The Hydra-like power of social media is emphasized early in “Dear Evan Hansen.” The high school teens at the epicenter of the musical running through New Year’s Eve at the Nederlander Theatre are often framed (engulfed, more like) by an ever-scrolling onslaught of hashtags, texts, photos and emojis, perhaps never so poignantly as in the second number, when the socially awkward title character unleashes “Waving Through a Window.”
The song (score and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul) is a sonic high point in the six-time Tony-winning musical. The melody is as soaring, wistful and lonesome as a Roy Orbison ballad. It’s impossible not to relate to Anthony Norman’s emotive Evan Hansen, singing about isolation, surrounded by relentlessly curated pix of his smiling peers. The yearning disaffection in the lyrics foreshadow the first-act suicide that sets the musical’s plot into motion.
