Ben Platt’s not too old for Evan Hansen, but he is too old for the movie version
Film Features Ben Platt
Yesterday, Universal released the first trailer for Dear Evan Hansen, Stephen Chbosky’s big-screen adaptation of the Tony-winning musical from composers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and writer Steven Levenson. Two things happened in quick succession. The first was that the people of the internet collectively noticed that Ben Platt, the actor whose performance in the titular role earned him a Tony and near-instant stardom, doesn’t exactly look like a high-schooler anymore. The second was that many of them then googled “dear evan hansen plot” and had an experience. But we’ll get to that in a moment.
There are many worthy reasons to adapt a play or musical into a film, the best being that the story in question would, you know, make a good movie. But when the stage production is one like this, anchored by a performance that is, by all accounts, somewhere between excellent and once-in-a-generation, there’s an additional incentive. Preserving such performances is a worthy pursuit, and the impulse to keep Platt in the role so that the world at large can experience it is understandable. But while it’s not always easy to accept someone who’s obviously a fully-grown adult playing a teenaged character on stage, it’s even harder on film. And when the story requires a lot of subtlety and earnestness, it becomes nearly impossible. Ben Platt is not too old to play Evan Hansen, and in certain circumstances, he never will be. But he’s too old to play him in this movie, and it’s because the movie is not a play.
Of course, the fact that Platt looks like he’s about to say “how do you do, fellow kids” isn’t actually the weirdest thing about Dear Evan Hansen, so let’s briefly address the plot. Platt plays, yes, Evan Hansen, a teenager with devastating social anxiety writing letters to himself at the behest of his therapist. Connor (Colton Ryan in the movie, reprising a role he understudied on Broadway), a fellow and similarly isolated student, takes one of these letters from the printer, and after a confrontation with Evan, brings it home. Then Connor dies by suicide, his parents find the letter, and they reach out to Evan, believing Connor to have written the letter to an apparently close friend. For reasons both well-intended and mercenary, Evan keeps up the ruse, and this lonely 17-year-old boy winds up inventing a profound friendship with a dead classmate he hardly knew, piling on lie after lie to comfort Connor’s parents (admirable) and to maintain the connections growing between him and other students, notably Connor’s sister Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), on whom he has long had a crush and with whom he begins a relationship (uh, not so admirable).
Creepy plot or no, watch Platt sing a song from the show and it becomes instantly clear why Chbosky and Universal would want to capture this performance in amber. Chbosky said as much to Vanity Fair:
“You just have to hear him sing the songs… His understanding of the character is so complete and so profound. I couldn’t imagine anybody else playing it. It’s his part. I felt very strongly about it. And to me it was never even a consideration.”
It’s hard to argue with that. And we pretend a lot when we go into a theater, whether we’re looking at a stage or screen. It’s part of the contract that exists between audience and artist: They agree to try to bewitch us, and we agree to let them try. Dragons exist. Gangs can dance and snap for dominance through the streets of New York. And yes, a 27-year-old man can play a 17-year-old boy, all thanks to the power of imagination. It’s what theater dorks call the willing suspension of disbelief. And it has to be a joint effort.
It’s much easier to pretend with theater (speaking here of the performing art, not the place). Ben Platt is not 17 anymore, but he also wasn’t 17 when he won a Tony for playing Evan Hansen. It didn’t limit his performance or damage the story then; it was just another (then much smaller) hurdle to jump. Some of the reasons it’s easier to suspend your disbelief at the theater are straightforward. Even in the smallest black box theater, the audience will not see the actors in extreme close-up, their faces 30 feet tall. But it’s not just physical distance. Theater also comes with unavoidable mental and emotional distance, because the artifice is unavoidable. In theater, when Peter Pan flies, you can always see the wires; audiences are confronted with body mics, stage makeup, painted scenery, the list goes on. We accept all of it because we have to.
Often that artifice is emphasized, not masked. Revolutionary theater artist Bertolt Brecht deployed a famed “distancing effect” to push his audiences from a place of passive empathy to active analysis. In contrast, playwrights like Paula Vogel, August Wilson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and even William Shakespeare have used it to deepen the emotional connection between actors and audience. Acknowledging that we’re all playing that game of pretend, the thinking goes, allows us to put aside the need for realism (or the “fourth wall”) and give ourselves over to a collective emotional experience. Platt could return to Evan Hansen when Broadway reopens in September and audiences would get on board, because all they have to do is say yes to the experience.
When audiences sit down to watch Hansen on screen in September, suspension of disbelief will need to kick into gear right away, as it does anytime we sit down to watch a fictional narrative. But the hurdles will get higher almost immediately, and not just because it looks like a sorrowful adult man is wandering around a high school library. It’s because Dear Evan Hansen is a musical. Love the plot or not, it’s the kind of story perfectly suited to the genre, which sees characters burst into song (or dance) when the emotion is so great that speech alone is no longer sufficient. The lack of realism shouldn’t be a deal-breaker—acknowledged artifice or theatricality can be just as effective on film, as evidenced by decades of movie musicals, Lars von Trier’s Dogville, the films of Wes Anderson and the Coens, and many, many others.
So why can’t the same be true of Dear Evan Hansen? Well, it can be. But the trailer indicates that Chbosky aims to reflect the nuance and vulnerability in Platt’s performance in his own filmmaking choices, and approaching movie musicals with an eye toward naturalism is always a tricky needle to thread. It can be done. Look, for an unexpected example, to La La Land, which was actually produced by Ben’s father, the veteran stage and screen producer Marc Platt. Though the film is hardly a bastion of realism, its emotional fulcrum is a performance of great subtlety, and the film’s artifice allows that performance to flourish while giving the audience permission to dwell on the emotionality, not the theatricality or lack thereof.
Emma Stone does not play a high-schooler in La La Land, but it would be easier to buy her as one than Platt as a 17-year-old because Damien Chazelle gives us the permission to make such a leap. And audiences were able to make it with Platt when he played a high-schooler in The Politician, a hyper-stylized Ryan Murphy joint in which none of the kids seemed kid-aged. The absurdity didn’t make the story harder to buy. It made it easier.
