BARCELONA, Spain — When Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey started writing their 2008 rock musical, “Next to Normal,” they wanted to create a piece where, according to Yorkey, they could “bring the audience into the mind of the main character.” That character, Diana Goodman, is a suburban wife and mother with bipolar disorder who struggles with the distressing symptoms of her mental illness while trying to maintain a functional life.
The emotional musical was not only acclaimed – it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010 – but also resonated with theatergoers, playing on Broadway at the Booth Theater from 2009 to 2011. In his review, Ben Brantley wrote that the show “gives full weight to the confusion and ambivalence that affects not only Diana, but everyone around her.”
Now the audience here is experiencing “Next to Normal” in a whole new way through an immersive hour-long production that recently opened at the Festival Grec de Barcelona. This version, stripped of props, sets and live orchestra, is presented in a venue with an open floor plan, a surround sound system and 360-degree projections. The cast performs in English, with Spanish and Catalan surtitles, alongside the spectators, who sit in small cubes and become ghostly witnesses sharing living quarters with the Goodman family.
Alice Ripley, who conceived the role of Diana, has returned to the role and she shares the stage with Andy Señor Jr., who plays her husband Dan; Lewis Edgar, who portrays her son Gabriel; Jade Lauren, who plays her daughter Nathalie; and Eloi Gómez, Henry, Nathalie’s lover. But some of Ripley’s most exciting exchanges take place with an actor thousands of miles away: Adam Pascal, who plays her “rock star” doctor, and who, in a nod to the pandemic, conducts his sessions with her via Zoom. Ripley and Pascal rehearsed their scenes together in Florida (he performs on the “Pretty Woman: The Musical” national tour), and the shooting of his scenes makes Pascal look like a larger-than-life figure, adding to the show’s character. surreal effect.
“I would venture to say that I am now the first actor to perform in two different shows simultaneously in the United States and Barcelona,” Pascal wrote in an email.
“Next to Normal” is produced by the Grec Festival, Layers of Reality and Pablo del Campo, who first saw the musical in 2010 and became obsessed with it. (At the time, he was working as the global creative director of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, splitting his time between London and New York.) Struck by Diana’s emotional ordeal, he said he felt the story should be translated into other languages and began writing. working on a Spanish-language adaptation during stopovers. A determined del Campo soon found himself pitching his idea directly to Yorkey, and not long after, the Spanish-language production entitled “Casi Normales” took the stage in Buenos Aires, where it has been running for 10 years.
But that was not the end of del Campo’s involvement with “Next to Normal”. In early 2020, weeks before the Covid-related lockdowns began, del Campo had what he called “a moment of electroshock” while visiting an artificial intelligence exhibition at the IDEAL Center d’Arts Digitals de Barcelona, which specializes in in producing and presenting digital art projects. Watching robots translate lyrics into visual displays, Del Campo said he envisioned Diana in the song “Wish I Were Here,” in which she sings, “When the bolt of lightning crashes / and it burns right by my mind. “
It wasn’t long before Del Campo approached Kitt and Yorkey with his idea for an immersive production, and they agreed – surprisingly – to compress their two-act, nearly two-and-a-half-hour musical. Some dialogue scenes were cut, but all the great musical numbers remain. British director Simon Pittman was brought in to oversee the project, and Søren Christensen and Tatiana Halbach, who work under the name Desilence, created the images (including abstract landscapes intended to evoke Diana’s inner state). “Everywhere you look there’s something to look at,” Christensen said. “It’s like ‘Dogville’ meets a music video.”
Reflecting on the richness of the production’s visuals, he added, “If movies are 4K and really great movies are 8K, then it’s up to four times as much.”
At a recent rehearsal at IDEAL, the cast was practicing ‘Who’s Crazy’/’My Psychopharmacologist and I’, a song about adjusting Diana’s medication. First, the actors practiced their blocking in a completely empty space. Then the wall-to-wall screens lit up and the actors were transported into a surreal world of ticking clocks, larger-than-life neurons floating like jellyfish, and pills that resembled colorful raindrops falling from the sky. “We need more pills!” exclaimed Halbach at one point.
The other element that flooded the room was Ripley’s painfully emotional voice.
“When We First Made” [Diana]I didn’t know what it was going to be — the audience saw me figuring it out live,” said Ripley, reflecting on the 2008’s Off Broadway run of the musical at Second Stage Theater. She drew on that same sense of adventure in tackling this one. new production, though she said she found the experience disorienting at first.
“We actors are told never to turn our backs on the audience,” she said, “and here all those lines are gone.”
The team behind the riveting production thought it was a good idea to bring back Ripley, who won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Diana, even in the wake of a 2021 report in The Daily Beast accusing her of “sexually conversations with a girl of just 13 and a cult-like, obsessive fanbase of vulnerable youth, Ripley later denied the allegations in a statement to The New York Post’s Page Six. “It is a misinterpretation of my actions to say that I manipulated someone, and more shockingly, that there was abuse,” she wrote in a statement.
During a break from rehearsals last month, Ripley said she had no further comment on the allegations.
Musical purists may cling to the idea of a beloved Broadway show being cut, but, as Pittman put it, “We do a ‘Next to Normal.’” And Barcelona is perhaps the perfect location for this experiment. After all, it is the city of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, a towering basilica that has been under construction since 1882 and is a reminder that sometimes true masterpieces can never really be completed.
For Pittman, directing one of his biggest shows to date felt like a return to his fringe days in Edinburgh, which began in 2005, when he received critical acclaim for his directing of “Hospitals and Other Buildings That Catch Fire.”
“It’s like being in the gut,” he said, before adding, “I’ve never directed a show where you build both the process and the location,” referring to the new technology installed at IDEAL to meet production’s needs. (According to del Campo, the show’s budget is nearly $1.2 million.)
It’s been nearly 15 years since Ripley first inhabited the character Diana. “Playing Diana is definitely more fun than it’s ever been,” Ripley said of her role in the production, which runs through August 14. “I like to use my whole body to tell the story, and now I know that people will look at my hands or my heels or something.”
She added: “I’ve been through hell and back since I last played Diana,” referencing life-changing events like her parents’ death and changes to her body and voice, “but this feels incredibly liberating. We come to the theater to be touched, and to make an impact yourself.”
