After a New York Run, an Unusual 'Next' Step

"Next to Normal" creators Tom Kitt, left, and Brian Yorkey, on the set at Arena Stage, have created five new songs for the show (seven have been cut) since its off-Broadway production, which faced a mixed critical reception. (By Michael Temchine For The Washington Post)

They got the opportunity when David Stone, one of Wicked's lead producers, who had been involved for years in the development of "Next to Normal," offered Arena a chance to present it. "I saw it and I was knocked out," says Molly Smith, Arena's artistic director. "It's the kind of musical that gets under your skin. And I believe in second chances. I believe new musicals and plays don't come into their own until their second or third production."

Eventually, Ripley, whose performance was widely hailed, would re-up for the Arena production, as would the actors who make up the musical's younger generation: Aaron Tveit, Jennifer Damiano and Adam Chanler-Berat. The major departure from the show was Brian d'Arcy James, who had played Dan; he's been cast as the title character in the potential Broadway blockbuster "Shrek the Musical," opening next month, and has been succeeded as Dan by J. Robert Spencer.

For Ripley, the part is one of the supplest she's had since her stint as a conjoined twin in the innovative 1997 Broadway musical "Side Show." "I feel like it's continued to crescendo," she says of "Next to Normal." Her role is exhausting -- "full-frontal emotional trauma," she calls it, and adds that reworking the piece is a challenge. "I think my job is to facilitate that, as seamlessly as possible."

The biggest challenge, naturally, was to Yorkey and Kitt, who met as Columbia University undergraduates. They had been working on the musical since the late 1990s, when they presented a 10-minute version of it, called "Feeling Electric," as their final project as enrollees in the competitive, highly regarded BMI Musical Theatre Workshop in New York.

"It's about finding the show," explains Yorkey, who has written for film and television and helped develop musicals for Village Theatre, a company near Seattle. "There were things to solve and answers we needed."

Greif says he was willing to commit time to rethinking the piece because the work felt to him so singular: "Brian and Tom have really written a heartbreaking piece of musical theater that goes to a very deep place, that uses the musical form completely and originally."

By the end of the New York run, they agreed to remove a song that some of the reviews had mentioned as particularly jarring: a glib and frenetic number, set at a Costco, in which Diana suffered a nervous collapse.

Harder for Yorkey and Kitt to face was the possibility of losing the electroshock number that sent the audience into intermission.

"We resisted getting rid of it," Yorkey says. It had been in the show since the beginning, but because it was sung by the psychiatrist character, Greif and others had urged the songwriters to consider replacing it with one that revealed more about what Diana was going through.

The idea, Greif said, was to encourage a shift in emphasis in the musical from doctors and medicine to more about Diana's family. So "Feeling Electric" was out and "Wish I Were Here," sung primarily by Diana and her daughter, Natalie, was inserted.

All told, six songs were cut and five new ones added for the Arena production, which is being mounted on the same structure of multi-tiered platforms that was used at Second Stage. "It was just a geometry project," Mark Wendland, the show's set designer, says of fitting the set into the Crystal City space, a former movie theater.

Yorkey is staying in Washington for the extended preview period, as is Kitt, who's on a brief hiatus from his other job, conducting the band for the new Broadway musical "13." They will continue to tweak the show, although they do seem vaguely aware that at some point, they are going to have to clamp the laptops shut.

"I could keep working on this till they drag me away in a straitjacket," Yorkey explains.

They're eager to see how audiences here respond to what they've done. To that end, they must be hoping that the new song they've written for early in Act 2 will somehow prove prophetic. It's called "Better Than Before."