The best arguments for the existence of the movie version of Hansen are the preservation of a tremendous performance, and the opportunity to see the show that it affords those who couldn’t see it on stage because of distance or onerous prices. But those are still-better arguments for preserving such performances in their original state and then—and this is key—making those recordings widely available to the public. Beyond that, there’s no law that says that Chbosky’s approach must be realistic, or even that he can’t use a theater. Put 27-year-old Ben Platt on a stage in the polo and cast, and suddenly it’s a lot less jarring; make it a “concert version,” à la the “dream cast” anniversary production of Les Miserables, and it’s even easier to get on board. Or he could, of course, cast an actor who belongs in the movie he’s making, not the stage production of 2017. The solution for capturing great theatrical experiences doesn’t have to be film adaptation. And film adaptations don’t always need to be about preserving these remarkable performances. (Looking at you, Rent.)
Next month, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’ In The Heights will open in theaters, some 10 years after it closed on Broadway. Miranda will no longer play Usnavi, the role he originated, because he’s too old for it. Instead, Usnavi will be played by Anthony Ramos, another remarkable performer. Maybe audiences will struggle to accept the artifice of In The Heights, as some do to accept the artifice of any musical. But at least the film has removed one barrier to suspension of disbelief. As for the Evan Hansen movie, we can only hope that Platt’s age isn’t one barrier too many.
184 Comments
Jeremy Jordan was 34 when he played an 8 year old in Newsies
But a hell of a better singer than Christian Bale.
Separated at birth?
I absolutely had to do a double take.
RIP Deadspin.
It’s my understanding that Defector is doing just fine. Death to Vichy-Deadspin.
Good to hear.
I knew nothing about the plot of Evan Hansen and honestly that’s way more interesting than I was expecting! I think people nowadays often confuse messy art – and I’d argue most great art is messy – with problematic art.With regards to naturalism in musicals, while it can work, I think it often misses the boat and callas attention to the artifice in the rest of it. Les Mis is a great example – their singing is rough because they’re singing live (how gritty!) but the imaginary orchestra is plenty in tune. Like you said, especially if the main actor is already asking you to suspend your disbelief, just embrace it!
The movie of Dream Girls cut out almost all of the sung dialogue, leaving in only the diegetic songs. So near the end when the cast started singing to each other it was a rude shock.
gen z is going to be even more embarrassed for millennials ever thinking this was good story.it’s the origin story of Daniel Mallory.
I… don’t really get the issues with the story—he’s a teen that does a stupid teenage thing but due circumstances of age, etc, he’s not a psychopath. But that makes the casting arguably more of an issue.
One thing I don’t see mentioned is that most of the other teens are… almost as old. Kaitlyn Dever who plays Zoe is 24, Colton Ryan who plays Connor is 25. And yet, they don’t stand out as looking so off in the trailer for whatever reason (can they realistically look younger? Is it that they don’t seem to have had makeup and hair done to make them look younger?)
Is it that they don’t seem to have had makeup and hair done to make them look younger?It’s because they already looked younger than Ben Platt. I mean, Kaitlyn Dever straight up has a baby face. Of course, that Phil Spector hair does him no favours…
Yeah, I think part of the issue is that Ben Platt, already a decade older than his character, looks older than his age. I was actually pretty surprised upon reading this article to find out he’s younger than I am – I would’ve guessed he was in his late thirties.
Evan Hansen’s plot is a lot less problematic than Carousel, which we performed at my high school despite it repeatedly waving off and even romanticizing domestic violence.
Stupid kid does a stupid thing, digs himself ever deeper, is pretty standard dramatic fare. Mother and daughter bonding over the fact that a slap from Dad “felt like a kiss” is something else.
Yeah, honestly I’m a bit surprised to see how much of a “thing” a backlash to Evan Hansen’s plot has become, at least with certain people online. It feels like you have to work pretty hard to misread the musical’s intentions to truly be offended by it.
As a musical theatre geek, on the other hand, I’ve heard the issues with Carousel going at least as far back as when I was a teen in the 90s and saw the tour with a young Patrick Wilson. I know they tried to make minor rewrites for the last revival to, err, de-emphasize that but it’s pretty ingrained in the source material (although they could go back to the source play Liliom and have it implied that the male lead ends up Hell 😛 ). It’s too bad as I think it’s Rodgers and Hammerstein’s best score—but honestly I’m shocked anyone would suggest it for high school kids (and not *just* for that reason).
Huh, I don’t know that I’d call it offensive so much as why. Just why.
OK now I’m confused… If it’s not offensive than, why not? LOL
I mean, do we really need a feel good story about a guy who emotionally manipulates a bunch of people instead of…going to therapy?
I’m not sure if it is a feel good story really (even if the final moments do strive for a bit of that) but does it help that the character… does go to therapy? LOL No?
“Yeah, honestly I’m a bit surprised to see how much of a “thing” a backlash to Evan Hansen’s plot has become, at least with certain people online. It feels like you have to work pretty hard to misread the musical’s intentions to truly be offended by it.”To be fair, misreading things in order to take maximum offense is kind of a big thing with “certain people online.”
I think because it’s made very clear throughout the play that Billy Bigelow is a terrible person who keeps fucking up his and other people’s lives whereas Evan Hansen is at no point ever treated in a genuinely critical fashion?
Kinda? I mean the original script of Carousel does more or less end on that (to quote the Crystals song) He hit me but it felt like a kiss line, which seems to have allowed Billy to end up in Heaven so… it’s complicated.
I mentioned this is a separate comment, but there was an interesting thing I saw happen with DEH. When the 20-somethings were playing EH, he comes across as such an asshole to a lot of audience members. Because there are limits to how much you can disable someone’s subconscious perception of a character/actor.But when they had the run of DEH with an actual high schooler playing him? Many people were so much more willing to give him some sympathy, to accept that the ignorance of youth was a part of this equation. Because that reaction became natural, not mental gymnastics you had to do. There are limits to how much stage context alone can disable your subconscious, and there are times when that’s a serious hurdle for the plot of the show. When it’s so contingent on the follies of youth as a driving factor…. eh. I think a big part of what DID still keep DEH a success is certainly Ben Platt’s charisma and the beauty of the songs. But I don’t think audiences widely had sympathy for his character until Andrew Barth Feldman played him.
Bock and Harnick eventually rewrote the lyric, “And if he likes me/ Who cares how frequently he strikes me?/ I’ll fetch his slippers with my arm in a sling/ Just for the privilege of wearing his ring.” in an otherwise cute song.
