknowledgement that sometimes people are messed up, and life is complicated. It delivers a poignant look at family, the relationships between mother and son, mother and daughter, and wife and husband.
Throughout its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, the play is primarily focused on Diana. It is a welcomed turn near the end when the spotlight shifts onto Dan and his experience.
It would have been nice to leave it at that, loose ends untied, instead of finishing off with the heavy-handed big number “Light” ““ gone are the light bulbs and the entire background becomes flooded with light. There is the sense that the musical, though bold and unconventional, still feels compelled to wrap everything up and deliver a neat message.
But what the rest of the play shows us was the very impossibility of a “cure” or a clear-cut answer to anything. It is a shame to see it turn its back on the complexity and honesty it works so hard to give us.