A moment from Next to Normal, with Louis Hobson, Alice Ripley and J. Robert Spencer

Part of a new wave of original musicals electrifying Broadway, the Tony Award-winning Next To Normal is not only a powerful rock musical experience but an emotionally wrenching look into bipolar disorder and how it affects a family whose mother is battling with the affliction. Tony-winner Alice Ripley is the woman caught within the storm that rages in her mind, while her family tries to cope with the fallout and to maintain unity. Tony-winning writer Brian Yorkey and Tony-winning composer Tom Kitt tackle their subject matter with passion and gusto, utilizing a wide variety of musical styles to express the roller coaster of emotions within the story.

Brian Yorkey (left) and Tom Kitt, the writer and composer of Next to Normal

A few days after their victory at the Tonys, Stage Directions met with Yorkey and Kitt downstairs at the Booth Theater. We delved into the evolution of the show and the sensitivity they took in tackling subject matter that they had not directly experienced. If anything, Next To Normal is an amazing testament to persistence, perseverance and inspiration. The duo, which came together at Columbia University during the 1990s and once created a children’s show in Seattle called In Your Eyes, spent more than 10 years working on this show, which was originally entitled Feeling Electric. Retitled Next To Normal, it went through numerous incarnations in different settings, including the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2005, where Wicked producer David Stone jumped on board. The final results show why time and care are integral to creating a great show. Amazing work does not happen overnight. And that is a good thing.

Stage Directions: Did you know anybody with bipolar disorder when you started writing the show, or was there something else that inspired you to write this material? How careful were you in trying to portray this subject matter onstage?

Brian: We were at the BMI songwriters workshop in 1998 and needed an idea for our 10-minute musical or final project for our first year. Originally I had seen a news report about ECT, about shock therapy, which I didn’t know was still done, and it gave me the idea to write about a woman who had been struggling with mental illness. It didn’t originally come from anyone we knew personally, but as we’ve written that we’ve come to know people close to us and many other people who are bipolar who have shared their stories, and it definitely informed the writing of it along the way.

Tom: While this is not autobiographical in any way, we’ve been touched by mental illness in our lives. So even though we didn’t get everything to the point that we wanted to, it was still work in progress, and we kept trying to improve on the research. We had doctors who read the script, reread the script and advised us. I think because this is such a personal thing, people were inevitably going to have issues with certain elements that maybe were not as true to their life as what we were describing, but I think we’ve been lucky that we’ve been given so much time to work on the piece. Certainly the medicine is something we really wanted to get right.

Brian: We never didn’t do research. It wasn’t like after the Second Stage production in 2006-7 that we decided that maybe we should read a book. We had done plenty of research up to that point. It’s an original musical. It’s an original story. There’s a reason why people don’t do those very often and tend to do adaptations of other things, because it’s hard to get the story right and to get the tone right, and especially with something like this tone is the hardest thing. We did a lot of research leading up to that, and also in the Second Stage production and the way it was received we learned a lot about where we were getting the tone right and where we weren’t.

As you’ve watched the show grow through various readings and productions, how does it look to you now?

Yorkey and Kitt followed an unconventional path to take an original musical to Broadway.

Tom: It feels very finished. It feels like everything we’ve done in this process has been for a reason and a very good reason. And I take a lot of pride in watching a show that has a song that we wrote 10 years ago next to a song we wrote 10 months ago, and seeing how they all fit into this piece. Musicals are really difficult—they take time, they take care. We were very fortunate to be given care and resources to develop this work and to find people who really believed in it as much as we did. I think that as a writer you are constantly trying to get to that point where it’s not just pencils down but you’re really ready to put it in the world. This has captured what we set out to do. If you’re lucky you can keep making those changes, and those changes are helpful in improving your piece. Certainly this was an unorthodox process to start in New York for an off-Broadway run, go to Arena in D.C., then come back to New York, but looking back everything happened to the show for the exact right reasons, and we’re very lucky for that.

With so many musicals being adapted from other art forms in recent years, from television to film, it felt like original musicals were becoming a dying breed, although that gradually seems to be changing lately.

Tom: Anything in this business is difficult. I think some of the musicals that influenced me to want to do this were adaptations. Cabaret is an adaptation of a book. I think that musicals are hard no matter what. I worry that people get too bogged down in the sort of romantic notion of what a musical should be. In my mind, if you have something inspired to say and you have an interesting way to do it... I felt that way with High Fidelity. We had a different experience and got thrown into the whole movie musical backlash. I understand that, and I’m proud to have written an original musical. But I also would never look at Next To Normal and say that it has more validity than an adaptation just because it’s original. I think that all works should be judged on their own merit.

I was surprised at how good The Color Purple musical was. I didn’t think they could pull it off. I think a lot of times Broadway audiences go to certain shows just because they’re the big shows. In certain ways, while the concept does not scream “blockbuster,” Next To Normal actually is a big show because of the largest, multi-tiered stage that it has.

Tom: I always felt as a writer that a story that’s big enough would belong on the biggest stage. Certainly Brian and I didn’t write Next To Normal because we thought we would be here. We wrote a show that really inspired us and challenged us and brought out what we thought was the best of our writing. I think I hoped deep down [that] if the story affects people that people will want to come see it and that means it will be on a bigger stage.

There is an interesting assortment of styles here, from traditional musical theatre numbers to more bombastic rock numbers. There’s a little a capella at one point. How conscious were you of creating this sonic mixture?