I actually saw a revival of Fiorello! about five years back (which is surprising in and of itself) but they really foolishly kept that line. It… caused a big “wha did she just sing?” in the audience…
I saw a production of Carousel with a friend when I was 16 and we both were baffled by the “romance” element that involved a guy relentlessly bullying and abusing a woman while she fell in love with his puppets.
You’re thinking of Carnival not Carousel lol No puppets in Carousel. But Carnival has proven even harder to revive (I believe they tried it in DC with revisions and… Anne Hathaway I think?)
In Washington DC? Why would they do an original play here?
Because a lot of revivals of plays and musicals and new plays and musicals start outside of New York for a try out run, and DC is often one of those cities. It’s usually cheaper, it means that you don’t necessarily have to deal with New York’s harsher critics, etc (back when musicals and plays weren’t so expensive to stage they would usually have tryouts in several cities before moving to Broadway, where they could be fixed in front of a less critical audience).
But I was wrong—Anne Hathaway did a production in 2002 at Encores in New York, where they do semi staged productions of musicals that for whatever reason aren’t often done anymore. According to Wiki: “Ben Brantley in his The New York Times
review praised the Encores! concert, describing Hathaway as convincing
in the role even though “Lili may be the most unworldly heroine ever in a
Broadway musical, dangerously blurring the lines between innocence and
mental deficiency”” which sounds about right. There was talk of it, with a revised script, would open on Broadway two years later but it never happened.
The DC revised Carnival was later, but apparently got good reviews, but not enough to lead to a Broadway move. “
Director/choreographer Robert Longbottom directed a revival of Carnival which ran from February 17 to March 11, 2007 at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theatre in Washington, D.C.,with a cast which included Ereni Sevasti (Lili), Jim Stanek
(Paul Berthalet), Sebastian La Cause (Marco), Natascia Diaz (Rosalie),
Michael Arnold (Jacqout), and Jonathan Lee Iverson (Schlegel). This
production, which introduced a heavily revised book by Francine Pascal (sister of original book writer Michael Stewart) was a critical hit, as evidenced by the reviews of Paul Harris in Variety”
Yes, Sweet Valley High creator Francine Pascal was hired to rewrite it. LOL
The Kennedy Center is one the major centers for theater in the US. Not as major as the big Broadway theaters, but up there.
God, there’s more than one? But you’re right, it was Carnival. And it was ghastly. The male lead tried, but there’s no way to make a guy who spends all of his time on stage being a nasty jerk appealing.
The early 50s movie it’s based on Lili, with Leslie Carron has its fans (who I guess see it as a fairy tale basically) but… yeah, it’s never made sense to me. I’m impressed you saw a production, lol
I saw the recent rival of Carousel with Joshua Henry who was AMAZING as far as his performance, but casting a black man in the role opposite a white woman was…a choice.Could still listen to him sing If I Loved You and Soliloquy on repeat.
Oh yeah, he sounds gorgeous. Of course some people combined a certain casting choice (Jigger) in that production with their issues of the abuse as well…
I admittedly saw the show in previews so it was prior to that lawsuit breaking so that wasn’t in my mind yet when I saw it, but definitely doesn’t help the perception of that one.
And he went on to be a lead in West Side Story (which I don’t think has been announced if it is returning post Covid…) What a mess.
Damn it, now you have me singing “If I Loved You.”
It’s weird that “doing a stupid thing and digging himself ever deeper” is both a standard trope of sit-coms where it is played for comic effect (e.g. Lucy in the candy factory out of her depth in I Love Lucy) and in film noir where it is played for tragedy and may end up causing some deaths (e.g. the film Fargo with William H. Macy’s character ill-fated fake kidnapping of his wife).
It’s pretty much standard for the AV Club to find a way to preach in every single thing they write an polemic on how not to be a toxic male.
Carousel is bad, but the music. . .
I would love for someone to re-imagine it like they did with Oklahoma. Really use it to highlight the horror, not to romanticize it.
I still remember doing Bye Bye Birdie, in high school in the 90s, complete with the attempted gang-rape scene. It was “funny”! I think most productions skip that sequence, as it adds basically nothing and, uh, isn’t funny at all.
I think Carousel has one of the most beautiful scores and a truly lovely underlying message, that as long as someone alive can remember you, you’ll never be truly gone. (Isn’t it great that Carousel and Coco have the same message?)That being said, the show needs to be handled like the serious material that it is. Julie and Billy are poor, largely uneducated people who will never get much further than they are. Billy is unable to cope with his emotions and turns to violence against his wife (and then daughter). A director who is able to handle telling this story in as straightforward a manner as possible is what’s needed.
You know what surprised me with its problematic plot was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I had always heard of that as a fun musical and then I was like hmmm, OK, so, they abduct a bunch of women and force them into marriage?
You’re describing over 95% of television shows and movies that depict high school characters. They are almost always in their twenties and sometimes thirties. It’s fine. Why are you suddenly noticing now?
Why are you asking me? I didn’t make an AVClub post about it 😛 But I think as others have said it’s because Ben in particular *does* look old on film, more so than his co-stars.
They are almost always in their twenties and
sometimes thirties. It’s fine. Why are you suddenly noticing now?Because in those tv shows all the actors/characters, even tho they’re not teens, tend to at least look the same age as each other.
In this one, Ben Platt looks strangely older than the other characters – so it’s kind of jarring.
Tvtropes even has a trope for that named “Dawson Casting” (Although obviously Dawson’s Creek wasn’t the first show where we were expected to accept twenty-somethings as teenagers).
I believe TV Tropes maintains that Dawson’s Casting was the first example that the public was well aware of. Otherwise they wouldn’t have named the trope as well
The joke of Dawson Casting is that James Van Der Beek was 20. He wasn’t the worst example on the WB by a long shot.
Andrea Zuckerman was pioneer in 30-somethings playing teens on the original 90210.
Some people just cannot handle the idea of the unlikable protagonist or anti-hero. You can very patiently try to explain that depiction doesn’t equate to endorsement to these people and it just doesn’t compute with them.
And yet these people write fan fiction about the Phantom of the Opera 😉 (OK, I’m conflating two very different fandoms, but still…)
Regardless, you’re spot on that I think a lot of these people simply have a hard time not thinking that the show is endorsing his actions.
