If you haven’t been clued into the theater scene for the last few years then you’ve missed a hell of a lot. Case in point, Dear Evan Hansen became one of the biggest musicals in the line-up, and its run was still going strong into the COVID-19 pandemic. And of course, when something like that gets big on Broadway, it’s bound to get its own film adaptation. And now in 2021, we’re getting the first look at the film in its trailer:
Dear Evan Hansen follows the titular teenaged boy who is, in essence, an outcast. He writes letters to himself as part of a therapy exercise, which gets stolen by another student named Connor to tease him. However, when Connor later kills himself that day, his parents reach out to Evan, thinking their son wrote the letter to him and that he and Connor were friends. Evan, not having the heart to explain the truth, creates a fake friendship between him and Connor, a lie that soon spirals out of control.
Ben Platt, who originated the role on Broadway, is back as the lead (though he is admittedly a little old to play a high schooler convincingly but I digress), but the rest of the cast is new. Julianne Moore plays Evan’s mom, with Amy Adams and Danny Pino playing Connor’s parents, Kaitlyn Dever plays Connor’s sister Zoey, Amandla Stenberg and Nik Dodani play Evan’s peers Alana and Jared. The movie is directed by Stephen Chbosky, who directed the other popular teen drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and written by Steven Steven Levenson, who wrote the book for the musical.
One concern I have is that while the trailer features two of the biggest songs from the soundtrack, “Waving Through a Window” and “You Will Be Found”, but I couldn’t find any information about the other songs from the show. I feel like people would be very displeased if the movie doesn’t have any of the other numbers, but the tone of the movie also feels more serious than the musical (not that the musical is a barrel of laughs).
Dear Evan Hansen premieres in theaters on September 24, 2021, and will appear two weeks later on video-on-demand.
