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I got into the Next to Normal fandom a couple years after it was on Broadway. I was about 14 or so at the time. I obsessively read through old message boards and forums about the show. One time, I stumbled across a thread about a specific actor from the show. A fan was complaining that he had been rude to her. When asked for details, she said that when they met at the stage door, he had just said hello, signed her playbill, and left. This seemed to confuse some other users, who informed her that this is actually totally standard behavior, and asked what she had been expecting. She told them all about how Alice was so much nicer. How she had taken her out to dinner, taken her backstage, etc. There were a few other users on the board who corroborated these stories and had had similar experiences. Since I was a kid at the time, I thought it sounded cool and was actually jealous. I then forgot all about it until a couple of days ago.

I have studied Next to Normal (including its cast, fandom, and early-days) religiously for the better part of the decade, and there were always things that just didn’t add up. I’d hear fan accounts that felt oddly disjointed or just plain bizarre or see cast behaviors that felt inconsistent or confusing. I was always left with these little nagging questions that I didn’t know what to do with. 

I am bringing this all up because the allegations against Alice Ripley answer more questions for me than they raise. I obviously can’t sit here and say with absolute certainty that they are true, but I can say that they absolutely track with everything I have observed for years, and that Alice’s abnormally close interactions with fans were, at the time, very well-documented online. It makes me sick to think that I didn’t realize it sooner. When I first saw Brie’s post, my response wasn’t “what the hell????” My response was just “oh.”

I fully support the (now many) survivors who have come forward. I also support those who have not come forward yet or may not choose to come forward at all. I hope that any audience member, crew member, or cast member who experienced any sort of grooming, harassment, manipulation, gaslighting, or abuse from her can find some peace in knowing that they are not alone, this was not their fault, and they deserve so much better.

A few shitty things Scott Rudin has recently done:

He is the producer of To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway and has threatened to sue regional theaters for doing productions of TKAM—not the Broadway version, but a previously existing, legally licensed play written by Christopher Sergel, which has been performed for decades before the Broadway adaptation written by Aaron Sorkin. Many of these theaters had already spent money on their productions and had to cancel their shows, therefore losing the ticket revenue to pay for what they had already spent. 

He is forcing Beetlejuice to leave their theater and therefore likely close permanently because he wants the Winter Garden for the upcoming revival of The Music Man. Beetlejuice producers offered to pay for the cost of moving TKAM so The Music Man could take the Shubert, but Scott Rudin wanted more money out of the deal and refused.