Yeah, there are certainly musicals that haven’t aged well (like 1958’s Gigi about a teen being groomed to become a high-end Parisian prostitute as if that was something to aspire to), but Carousel never hid that Billy was not a nice person. That was the whole point — he was allowed to come back after death to set things right.
I’ve bent over backwards to defend Carousel before—and I think a lot of it can be defended, but the actual part many people object to is when he comes back and ends up hitting his daughter anyway—and that kiss line… (But I also think Gigi, at least Colette’s original story is more than simply the story of a woman being groomed to be a prostitute, but I prob should quit while I’m ahead.)
I would argue that everyone ended up cast too old because they cast it around Ben Platt. I even think that Julianne Moore is too old to be honest. I do think adult!Ben Platt looks more off because he seems overdeveloped for Evan. That’s more perception than anything in the script most likely, but Evan “feels” like he should be skinny, underdeveloped and awkward. Ben almost looks too healthy? I’m more interested to see how he translates his stage performance to film. I saw him on stage and it was great, but it wasn’t subtle. He’s going to need to make some changes, imo.
Yes! I wondered if they cast Julianne Moore (60 years old!) because younger actresses looked too young playing against a super-adult-looking teenage son.
It changes the vibe because there’s nothing that says she’s not older, but I just always assumed the character was younger, ended up without her husband there and had to take crappy jobs. Her being 60 raises a lot of different questions for me – Why was her divorce settlement so terrible? How little community property did they have? Why would they opt to have a baby so late in life that clearly ruined their marriage?
It’s one of those plots that’s full of contrivances and a lot of metaphorical tap dancing. If we’re going to analyze it on a deeper level, we should factor in that Conner’s parents and basically the whole school put Evan on the hook for keeping Conner’s memory alive and speaking for him. The grammar of the story doesn’t really condemn this and it’s mostly just a problem for Evan to solve, even though this isn’t actually a scenario that can be interrogated through anything approaching a realistic lens. It reminds me of the Lost finale, when people who never watched the show boasted about “calling it” that the island was purgatory…when that’s not what happened. Those people outed themselves as being wrong but still somehow dominated the conversation.
Oh I don’t disagree with anyof that–I think you put it very well (and no, it’s not something that can or should be examined realistically). But most of the people who seem to hate the story so much, also don’t… really seem to be talking about what actually happens (like the poster on here who admitted he was upset at a Wiki summary… Ok…)
I don’t understand the outrage over the relationship, at all. Again, if we actually look at the mechanics of the plot, Evan is guilted into immersing himself in someone else’s suicide. It’s not like he contrived the ruse just to get with the sister. Is the argument that he’s supposed to be selfless in every situation?
Exactly. The nature of the plot is that suddenly he’s in over his head—yes, his lie instigates it but, honestly, I can see how someone (especially given his age and situation) could let it tumble into the extreme and it would be completely ridiculous, IMHO, to have him react by breaking off those relationships.
Kaitlyn Dever was a high school student in booksmart lastyear and Beanie Feldstein was 26
I hate to do this to you, but Booksmart came out 2 years ago & was filmed 3 years ago.
When I was in a college class with non media arts majors, someone gave a presentation about romantic comedies in which they listed love actually a as 2004 movie and I raised my hand and was like “hold up, wasn’t “Love Actually” in 2003?”, thereby lowering her grade and possibly deflating her academic self-esteem enough to want to quit college so karma really should hit me back for that, don’t feel bad.
You raise a good question, Dear Evan Hansen might have been shotbefore the pandemic entirely.
That wouldn’t surprise me since the majority of live-action films coming out this year were shot pre-pandemic. Wikipedia says Dear Evan Hansen only filmed last fall, though.
Expect 3 more articles on the problematiety of this plot by the end of the week. By God they will make a thing.
Yeah I think unfortunately this is a story where you really can’t get away with Dawson Casting. Most movies/shows it works because the characters don’t really behave like teens anyways. But to find Evan Hansen sympathetic at all you have to see him as a kid.
It’s someone using a suicide to advance both his social and romantic life in a time of increased awareness of the lack of consequences a lot of people experience for lying to advance their lives. In the same way that the characters in Animal House can be seen as incredibly repugnant without the veneer of comedy to protect us from their exploits, Evan Hanson deals with this idea fairly straight-faced, and so we have to deal with it, and of course it would at least provoke conversation. Especially since the show also makes the choice to make the protagonist that does bad things also have going to therapy as a major character defining trait: uh oh, someone with a treatable mental disorder is doing bad things in popular American art again, and people dare have an opinion on that!
That people are only getting around to hearing about it and having a reaction now just shows how niche theater is these days, not how mild and uncontroversial the subject matter is. When Bobcat Goldthwait directed an INCREDIBLY similarly plotted movie a decade prior in World’s Greatest Dad, it similarly wasn’t reviled or discussed by the general public. Why? Because it wasn’t released to them. It was only shown in independent art theaters. That’s how that works.
Yeah, I should have phrased my post better. Since I do follow New York theatre, I’ve heard some objections to the storyline going at least as far back as its original off-Broadway run. I guess, I was surprised to see them come back up now—but of course it’s because more people are becoming aware of the film (and many—curious about it—seem to just wiki the synopsis and are horrified). I still see the upset around the plot as people willfully misreading the way the show clearly seems to present things—but that also has a lot to do with if you see the show as somehow approving of Evan’s actions, which, it seems, a lot of people do see it as.
I don’t think it approves of Evan’s actions, but it does inherently make you sympathize with him, him being the lead and all.
I think the bigger thing is that no one expects this sort of moral complexity in something that looks and to certain extent sounds like a popular teen musical. Alan Strang in Equus is a similar “is it his fault he’s a monster” conundrum of a young man, but it’s far easier to sit with the “he’s a monster and I pity him” dichotomy, even with his far worse and more lurid crimes, because
A) he’s not the main character and the person the audience identifies with (the psychiatrist is that in Equus)
and B) he’s not putting his monstrosity to catchy tunes.
We’re meant to see Evan Hansen in ourselves, and he’s not a great guy. And audience accusation is inherently going to provoke negative responses, even in people who eventually get over it.
