Ben Levi Ross as Evan Hansen in Dear Evan Hansen, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

An innovative award-winner of a Broadway musical with every kind of contemporary traction is the finale of the upcoming three-show Broadway Across Canada season.

Dear Evan Hansen, arriving at the Jube Feb. 11 to 16 2020, has been  sold out in New York ever since it opened on Broadway in late 2016. It chronicles a declension into deception by a solitary and awkward high school kid caught up in an escalating social media frenzy set in motion by his own failure to correct a misunderstanding about a teen suicide.  The musical — book by Steven Levenson and music by the wunderkind team of Benj Hasek and Justin Paul (La La Land) — gets to the very heart of the experience of being young and feeling desperately alone.

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Among its competitors for the Best Musical Tony Award in 2017 (which it took home, along with five other Tonys) was Come From Away, currently stopping down in Canadian ports of call on its North American tour.

The new three-show Broadway Across Canada season opens in September (3 to 8) with another landmark Tony winner: Jonathan Larson’s Rent returns as part of a 20th anniversary tour. The 1996 rock musical updates the scenario of the Puccini opera La Bohème and takes its scenes of imperilled youthful exuberance to New York’s East Village.

The heroine of Waitress, the heartwarming 2016 musical based on the Adrienne Shelly movie (with music and lyrics by Sara Bareilles), is a woman trapped in a bad marriage — and finally empowered to do something about it. It runs Nov. 26 to Dec. 1. The add-on option is the much-travelled Wicked, the untold backstory of the witches in the Oz story (Aug. 12 to 22, 2020). 

There’s a big bonus attached to subscribing: when they renew, subscribers from the 2019-2020 season get first crack at tickets to Hamilton, coming in the 2020-2021 season.

Meanwhile, subscriptions are available at 1-866-540-7469 or BroadwayAcrossCanada.ca.

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