earnest to a fault, prone to melodrama

the opening monologue is tricky to put on camera, because “actor types on a laptop while reciting what they’re typing out loud” isn’t quite as plausible on film as it is on stage and “words appear on a laptop screen while the actor recites them in voiceover” isn’t very interesting to watch. my proposed compromise: evan starts to type his letter, goes Oof Ouch My Arm, and reluctantly turns on voice-to-text to help him compose it instead.

i’ll still do waving through a window as some version of “evan moving through the halls at school begging someone to acknowledge him and getting no response,” like in the movie, but unlike in the movie where they’re all just milling around, everyone else will be moving in time with one another and to the music like in the stage show, because 1) it emphasizes that evan is On The Outside from everyone else who seems to just know What To Do In Life and 2) IT’S A MUSICAL.

i’ll make it clear that heidi is a nurse’s aide who works in a nursing home, not a nurse who works in a hospital as claimed by both the novel and movie. it’s a completely different role that implies different reasons for her studying to become a paralegal, which the movie also cut! i might bring in the extended dialogue from arena stage, when she’s explaining why she can’t pick evan up after the first day of school, that hints further at her feelings about her job:

HEIDI: Well, the truth is, we could use the money. Not to mention it’s not the worst idea in the world right now to show them I’m, you know, a team player… They’re announcing more budget cuts, which means I’m the aide for four different nurses now on two floors, which is not even… it’s not fair to the patients, first of all. I just want to say to these people sometimes, I mean, “I’m sorry, if these were your parents, is this how you would like them to be taken care of?” EVAN: Right. HEIDI: I just have to keep reminding myself, this is why I’m going back to school. This is why I’m taking out loans and working extra shifts when all I want is to spend time with you.

i’ll lean into the horrors of car-centric suburbia that should undergird the whole “everyone is isolated and Constantly Online” deal. the stage show kind of ignores the question of “how does evan get around if he can’t drive?” (sure, he can take the bus to therapy, and i can believe he lives within walking distance of jared, but how is he getting to and from the murphys’ house all the time? they canonically live at the end of a cul-de-sac and i just know they’re in some horrible neighborhood miles from the nearest bus stop with half-acre lots) and the novel and the movie both strike me as overly optimistic in answering that question with “well he can just walk and take the bus pretty much anywhere he wants to go, though Of Course zoe drives him around once they’re dating.” (in the movie, once the letter is leaked online, evan seemingly walks from his house to wherever that bonfire is happening to the murphys’ house in less than five minutes onscreen and probably less than half an hour in real time. i call bullshit!) this should be, in part, a story about someone who is profoundly lonely because he can’t go anywhere or see anyone without his mom driving him around and she’s never home!

once connor’s dead, he’s dead. no ghostly narration reminiscing about the real secret best friend he had all along, and no sneakily taken videos of him baring his soul in group therapy. barring the eighth grade yearbook, all we get to know about him after the first day of school is from other people’s memories.

that said, i’ll keep posthumous connor as evan’s shoulder devil. the novel made him an actual ghost and the movie didn’t even try outside of sincerely me but i’ll find a way! (i have an idea involving cynthia giving evan an old school photo of connor, since “i guess you don’t have any pictures of him,” that acts as a starting point for evan visualizing him. like the photo of michael jackson in the “get the fries, you’ll need the energy in the coming days” post.)

every iteration has leaned harder and harder into it being The Evan Hansen Show rather than evan being one otherwise ordinary member of A Community reacting to a tragedy, despite the novel’s and movie’s attempts at fleshing out that world by adding a plethora of minor characters, and this will push back against that. we’ll see everyone at school trying to be “““friends””” with zoe (ft. the long-ago cut moment of alana trying to give her a hug) and selling connor merch for five minutes and learning from jared that evan and connor were Definitely Best Friends and paying attention to evan for the first time.

for years i wished that alana could have a larger role in the story, maybe even get a solo, and then a monkey’s paw curled and gave alana twice as big a role in the movie as in the stage show, with a solo to boot, at the cost of nearly all the dialogue and characterization that made her compelling to me in the first place. (and at the cost of a good chunk of the moral ambiguity of evan’s actions, but i digress.) the novel did a better job of expanding alana’s role while maintaining her characterization, but i always felt it was a little too unsympathetic to her. somehow i’ll find the balance, and if possible i’ll also bring in the alana / naomi / isabelle love triangle that may or may not have been present in an early version of the movie, because it delights me.

i’ll find a way to make the “evan stops taking his meds because he resents taking them and wants to believe that he’s Fine once he has relationships with the murphys” subplot work as intended. the original stage show didn’t quite pull it off (hence One Hundred Years Of Discourse re: “ummm how dare they imply that getting a girlfriend cures your anxiety”) and the novel completely missed the subtext of “evan’s Not fine, actually” and the movie changed it to him skipping therapy appointments and the revised stage show cut it entirely but i KNOW it’s possible.

i’ll develop more of a relationship between evan and cynthia. we see evan bonding one-on-one with zoe and with larry, but not with cynthia, even though A Mom Who’s Always There is one of the elements that drew him to the murphys. cook chicken milanese together! have a conversation with [a parent who has plenty of time for you and doesn’t expect you to be One Of The Guys] / [a kid who actually likes spending time with you] for a change!

in the stage show, larry and cynthia mention to heidi when she comes over for dinner that evan has spent the night at their house before, but the novel and movie both cut that detail from that scene. i’ll keep that in and actually show at least one instance of him spending the night at their house.

good for you has to be in there as well, but this post about how it would have looked in stephen chbosky’s excessively literal style haunts me to the point that i don’t have any specific ideas about how to do it. (and really makes you think about how abstract the original staging is!)

and yes, jared Is gay and has feelings for evan and is working overtime on repressing it all, and when evan says “go ahead, do it, tell everyone how you wrote emails pretending to be a kid who killed himself,” jared Will react as though he heard “it’s not my fault you’re, like, in love with me or something.”

you know that post-good for you scene from the novel where zoe shows up to evan’s house at night and asks why he didn’t tell his mom about her and yells at him for being a bad boyfriend? some version of that is going in there, though i might change the timing.

the letter being posted online and the ensuing backlash will still be set to a reprise of you will be found, which the movie failed to do and suffered for. the whole point is that the internet focusing massive amounts of attention on one person or group of people has just as much potential to harm as to heal, that’s what the reprise is for! “you are not alone” can easily be a threat!

after the letter leaks, we return to the opening shot of jared sitting alone, staring at his laptop screen. he says in voiceover, “dear evan hansen… i wish that everything was different, i wish that i was a part of something, i wish that anything i said mattered to anyone.” then: “i said this story wasn’t about me. but i’m in it anyway.”

re: developing evan and cynthia’s relationship further, i really liked that the movie version of words fail switched things up so it’s larry who goes after zoe and cynthia who remains in the room with evan longest to politely ask him to leave, so i’m keeping that.

for a decade now we’ve had discourse about how deh allegedly romanticizes mental illness / lying / lying about your mental illness / substance abuse / not taking your psychiatric medication / et cetera ad infinitum. you know what it actually romanticizes? the nuclear family. you know how we can fix that? here’s the vision:

EVAN: How are your parents? ZOE: Divorced. EVAN: I’m sorry. ZOE: Don’t be. They’re actually happier now.