So I think it’s utterly appropriate people have diverse responses to the show, and it’s not because they don’t get American theater on the same level as we do, hehe (as per the Onion, that opinion is only reserved for takes on the Muppets). I think it’s cool something the least bit ambiguous (and I do mean “the least bit”) is being put in front of American general audiences, and they actually wanna talk about it.
Well… yeah I can’t argue any of that and I think those are all good points (especially that, unlike a Sondheim musical or even, I dunno, Chicago) it is basically a teen pop musical. Pasek and Paul’s earlier off-Broadway musical, Dogfight (based on the movie) is, IMHO, a better show and score, but I know when it premiered in London there was a lot of talk that it actually advocated misogyny, so…
The story is fine, aside from the ending (he meets the wrong person in the orchard at the end). I think it’s partially the make-up and bad hair, but also because Platt looks noticeably older than his cast-mates in that trailer. Nobody cares whether your teenagers look like adults in TV and film as long as they all look roughly the same age, and the “adult characters” all look much older.
it’s a creepy ass story.
Kaitlyn Dever already looks 16, to be fair.
In the mid-fifties all the high-school movies appeared to be populated by kids in their twenties or even thirties. And how often is Romeo and and Juliette been cast with age-appropriate actors? And opera? Some wag remarked that that Strauss wrote Salome for a fifteen-year-old soprano with thirty years of musical experience. ALL drama requires suspension of disbelief. Batman realistic?
I read this whole article thinking, “Has this writer ever seen Grease?”
Grease sucks, having something in common with Grease is not a good thing. Especially if you’re telling a story that’s supposed to be taken seriously.
I’m fond of Grease, but the whole film is an obvious pastiche of the ‘50s rather than an attempt at reality. And that’s fine with me because Stockard Channing kills in that film even if she looks 40, but it’s definitely not something a realistic drama should emulate.
Yeah, if anything, Grease is further proof of how artifice makes some absurd casting choices work better.
The idea that this contemporary teen musical is to be “taken seriously” is pretty funny in and of itself.
Grease is CAMP and none of the actors look like teenagers – it’s consistent.DEH is supposed to be “real” and only the main actor/character stands out as obviously older.
Yep. The broad and comedic stylization of Grease makes the older casting a feature, not a bug.Asking to take Ben Platt seriously as anything resembling a 17 year old is basically that Walk Hard scene: “I think I’m doing OK for a 15 year old with a wife and baby!”
I read this whole article thinking, “Has this writer ever seen Grease?”I came here to say this. Was not disappointed.
The plot reminds me of World’s Greatest Dad.
This is exactly what I thought, it was World’s Greatest Dad without the dark humor. I’m surprised this doesn’t get mentioned more often.
for me it’s Margaret.
This article is 1500 words that could have been replaced with “I am very poor at suspending disbelief.”
Is “suspending disbelief” supposed to be a virtue?
Look, if you don’t know what the term means, just say so.
For appreciating the medium? Yes.
Uh, it’s a requirement for pretty much all performing art forms. You think people actually speak in iambic pentameter?
There’s a reason very few movies are written in iambic pentameter…
If you want to enjoy any sort of drama or literature, yes. We are children playing Let’s Pretend, and it can be fun and instructive.
It’d be easier to suspend disbelief if there was continuity – if all the teen characters age-look was the same. But they’re not, that’s the problem – Ben Platt looks jarringly older than the other actors/characters. That can easily take people out of the immersion.I think it might be okay after people settle into the film and get used to it, but just for the trailer it’s kiind of sore-thumby.
Exactly this, you gotta have them ALL look like their age. That’s why Grease works, because none of them appear out of the ordinary within the context of what’s on screen.
this is like the movie jack, but if robin williams was supposed to have been 10. did nobody really watch the daily’s and realize their lead looks like a 40 year doing an SNL skit?
That cracked me up. The other I saw that amused me was that he looked like a Kyle Mooney character.
Losing weight was almost certainly the wrong way to go.
What? Of course there are no chubby teens. How could someone play a teen without losing weight?
well, yes, basically theatre is about artifice & film is about reality. i love to see the zipper up the back of the monster suit on stage but the highest praise for a movie is, “it seemed so real.”
Yeah, and even in the highest budget Broadway spectacles the set is going to be a vague and usually abstract suggestion as to what the background is supposed to look like.
the highest praise for a movie is, “it seemed so real.”STRONG disagree.
I love walking out of a movie, turning to my friend, and going “it seemed so real!”
I love going through a real experience and saying, “It felt like I was in a movie.”
Breaking the fifth wall was a tradition that goes back to Greek comedy. In the the movies, it was a hilarious surprise in Tom Jones when Jenny Jones suddenly spoke directly to the audience to assure them that she had not committed 8ncest.
I think the problem is they actually tried to make him look like a teenager and failed. Somehow I think it would be better if Ben Platt just looked like Ben Platt. I was a teenager between 2000s and 2010s, almost all teen movies (and The CW teen dramas) had older actors back then, nobody tried to hide it and somehow nobody cared (well, some people cared and laughed at it but they usually weren’t the target of those films).
You should probably check out the original 90210. Just for kicks.
Or virtually any other television show or movie set in a high school.
Or The Powers of Matthew Starr, where they seemed to find as many ‘mature’ high school extras as possible to mask how badly suited Peter Barton was for the role.
Wow, that’s going deep there. And it’s crazy how many names were involved in that garbage heap of network TV. Lou Gossett Jr, Harve Bennett…the list really does go on, and it’s apparently up there with the worst TV shows ever.
Yes, and I think Louis was booked in before he got his Oscar, so it made him look a bit bad having such gunk as the followup.
Damn, step into the wayback machine. I remember that show.
Gabrielle was like 35. . .
That was kinda the point. I think the closest they had in casting according to age was maybe Brian Austin Green, who was still a teen but was still playing someone 5-6 years younger (I think…can’t say I revisit that show, ever).I blame it all on 21 Jump Street, but that’s probably not going back far enough, lol.
carteras was in her 30s
I distinctly remember Ryan from The O.C. riding a bike everywhere in S1 because he was supposed to be 15 or something. Meanwhile the actor is ten years older than Ryan is supposed to be and looks it. But yea they never really tried to hide it, was just kind of funny.