Tom: For me, the story always drove the music. It wasn’t necessarily setting out to do bunch of different styles so that I could have a different palette. I think it was really just what’s appropriate. For the pharmacologist number, for example, I remember the day that we hit on the jazz waltz. I wanted to desensitize the drugs, almost make it feel like it’s in radio jingle land because I think there is a sense, especially on television when you see these ads with a good-looking guy running along the beach and you hear all of those warnings, that they do try to desensitize a little bit what they’re selling. So musically it seemed to me that that wistful, spring-in-your-step type music worked well for that, as opposed to saying, “This needs to be jazzier.”

Left to right: Aaron Tveit, Alice Ripley (who won a Tony for her performance) and J. Robert Spencer

Brian: The flip side, and this is where rock music comes in, is that the show deals in extremes of emotion, especially extremes of sadness and anger and frustration, and I think that no kind of music expresses anger and frustration and being at the end of your rope the way rock music does. Even the parents in this musical are in their late 30s and early 40s, and they grew up with rock ‘n’ roll, so that would be the natural way for them to express themselves musically. They wouldn’t express themselves in a Harold Arlen song. That’s not their music. Their music is Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi.

What did you learn about mental illness in writing the show?

Brian: I think I learned how pervasive mental illness is. Every time I’m at the show I meet someone who’s bipolar or who grew up with a bipolar parent. Literally every time I’ve met someone at the show there’s been someone there who says, “This is my story.” I could easily say that I wasn’t expecting that. In developing the show we met so many people who responded to what was onstage because it told their story that they hadn’t seen told, particularly not as a musical. Learning how pervasive it was and how many lives have been touched by mental illness was a real revelation for me.

The creators constantly did research into mental illness, to stay true to the reality of the struggle of dealing with it.

Tom: I learned to see it in its true form, which is that it’s a disease. I think there’s a tendency, and I think I was this way growing up, to say, “Why can’t that person snap out of it? Why are they acting that way?” Brian has that great line when the doctor says it’s a disease like hypertension or diabetes and it must be treated. To look at it that way, to look at it as a disease that afflicts people and that there is no rhyme or reason to it and there is no silver bullet, it’s the struggle to live with it and to take care of it. What’s most important to me about Next To Normal is that people see that we’re honoring that struggle and hoping to shed some light on it.

You guys have found humor within this tragic tale. Next To Normal could have been one big downer, but it’s not. There are times in life you have to laugh, even at the absurdity of a difficult situation.

Tom: The people you laugh with are the people you care about.

Brian: The thing about bipolar is its sad but its so extreme that it is kind of ridiculous. There are certain points you have to laugh at, like when she’s making sandwiches on the floor. You have to laugh because the alternative is too dour. It’s too dark.

The son, Gabe (Aaron Tveit, center), is meant to haunt the main characters, to make them deal with the sadness and grief present in the house.

Was your intention to give the son a devilish presence? He comes off as the villain here.

Brian: I think he’s definitely the antagonist. I think Ben Brantley in his review said he’s angel and devil both to his mother. That’s really true. The thing about the character of Gabe is that he has a very specific job to do. The song “I’m Alive,” which seems like a great, rousing pop song, is laying out why he’s there. He’s really there to get them to deal with this thing that they’re not fully dealing with. Michael and I always said that he haunts the house the way that grief and loss and sadness haunt this house and mental illness haunts this house. This family hasn’t totally faced up to that. They’re trying to take care of it by dampening it down and keeping a lid on it, and what ultimately happens at the end is that they have to rip themselves apart to start healing.

What was the toughest scene for the both of you work on together?

Brian: You would think the answer would be the whole therapy sequence, but it actually wasn’t that hard. We already had other songs, and I was able to lay the pieces out in a row, and Tom just took it and made it work. And to give credit where credit is due, AnnMarie Milazzo, our vocal arranger, and Michael Starobin, who was the Tony winning co-orchestrator, both got on board to figure out this tapestry and weave it all together in this way that was amazing. It had no right to work as well as it did.

Tom: Michael was so great at coming in and saying the show needs to move quicker and we need to get to that big moment quicker as well, so Brian and I just kept honing and changing that sequence. We wrote new songs. For example, the song Natalie sings at the piano is totally different from what we had at the Second Stage.

Brian: Even though it feels fizzy and effortless, the whole “I’m Crazy/My Psychopharmacologist and I” sequence was really hard. We worked on that a lot.

There’s interesting counterpoint utilized there, with the three parts interweaving. There was one song where you had all the characters singing dissonantly but they all came together on one word.

Tom: Certainly in the therapy sequence they do. There’s a big cacophony that happens in the middle because they all are singing a hook from an earlier song. That’s “Catch Me I’m Falling”. They don’t sing the same word but they all stop at the same place together and sing together. It’s an “i” rhyme.

Is there one thing that you want people to get out of the show, even on a basic level?

Tom: I don’t know. One thing that I’ve heard said that I think is kind of a cool thing is that people want to leave the show and go be with her family and talk to their family members and hug people. I think there’s an appreciation because these family members, even though they really go through it, all get each other in a better way. They’re better off when we leave them, and I think that nothing makes you appreciate your family more than watching other people struggle to love and be loved and to feel love in the right way. I began writing the show when I was 24, and I’m 35 now and have two kids of my own, and watching some of these things that happen in our show is difficult for me even sometimes. I’ve always responded to theatre that’s made me feel empowered and made me feel like I want to talk about it and made people excited, and that’s how I want people to leave the theatre.

Brian: For me it’s a lyric that Diana has in the last song. She says, “You don’t have to be happy to be happy you’re alive.” That, to me, is one of the most important thoughts in the show. Life is pain, life hurts, and life is sorrow and its grief. The doctor says, “the price of love is loss, but still we pay, we love anyway.” Those are the two most important thoughts to me. Without the pain there’s no feeling good. There’s no happiness without sorrow, just like there’s no day without night. For me that’s the lesson of the show, that life hurts but hurting is part of being alive.

Security Check. Please enter this code.