Most West End musicals aim to disconnect audiences from their phones, encouraging them to turn off those annoying notifications for just a few hours. But at London’s Noël Coward Theatre, where the award winning Dear Evan Hansen is showing, audiences are instead greeted by a giant newsfeed displaying tweets from DJ Khaled, among others – bringing them firmly into the lonely, online world of its title character.
The musical tells the story of Evan Hansen, a 17-year-old American high school student struggling with anxiety who, in a misguided attempt to console the grieving family of Connor Murphy, a troubled classmate who has recently taken his own life, fabricates a thread of emails between the two of them to show that he had at least one true friend. In doing so he wins the craved for attention and admiration of his fellow pupils, but is faced with a devil’s bargain when it comes to revealing the true nature of his relationship to Murphy.