You don’t want high schoolers playing high schoolers. They’re far more reliable as actors if they’ve gone to a college’s acting program and studied the craft more. Child actors are more forgiveable for being hammy but the material for a show like OC it doesn’t necessarily fly.
I think part of the issue is also that Evan isn’t supposed to be cool. Ryan in the OC is cool. Luke Perry on 90210 was cool. Even Rizzo in Grease, cool. So we expect them to look worldly and adult in a way high schoolers don’t. A filled out, adult Evan looks too healthy.
I agree, we expect that Dorky boys look younger than their age not older.
Also, in order to sell the plot, Evan has to read as believable as a high schooler. Because a high schooler doing what he does is bad but at least somewhat believable. An adult doing what he does is sociopathic. If his character reads as an adult, it cuts a lot of the audience’s sympathy for him.None of the characters in, say, Grease are believable as high schoolers, either. But with Grease, that’s a good thing! If they looked like actual high schoolers, a lot of the movie’s focus on sex would be weird or disconcerting for adult audiences to watch. Casting actors who are clearly closer to 30 than to high school allows audiences to let that go and enjoy it.
It reminds me of Martin Short playing Clifford. He was 40 playing 10. It…didn’t work…for a lot of reasons.As for Platt, if he’d just been him, I think I could of suspended disbelief more, but he looks like he’s wearing making somewhere between Rocky Dennis/Eric Stoltz in Mask and Odo on Deep Space Nine.
The elephant in the room is that Ben is a theatre person and not a movie star hottie. And that’s okay. But while Charisma Carpenter was clearly 26 during Buffy’s first season, it was a fresh-faced, wrinkle-free, hourglass figure 26. To be honest, Ben looks older than 27. His hairline isn’t his fault, but this isn’t really about him being 27. Its about him looking like a “movie 35.”
“But while Charisma Carpenter was clearly 26 during Buffy’s first season, it was a fresh-faced, wrinkle-free, hourglass figure 26.”
Ah, so we’re at the point that we’re going to pretend Cordelia didn’t look 30 in the first season?
You know, Ben Platt was a high schooler two years ago in the 2019 season of The Politician, right?
I assume its like that old Simpsons gag , that cows dont look like cows on screen , so you have to paint up a bunch of horses (and to get horses you tape a bunch of cats together), and teenagers look like deranged homunculus monkeys on film , and you have to use late 20s adults instead . (“late 20s adults” were of course filmed by using claymation models until the even of CGI)
Tom Welling was a fucking Golden God in Smallville. He could’ve spit in my mouth and I would’ve been like, oh yeah you’re in high school whatever you say Supe.
Going by the pic at top I thought he was 28. Not believable as a 17yo for sure.
But its a film musical of a stage musical. The few people who watch it wont care.
His looks make me think of Kirby Heyborne.
“…But those are still-better arguments for preserving such performances in
their original state and then—and this is key—making those recordings
widely available to the public”
I think those are better arguments for allowing stage productions to exist in their moment, and then pass into memory. As a theatre actor, I have to accept that each night is a moment I will never, ever recapture. The audience should live in the moment with the performers. You have to be in the theatre, not sitting on your couch.
I will not deny your statement that there is magic, awe, and wonder of watching a play or musical live. But recordings can also be beneficial for people who cannot afford to go to Broadway. I know about Sondheim’s works because a college friend lent official DVDs of filmed performances from PBS and so forth.
Yeah, I really wish they’d just film theatrical performances and release them as movies more often, like they did with Hamilton.I get that they’re worried about cannibalizing ticket sales of still running/touring shows, but if the idea is really to “capture the performance,” doesn’t a filmed production do that a million times more effectively than watching the actor lip sync along to a highly produced, pre-recorded track in extreme closeup?Imagine how much better a filmed performance of Jersey Boys on Broadway would’ve been than the drab, lifeless Clint Eastwood movie we got.
Equus was a wonder on Broadway. They never pretended the horses were anything but extremely talented dancers imitating the precise motion of horses. It was filmed with real horses and all the magic was gone.
My wife and I saw the show last February, after years of me singing along with the album. It was great, but I always will wonder how the musical would be with the original cast. Yes, Ben Platt is much older than he was when the musical opened, however this will probably be the only time I and many other fans will get to see him in the role.
I saw the show on Broadway when the original cast was long gone. I didn’t know anything about it going in, never heard the music before, loved it. Looked up a Ben Platt performance on YouTube later, and it was in an entirely different league. I’m glad I went into the show with no expectations. So I get why they were so motivated to have him in the role. There’s nothing at all unusual about a 27 year old playing a teen, I think they just tried too hard to de-age him. It feels flop sweaty. If they can take 20 years off Samuel L. Jackson for an entire movie in Captain Marvel, they can’t digitally buff a 27 year old a little?
Agreed! I would watch Ben Platt play Evan Hansen in his 60s, but I don’t know why on earth they had him grow his hair out for the movie so it looks like a bad wig. (He’s confirmed it’s his real hair.) He could have simply repeated his hairstyle from the Broadway production and it would have worked far better.
It’s SUBSTANTIALLY easier to de-age grown adults to other stages in their grown adult development. It still has a certain uncanny valley effect, but it’s much, much easier.The body still continues to develop in ways that go beyond loosening skin/wrinkles. Bones actually continue to grow (or, at times, shrink).It’s not as easy as just smoothing out wrinkles and giving skin a youthful glow. The shape of teen bodies and faces is actually different than they would be 10 years later. And those 10 years matter. Look at Orlando Bloom in LOTR vs. the Hobbit. It’s 10 years difference (Iirc, age 22 and 32). Which, physically, are substantially more similar than 17-27. And it still doesn’t work.
Psst… as I mentioned to another commenter above, you can find bootleg videos of Ben Platt in “Dear Evan Hansen” online. (The complete production from start to finish.) Obviously the quality is far from great, but it was worth it to me to see Ben and the rest of the original performers I had listened to so many times on the cast album.
Wasn’t the age issue a pretty large criticism of The Politician (along with how terrible the writing was)?
We’ve come a long way from the days when Hello, Dolly! drastically de-aged their leading lady for the film version. Somewhere in-between would make more sense to me. This whole production gives the vibe of something that usually would have just been filmed in the theater and then aired on PBS. I’m not sure who the audience is for an actual movie version at this point.
