Jessica Phillips had barely been in Colorado for 24 hours before she was spirited to Broncos Stadium to join her “Dear Evan Hansen” castmates in singing the National Anthem in front of tens of thousands of football diehards.
“I haven’t been outside too much, but I hear Denver’s great,” she said the next day from a break room behind the Buell Theatre, where the Tony-winning “Hansen” runs through Oct. 13. “I’m going to take everybody’s word for it.”
Phillips and the rest of the cast had little time to prepare before the show opened its first-ever national tour in Denver on Tuesday. They had not yet enjoyed a full rehearsal on the Buell’s stage when The Denver Post interviewed them. They had barely seen the theater. The critic’s screening was two weeks away.
But the intense, months-long preparation for the touring version of this musical — which has attracted “Hamilton”-like attention and awards since debuting at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage in 2015 — requires full concentration, even if its performers got a head start in New York City.
“I do love seeing people getting excited and going out for a night on the town, all dressed up and happy,” said Ben Levi Ross, who plays the title character in this tale of high school love, deception and anxiety. “Being from L.A., it’s refreshing to walk around the (Denver Performing Arts Complex) and get a sense of that.”
Denver’s style is decidedly more casual than Ross’ observations may imply, but it’s no secret the Mile High City has become a top-tier laboratory for testing and launching Broadway musicals and their tours, including Disney’s “Frozen” musical adaptation, which preceded “Hamilton” last year at the Buell.
Armed with a half-dozen Tony awards (including Best Musical 2017) and an unusually compact cast of eight, “Dear Evan Hansen” arrives with the finest hype a stage production could ask for, and a chance to tweak itself further. As in the past, Denver is acting as the connective tissue between the Broadway version and the one the rest of the country will see, with the production scheduled to visit 22 more citiescoast-to-coast through September 2019.
Ben Platt and the cast of “Dear Evan Hansen” in the original Broadway version of the musical. (Provided by Matthew Murphy)
Not only does this “Hansen” feature the same director as Broadway’s — veteran Michael Greif, of “Rent” and “Grey Gardens,” who has been with it since the beginning — but Ross (as Hansen) also brings a vital measure of continuity. He was the understudy for three lead male roles on Broadway, including Hansen, and got to perform it for audiences a couple times in anticipation of this touring debut.
“It was different than a lot of swing (or chorus) positions because there’s no ensemble in this show, so it’s not like I had an on-stage track and also covered some of the leads,” Ross said. “It was: there’s only eight people on stage, and you cover three of them — and they’re all principal roles.”
That’s not the only pressure on Ross. As quickly as it garnered rave reviews, “Dear Evan Hansen” developed a reputation for exacting a high physical and emotional toll on its performers, even by Broadway’s punishing standards. Last summer, The New York Times wrote that the show “wrecked” its then-lead Ben Platt (now a Tony winner), capturing backstage scenes of him being hugged by friends who asked him to promise he was taking care of himself amid the seemingly “impossible to sustain” performances.
Again, the 20-year-old Ross is well-prepared.
“I’ve enjoyed being able to dive into Evan and not split my energy on three different roles,” Ross said. “But on days where I feel the most like Evan, it actually makes it harder to then be Evan because I’m not separating my anxiety from his. Are these his emotions, or mine? When things hit real close to home — and this show opens you up in a very intense way — you have to be careful and protect yourself. You don’t ever want to drag the stuff that you’re opening up on-stage (to) off-stage. That just becomes messy, and dangerous.”
Without giving too much away, “Dear Evan Hansen” focuses on outsider high-school student Hansen, his friends and his family at a pivotal moment in their lives. Phillips plays his mother, Heidi, and she’s able to draw on having two sons of her own (aged 14 and 17) for the emotional truth in her role, she said.
In fact, the same day she sent her real-life older son off to his senior year of high school, she later simulated that exact thing in rehearsals with Ross.
“That’s a trick for actors in general,” said Phillips, 47, who has worked extensively on Broadway and in TV (“Law & Order: SUV,” “Elementary”). “How much of our own stuff can we use to bring this character to life and have them feel real, but not fall over the edge of the cliff into our own experiences? At the end of the day it’s the material that is so powerful, and we’re here as instruments to present that material.”
Handling those instruments is Greif, whose comfort with this touring company is clear when he talks about them — even before a single public performance.
“Ben (Ross) joining this company set a very high bar, because there was a real familiarity with the material from the Broadway version,” Greif said. “People felt like, ‘Oh, I need to memorize this stuff, too.’ But they also saw him reinterpreting the material, and giving himself permission to go in different directions, which let them know that would be OK.”
Greif has also worked with Phillips in the past, who “knows me well enough to know what she can mess around with and what she shouldn’t mess around with,” he said with a slight chuckle. “That’s the wonderful aspect of our shared experience.”
That makes this first Denver run of “Hansen” (it will return to the Buell if it’s any kind of success, as the Denver Center for the Performing Arts anticipates) both a new beginning and a continuation for the show, an experiment and a finely-tuned machine. The company’s still developing its rapport, but the show has been tested nearly every way since debuting on Broadway.
“When you’re actually developing the musical there’s some shifting sands,” Greif said. “You never quite know what’s going to remain and what isn’t, so there’s always part of your brain that has to be open to things changing. When going into a touring situation, however, you actually really know the markers you need to hit. And you know you can hit them in a couple different ways.”
The question now becomes: Will this version, and this company, live up to the hype? Ross thinks so, and he’s not afraid of being compared to Platt’s iconic version of the title character.
“There’s no negative aspect to that,” Ross said. “The creative team did a really good job of not placing any unnecessary pressure on me. It was just exciting and felt like such an honor to be given this responsibility. And also, seeing the show from such a different perspective, as an understudy, really made me appreciate the social dynamics of the cast.”
In “Evan Hansen’s” case, it’s a necessarily tight-knit one that’s more than ready to get to work.
“That’s the beauty of being a touring company,” Ross said. “We’re not replacing Broadway. We get to build this together. I’m not saying a replacement can’t immaculately fit into a production, because they have. But there’s something special about having created a touring company with all of us from the beginning.”
If you go
“Dear Evan Hansen.” Acclaimed Broadway musical beginning its national tour in Denver, with various performances through Oct. 13 at the Buell Theatre, 1350 Curtis St. Tickets: $40-$145 via 303-893-4100 or denvercenter.org
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