Love London Love Culture rounds up the reviews for this highly anticipated transfer from Broadway.
The Independent: ★★★★★ “With his phenomenal voice and almost flagrant cuteness, Platt generates the impression (however unfair) of leading a charmed life as a performer. Tutty is more than equal to the part’s extraordinary demands – his strong singing voice has the plaintive wail and SOS falsetto of someone in a rapture of neediness – but he also radiates the haplessness of a misfit propelled into a situation that is at once horribly comic and tragic.”
London Theatre Reviews.co.uk: ★★★ 1/2 “Dear Evan Hansen is an entertaining – and filled with talent – show, that will have a long life in the West End. And this is not a lie.”
The Guardian: ★★★★ “The music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul – who collaborated on the movies La La Land and The Greatest Showman – are good enough to overcome the occasional holes in the story. The songs, mostly in a pop-rock idiom, seem to happen instinctively rather than being carefully planted.”
London Theatre.co.uk: ★★★★ “Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s beautiful score may be a little ballad-heavy, but has integrity and depth that matches the story they have to tell, whose book is written by Steven Levenson.”
Evening Standard: ★★★ “The show engages with the real world in a way most musicals simply don’t. But Steven Levenson’s book relies on a large amount of coincidence and is curiously old fashioned in its interface with modern life: everyone’s on Facebook, no one has a phone.”
The Stage: ★★★★ “Even with its flaws and shortcomings, Dear Evan Hansen matters because what it’s trying to say completely squares with what it’s trying to do.”
Culture Whisper: ★★★★ “Dear Evan Hansen is universally heart-warming and thought-provoking, but it’s particularly pertinent for teens and young adults whose impulse is to bottle everything up and retreat into themselves. The show zings with zeitgeisty details about a generation who grew up online, but there’s also a timelessness in the emotional arc of an outsider who finds his way in.”
Dear Evan Hansen continues to play at the Noel Coward Theatre.