The Politician is also about a high school senior who has an entirely serious plan to become president- it’s easier to ignore how old Peyton looks because he acts like a ruthless 40-year-old political operative instead of a real teen.(s2 spoiler: they’re also only in high school for the one year before jumping a few years ahead)
In the movie The Rock, Sean Connery goes through this really elaborate procedure to get INTO Alcatraz, dodging fire and rolling and such, and then he comes around the corner and opens the door to let the other soldiers in. The thing that I always thought when I saw that movie, was he learned those skills in escaping Alcatraz, but in his original escape, couldn’t he have just opened that door?Please write a 1500+ word website feature commentary on this nit pick.
There would have been people in that room, both guards and inmates, when Alcatraz was still an operational prison and not a museum. He had to go out through the fire thing to go out unnoticed. There ya go! Imagine I used 1400 more words.
It worked for the RENT movie, right…right?
I don’t see a problem here.
lmfao
I was thinking that it could be a great short film to cast some 65+ year olds and have them act out two or three scenes from Saved by the Bell line-by-line to make a play on what TV Tropes calls Dawson’s Casting.
You make a good point about how theater preserves artifice better than screen but I’m not sure why you’re specific to this film. I’m glad you pulled it back to Rent which got a lot of crap simply for casting people who were a little too old for their parts but when they did the NBC live musical with younger actors, I’ll admit I can see the difference
Platt also looked ridiculous playing a teenager on The Politicia.The real problem is he looks older than his age. Plus, the terrible wig they have him in in Hansen.
Sadly, Ben said on his Twitter account that that is his real hair (he called it “Jew locks”). But it really does look like a terrible wig!
It’s because they already looked younger than Ben Platt. I mean, Kaitlyn Dever straight up has a baby face. Of course, that Phil Spector hair does him no favours…http://www.pakistanjobs.pk/marketing-jobs-a55
People have no problem with Pesci in Goodfellas even though he’s way too old for the role. People will get used to it if it means getting good acting.
If only we had some sort of de-aging technology. Oh well.They should have just made it an animated film if they want to keep his performance. In fact, they should just animate around the recorded cast performance of the theatre show.
Stockard Channing was 33 when she was in Grease. Oliva Newton John was 29.
Then again, that was a silly romp through a rose-tinted time machine, as opposed something as ernest as Evan Hansen.
That second paragraph is the heart of it. Looking much older than a part is not so much an issue when a movie is a breezy comedy musical not asking for anything more than a fun romp. When a movie asks for much older casting to be taken deadly serious, then the illusion falls apart (especially when said actor is in a bad wig and doing hilarious big character tics in an attempt to look like an anxiety ridden teen)
I think the key point that should be taken away from this piece is that recordings of original Broadway productions should be provided to the rest of us poor souls. I hate how many amaaaaaaazing plays and musicals and oh-my-god-you-should-have-seen-its I have missed because I don’t live in or near New York, and also don’t have the money to see every show ever made. There should be some kind of limit put on it, sure, a timeline to make sure the traveling shows get decent audiences, but the Hamilton release on Disney Plus should be the model going forward. I still remember watching Sunday in the Park with George with Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters when I was a kid and it showed on PBS. If the original Broadway production of Dear Evan Hansen was so amazing, it should have been recorded that way and shared with the rest of us.
Yes, I saw so many shows that way! Also, once upon a time, A&E was an ‘arts’ channel and they would show entire plays/musicals on the tv. When you’re a sad gay teen living in the prairies, it was pretty amazing.
Bravo was like that too, before it became Real Housewives central. I miss the old Bravo.
And Discovery. And TLC was once called The Learning Chanel until they found out a custom motorcycle shop soap opera made them more money.
Absolutely, they should have done a high-quality filming of the stage show. I deeply value Broadway shows captured on film like Sunday, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods. The recent Hamilton film is a great experience, in some ways equal to (but different from) seeing it live as you get those incredible close ups. I was so glad they did a filmed stage version rather than reinterpret for film.
I believe that just about EVERY show – certainly the hits – has an archival recording of it, and they’re stored in the Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts.
Not every show, but a lot of them. The issue is that to see any of them you have to prove you’re doing legitimate research and..you can only watch it once. As in, “once ever.” So you’d better take damned good notes. (Also, you can’t watch anything currently running on Broadway, so of you REALLY want to see what Michael Crawford was like as the Phantom you’ll have to outlive Lord Webber.)
Just asking: for any of you who have seen the D+ Hamilton… is there an intermission?Serious question.Really.Thanks.
If you can bear the lower quality (and moral guilt) of bootleg videos, you can find the Broadway production of “Dear Evan Hansen”, with its original cast, online. I may or may not have watched it a few dozen times.
I would love that. This time last year, before everyone got bored with the pandemic, a theater organization made a new performance available on YouTube each week. I watched almost every one, and it was fantastic.I now realize that I may have been a “theater geek” when I was in high school. I always identified more as a band geek, but it was a small school, so I guess we had to take on multiple roles sometimes. My friends and I performed in the musical each year and enjoyed attending performances put on by other schools in the area as well (sometimes we were supporting our friends who attended other schools, but often we’d check out a show not knowing any of the cast members just because it was fun to watch). I like attending live professional theater now, but of course it can be expensive, and performances are infrequent. And on top of that, as a single adult male, I sometimes feel uncomfortable showing up to a random high school’s performance just to watch the show, not having a son or daughter in the cast. Broadcasting live theater could make it more accessible to people like me but also to people who never considered going to a live show before.
I watched a few of those as well, when I remembered! I really loved Twelfth Night.I’m a musician, so I was a theater geek by association. I played in multiple pit orchestras as a high schooler, and we had a great local program of high school productions sourced from the whole area, so the calibre of performers was extremely high. Those shows are incredible, every bit as entertaining as adult performances. I’m still playing in orchestras, but musicals tend to be a bit thin on the ground, and I miss playing in them. They were always a good time. And since I’m a bass player, I was often situated where I could look up at the stage, and since musical bass parts are generally very easy, got to see a lot of the show!
I can get behind the plot point that he was a high schooler who got in WAY over his head. But it rubs me the wrong way that he seems to stake his entire identity and happiness on dating this manic pixie dream girl. In one song he even refers to her as a “perfect girl.” As a socially-anxious teenager who thought “if I can only get this perfect girl to date me I’ll be happy.” They’re high schoolers—the world’s biggest morons. Best case scenario is they develop a clingy, co-dependent relationship that lasts like 4 years too long and influences both to go to colleges near each other and never try new things in life.
