The Wayward Artist opens its second season with a flawless intimate staging of Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Next To Normal, as dramatically moving and emotionally potent a musical as you’ll see all year.

Rachel Oliveros Catalano and Wyn Moreno star as suburban couple Diana and Dan Goodman, long-married spouses who would, on the surface at least, appear to be heading “the perfect loving family.” Admittedly, as Diana puts it, her husband’s “boring”, her son “a little shit,” and her daughter “though a genius is a freak,” but what household is perfect?

The Goodmans are far from even coming close.

That Diana is battling bipolar disorder is something we begin to suspect from the moment she sets about scattering slice upon slice of bread on the kitchen floor, the better to speed up morning sandwich prep.

Zoloft and Paxil and Buspar and Xanax are just some of the prescription meds prescribed by Diana’s shrink Dr. Fine (Jordan Schneider), and though these drugs may have lessened her anxiety, they have left her with headaches, blurry vision, and no feeling in her toes.

A dosage adjustment does manage to reduce Diana’s delusions, but it worsens her depressive state before another adjustment leaves her with “absolutely no desire for sex, although whether that’s the medicine or the marriage is anybody’s guess.”

 While Dan does his best to hold his house together, and seventeen-year-old golden boy Gabe (Kyle Goleman) brags that soon “the world will feel my power and obey,” aspiring pianist Natalie (Erica Schaeffer), a year Gabe’s junior, has only her music to maintain her relative stability, that and the attentions of head-over-heels classmate Henry (Rod Bagheri).

Meanwhile, missing “the mountains, the dizzy heights, and all the manic, magic days, and the dark, depressing nights,” Diana decides to go it alone, sans shrink, sans drugs, sans annoying side effects.

It’s about this time that Henry shows up to meet the parents and discovers a heretofore unspoken bit of Goodman history that causes us to reevaluate all we’ve come to believe about this not even next-to-normal family—and we’re still only about half-an-hour into the show.

As deep and dramatic and gripping as the best-written contemporary two-act play, the almost sung-through Next To Normal takes this often overblown genre and scales it down to an intimacy that suits The Wayward Artist’s 85-seat Grand Central Theatre far better than the 2000-seat Ahmanson where it made its L.A. debut back in 2010.

Add to that a score by composer Kitt and lyricist Yorkey that combines rock rhythms, catchy melodies, and insightful lyrics, and you’ve got a musical that will leave you entertained, shaken, better informed about mental illness, and profoundly moved.

Forgoing the more literal, furnished-suburban-house silhouette most productions have embraced, director Craig Tyrl and scenic designer Daniel Espinoza give us two angled walls of shelves filled with assorted household items and family mementos, a single, straight-back chair centerstage almost entirely throughout, and a nonstop succession of images (by video designer Kristin Campbell, projected on three widescreen LCD monitors) that not only set scenes but take us into Diana’s bipolar brain and even include a Busby Berkeley-style production number performed by the pills Diana has been prescribed.

The Grand Central Theatre’s audience-on-three-sides seating allows director Tyrl to have his cast perform not only on stage but from all three aisles, adding up-close-and-personal intimacy while treating audiences to surround-sound unamped harmonies.

It’s not just this inventive design that sets The Wayward Artist’s Next To Normal apart from the seven I’ve seen over the past ten years.

 First and foremost is its absolutely weak-link-free cast, headed at the Grand Central by an incandescent, quirk-eschewing Catalano, whose serene outer beauty hides a deeply troubled soul. It’s the most exquisite work to date from this Chance Theater star, as gorgeously sung as it is heartbreakingly real and deeply touching.

Supporting performances are all-around winners, from Moreno’s deeply caring, at-his-wits-end Dan to Goleman’s fiery dream boy of a Gabe to Shaeffer’s achingly vulnerable Natalie to Bagheri’s nerdy charmer of a Henry to Schneider’s all-business Dr. Fine and his rock-star-riffic Dr. Madden, each and every featured player more than able to meet the considerable vocal challenges of Kitt’s high-note-reaching melodies under Bagheri’s assured musical direction.

Chris Henrriquez’s dramatic lighting design ups the emotional impact every step of the way, Melissa Alvarez’s costumes are character-perfect, Nicole Sue Ross and Kiran Gonse merit major snaps for their multitude of household properties, and Lauren Zuiderveld’s audio design ensures that prerecorded tracks don’t overpower unamplified voices. (This is that rare Next To Normal where you’ll be understand every sung word.)

Last but not least, choreographer Natalie Baldwin inserts a number of clever, energizing dance sequences along the way.

Vanessa Cortez is assistant director. Sydney Fitzgerald is stage manager and Ross and Gonse are assistant stage managers. Analisa Peters is technical director. Brent Williams is production intern.

 Next To Normal may have lost the Best Musical Tony to Billy Elliott, but perhaps only the statuette-winner Dear Evan Hansen since then has matched the gut-punching, heart-wrenching, hope-inspiring impact of Next To Normal, a musical that The Wayward Artist gets absolutely right.

Grand Central Art Center, 125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana.
www.TheWaywardArtist.org

–Steven Stanley
April 13, 2019
Photos: Jordan Kubat Photography

Tags: Brian Yorkey, Grand Central Theatre, Orange County Theater Review, The Wayward Artist, Tom Kitt