If cleanliness
is next to godliness, then dysfunctional families must be next to normal. They’re
front and center in Next Door’s smart and funny NEXT TO NORMAL (playing through
Jan. 25th). The Brian Yorkey/Tom Kitt musical about mental illness
is hip and sardonic, especially with its savage take on what passes for sound
psychiatric treatment.
Director Brian
Milauskas and music director Mario Cruz have a top notch cast to deliver the rock
n’ roll and to bring out the humanity and suffering in the story. Some
productions concentrate on the humor and lose the pathos. Not at Next Door. Becky
Ruccio portrays the hapless housewife and mother who may be bipolar. She’s
definitely depressed, poor thing. She’s so unhappy that even making lunches for
her daughter and husband becomes an ordeal.
Doug Jabara
gives one of the best performances of the year as her desperate, perplexed
husband. Jabara could give a master class on stillness: When his heart is
completely broken, he just sits without moving. And we feel the pain. (He sits,
I should point out, on a modern kitchen chair with a design of holes cut out of
the backrest, just like the gaping holes that threaten to swallow his whole
family, a nifty touch by set designer Milauskas.)
Jared Walsh’s
tour de force as the son, whose presence propels the family’s breakdown, is one
of the best reasons to see the show. He’s charismatic, he’s compelling and can
he rock a lyric! Sarajane Mullins Pompeo gets nifty laughs as the sister
everyone has forgotten about and Sean Mitchell is charming as her goofy, would-be
boyfriend.
Milauskas plays
down the “bad medicine” scenes so in this production we get a caring shrink,
which Brian DeLorenzo deftly conveys (and he gets to be a breakout “rock star”
psycho-pharmacologist in the wife’s Xanax fueled imagination).
Yorkey and Kitt
tack a happy ending onto their musical which really doesn’t fit but the cast
looks relieved, and we certainly are, when they sing the joyful, hopeful “There
Will Be Light.”