“For reasons both well-intended and mercenary, Evan keeps up the ruse”
Oh, so it’s World’s Greatest Dad?
Just digitally de-age him. Deep fake technology is readily available and inexpensive. You can get his performance while also making him look young. This is a standard Hollywood process at this point.Plus, a lot of digital de-aging is used to remove decades worth of change. In this case, we only need to reduce the actor by 10 years. It should be relatively easy.
I know I’m basically just repeating the jist of the article, but man I’m hoping in the future more musicals will do like Hamilton and just film a high-quality production of the stage musical with the original cast. You can always do endless movie adaptations later.
I weirdly want to see a film adaptation of Hamilton. Like with arterial blood spray as some poor Continental Army bastard catches a British musket ball in the carotid at Monmouth, or something.
Dude looks younger than my son, who is 19. I would not have a problem accepting him as a 17 year old if I were to watch the movie. It’s not really my cup of tea, though, so I expect I will be skipping it.
Makes me think of the Rent adaptation. Actors and actresses were in their early 20s when it first appeared on broadway and age accurate for the roles but then when they made it into a movie and used almost the same cast, having mid 30 years old act like free spirited young people didn’t play off and exposed other criticisms for the musical. In fairness tho its not like the discussion of close to 30 performers protraying high schoolers is a new one.
They’re depicting a world where people sing aloud their deepest emotions. I think I can buy into someone looking older, too, but YMMV.
That doesn’t bother me as much as the fact that the trailer seems to be telling me THE WHOLE DAMN MOVIE!!!
Honestly Evan Hansen never needed a movie version. They shoulda just filmed the Broadway show and put it on Netflix like they did Hamilton.
I generally don’t like musicals, this one blew me away. I pity anyone reading the plot on wikipedia and ruining it for themselves (as i did, and regretted doing, for David Fincher’s Gone Girl). That said, the trailer to this film adaptation looks like trash, and after making it through the first season of The Politician I think I’m ready to never see Platt play a high school student ever again.
It was a good, possibly great performance. Was it a “once in a lifetime” performance? No. Was it an “only one person could do this” performance? No, as is clear by the many, many people who have gone on in the role since Ben Platt left it. Let’s not kid ourselves, here, this was not Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl or Carol Burnett in Once Upon a Mattress or even Robert Preston in The Music Man. Was it star making? Sure..except that Platt hasn’t exactly set the world afire since. Was it the sort of performance that no one could conceive of anyone else doing? Certainly not. Did it become a big deal because, frankly, tween and teen girls are now a huge market driver on Broadway and this was a show designed to appeal to them? Yeah, a little.Kind of interesting how Platt’s show business connections (ie, privilege, ie, leg up) are alluded to as the lede is buried. Marc Platt isn’t just the producer of La La Land…he’s the producer of the movie we’re talking about. Seems like something one might want to mention when discussing why it was so important that Ben play the role.I have nothing against it, by the way. Stockard Channing wasn’t exactly a convincing teen back in the 70s and there were worse things she could do. No one though Dame Judi Dench passed as a cat, for that matter. But they also weren’t thin skinned and whiny about the jokes and didn’t feel the need to get weepy and defensive about them in public, or to commit to insisting they were the “one and only.” Hell, Ben is literally dating one of his replacements!Where was this insistence on preserving the performance when it came to Rachel Bay Jones, who also won a Tony and actually looks the appropriate age to be her character?
This article is a big fail for not addressing the biggest example of racism/implicit bias against a Hollywood movie: The Wiz. To black people, it’s a classic. To non-blacks, how dare that woman okay a teenager. Uhh, Ross played a teacher and not a teen and all black folk got a relative that refuses to grow up. Hello: Michael Jackson!
But on Broadway with the marvelous André DeShields–wow!
This article could have been roughly half as long as it is. The same point is made about nine different times.
It’s much easier to pretend with theater (speaking here of the performing art, not the place). Ben Platt is not 17 anymore, but he also wasn’t 17 when he won a Tony for playing Evan Hansen. It didn’t limit his performance or damage the story then; it was just another (then much smaller) hurdle to jump. Some of the reasons it’s easier to suspend your disbelief at the theater are straightforward.Counterpoint:I know multiple people who saw DEH with Ben Platt and hated it, because it just feels like it’s a story about some asshole. They thought his performance was good, they thought the songs were beautiful, etc – but the show overall? No.But then several of those same people had an opportunity to see it again later, when Andrew Barth Feldman played the role, at 16… and they loved it. Because they realized part of the core problem was that, while they could suspend their disbelief to a point when watching it the first time, they were subconsciously still judging the character as an adult. They lost their ability to actually see Evan Hanson in the context he existed in – as a young adult trying to learn how to be a person.But once a 16 year old was playing it, they were fundamentally able to subconsciously forgive the same things they held Platt, as an adult, responsible for. So, I get the theory at play in suspending disbelief about actors playing characters. But there are also limits to it. Suspension of disbelief works when the qualities of the character you’re exploring aren’t so fundamental to how you need to perceive that character.Sorta like…I can suspend disbelief to watch a set of people of different races play a biological family. That’s fine, because the onus of that is in their chemistry as actors portraying a family. But I can’t suspend disbelief to give credence to a white actor playing a character of color, when their experiences as a non-white person are fundamental to their story (as is usually, or at least often, the case).
I don’t know much about Ben Platt or Evan Hansen, but I had no problem accepting the actor as 17. Perhaps the author has forgotten how old some 17 year olds look.
There was an article elsewhere online about a bunch of people presumably like myself (not theatre nerds, but people whose curiosity is piqued by any story about a canonically LGBTQIA character) who all seemed to incorrectly remember the plot of this musical being about an openly gay teen who writes enough letters to his homophobic classmates that he wins them over.
I don’t know how so many people got the same incorrect assumption simultaneously. I think we were all thinking of “Love, Simon” (which to my knowledge, isn’t…a musical).
Andrew Barth Feldman, an actual teenager, took over the role from Platt. His performance was the best I’ve ever seen on a Broadway stage. He would have been the perfect EH for the movie.