Traditionally, theatre prides itself on putting together fully staged shows; however, Grover Theatre Company presented Next to Normal as a concert version to highlight this incredible show.
By Tayla Ham - May 1st 2023
Stripping a musical back to its roots is a bold decision, but that is precisely what Grover Theatre Company (GTC) has done, in an Australian first, presenting Next to Normal in Concert. This production ran from March 23rd till 25th at the St Martin’s Theatre in South Yarra.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning rock musical covers the complex topic of mental health and its impact on the family, not just the individual. “It’s a tough show,” Hannah Bird, founder of GTC and the actress playing the lead role, Diana, describes.
When deciding to produce a show such as Next to Normal, there were two main reasons why GTC chose to present it as a concert and not a traditional stage show. The first is that Bird and her friends had this “pipe dream” tucked away, waiting for the right time to present this abnormal production.
The other reason was “the music,” Bird passionately explains. “We wanted to focus heavily on the music because the music is so important to us.”
“It literally just started as a group chat,” Bird says, as she expands on how this passion project of GTC’s came to life. “We were just gushing about Next to Normal and just saying like, how we would love to all be in it together.”
However, the show is based around a family unit, and Bird and her group chat of Luke Peverelle and Kristen Ryan knew the likelihood of them all being cast in the same production of Next to Normal was very slim. We “are all the same age, and the believability of myself playing [Ryan’s] mum” is low. Therefore, the group knew the only way to do it and play their individual dream roles was to do it themselves, with a twist.
“We thought a concert version might be a cool little, non-naturalistic way to still present the story; at the ages we are,” says Bird. “We don’t have a set, we don’t have costumes, kind of, and we can just use like a small intimate venue and just kind of make it like this non-naturalistic vibe, because it is a rock musical.”
This is exactly what they achieved; in a review by Matthew Sheahan, from Melbourne Theatre Info, he says, “Even with just the concert staging and not the full-scale show, the story was told, and the point was well and truly got across."
In the amateur theatre community, Next to Normal is seldom performed due to its complex themes and the renowned difficulty of the score. “The music was the triumph and challenge,” Bird says when asked about the highlights and challenges of the show.
Even with such a brilliant outcome, there was a rocky beginning as they had difficulty “getting all the musicians together.” Bird continues, “It is such a hard score; musicians, a lot of the time, just won’t touch this because it is so complicated.”
Musical director Kristie Thai, luckily, didn’t have this issue. She says, “I went into Next to Normal blind, so I had
no preconceived notion of its difficulty.” Thai, who was hand-picked for the role of musical director by Bird, learnt the show only after accepting the position.
However, she took the intricacy of the score in her stride, as she explains, “The music is written so beautifully, that not a single voice is wasted.”
Thai explains that this brought challenges: "It’s such a small band and small cast, there is nothing to hide behind. And because it’s a concert, there is so much extra emphasis on the sound.”
The score’s difficulty was not only felt by the band; the actors shared this feeling. Bird describes, “It was so hard!” She continues, “There were points where I was like, ‘I don’t think that we can do this. Have we bitten off more than we can chew?’” Yet, Bird also claims that “to hear us learn to mesh our voices […] to hear us learn how to blend” was also one of “the biggest triumphs” in the process of putting on the concert.
The small band and small cast enabled a “real vibe to form” between them, Bird says. “There's a real love between us. I think that comes out in how we portray the characters and present the music.”
It was evident in the performance how hard the cast had worked and how they had blended with the band. This was also commented on in the review by Sheahan, “ the cast were fantastic when they sang as a group, and all the harmonies were on pitch which made this magnificent score, played by the amazing band under the musical direction of Kristie Thai and very hard working band shine even brighter.”
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