FOR better or for worse, “Next to Normal” is usually shorthanded as “the musical about the crazy woman.” It’s accurate — the central character, Diana (Alice Ripley), has a severe bipolar disorder — but only up to a point.
The show, which opened on Broadway last night after last year’s run at Second Stage, is equally concerned with the way Diana’s husband, Dan (J. Robert Spencer, aptly negotiating the transition from “Jersey Boys”), and her children, Natalie (Jennifer Damiano) and Gabe (Aaron Tveit), contend with her condition.
In short, it’s about one woman’s mind and about how a nuclear family handles fission.
The bar is set high early on with “Who’s Crazy/My Psychopharmacologist and I,” in which lyricist/book writer Brian Yorkey and composer Tom Kitt quickly list a litany of side effects (“Headaches and tremors/And nightmares and seizures . . . “) while the melody quotes “My Favorite Things.”
It’s a common reference, but it’s used very effectively as the playful tweaking of the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic echoes John Coltrane’s variation, just like Natalie’s preference for the scripted rigor of classical music contrasts with her boyfriend Henry’s (Adam Chanler-Berat) taste for jazz improvisation.
Alas, the pop-rock score never offers so many interpretative layers again, though it’s still an improvement on Kitt’s last Broadway effort, 2006’s disastrous “High Fidelity.”
Musicals thrive on heightened states — but this one is about a woman so drugged up that she can’t feel a thing.
“I miss the dizzy heights/All the manic, magic days/And the dark, depressing nights,” Diana sings when she throws out her pills. In fact, her demeanor barely varies throughout.
Ripley gives a bravely contained performance — no “Snake Pit”-style, award-friendly histrionics here — as her heartwrenching Diana appears equally bewildered and saddened by her own fragile instability. The downside is that we never really experience the terrors lurking inside a tortured mind.
Instead, the show focuses on the grief that played a central role in Diana’s collapse and continues to haunt her. When the subject of her sorrow delivers the song “I’m Alive,” the threat to her sanity is clear. This darkness is the show’s most intriguing aspect, as if it were referencing Daphne du Maurier rather than the DSM.
It’s also the most underdeveloped and sentimentally resolved. For behind its surface grimness, “Next to Normal” ends up relying on soothing conventions.
Michael Greif’s sleepy direction doesn’t help. Typical is his over-
reliance on Mark Wendland’s banal three-tiered set, all chrome tubing and walls of lights. And, yes, a character does sing a power anthem while fiercely gripping a railing.
In the end, the family accepts that getting “close enough to normal to get by” may be good enough for them. Unfortunately, close to good may not be enough for theatergoers.
elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com
NEXT TO NORMAL Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45th St.; 212-239-6200.