Review: ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ is a soaring triumph at La Mirada Theatre

“Dear Evan Hansen” is musical storytelling of the highest caliber, a work of exemplary intelligence and a committed embrace of deep feeling flowing from a compelling, Tony Award-winning score.

Now at La Mirada Theatre, in a sure-handedly-directed production largely delivering on these elevated standards, there is also a tremendous casting coup in the form of young New York actor Tyler Donovan McCall as an impeccable lead in the title role.

Mini review spoiler: for wedding of play, production and performance, it doesn’t get any better than this on a local stage.

“Dear Evan Hansen” focuses on the anxious life and actions of the 17-year-old title character. Evan is an uneven, inner-challenged mess. A high school way-outsider in a working-all-hours, single mom household, he is awkwardly trying, but failing, to get through.

In Steven Levenson’s compelling tale of one adolescent’s struggle, a predictable part of Evan’s inadequacies stem from his yearnings, at uncomfortably close proximity, for a girl.

When her family is plunged into despair by an abrupt death, Evan — through his unplanned infiltration into their grief — becomes first a source of solace for the family, then of angst for everyone, including himself, while reaching to become whole.

This progression works so well due to plot complexities springing from an early-on misunderstanding. A believable, organic occurrence leads to larger impacts which eventually end with better resolutions than seemed likely.

A key facet is that Evan’s questionable actions of deceit seem understandable, even perhaps laudable, in the moment. Additionally, the resulting social media tsunami is something we now take for granted in daily life.

This is a meaty role for a younger actor that can punish a lesser actor on two fronts.

The character’s vulnerabilities require deft performance choices to navigate maturing from plaintive despair to swelling confidence.

Sheer physical appearance is McCall’s ally here. Thin and lanky, an angular face set above a notable Adams’ apple (and, as a sharp-eyed seatmate suspected, some unseen tape making those ears stick out further from his head?), McCall’s gawky, though not geeky, physicality in the role almost ensures adolescent quandaries.

But there’s more here. McCall manifests an anguished quality through glance and gesture, as well as dialogue, in the character’s questioning of his own worth.

Interestingly, though, when he is seen closer to stage front, McCall conversely somehow also projects hints of self-confidence lurking within.

The even more fiendish part of this role, though, may be that it requires a vibrant, powerful tenor to sing, and occasionally belt, across a demanding multi-octave range.

McCall has the chops needed. His is an assured, clear voice delivering Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s inspiring music and lyrics. He establishes his primacy in two early numbers, the up-tempo “Waving Through a Window” and then the solemn declarations of “For Forever.” Near the show’s end, his delivery of the heart-rending “Words Fail” is especially gripping.

The 12-person cast’s vocals also do “Dear Evan Hansen’s” lovely musical arrangements proud. The show’s best-known song — a widely heard source of rallying comfort during the pandemic — is the stirring, 6-minute first act ending “You Will Be Found,” and here the crescendo is amplified through excellent harmonies.

There are some notable supplementary acting turns. As Connor, Nic Hermick agilely animates a haunting part so that quixotic upbeat aspects of the character feel appropriate as they emerge.

Both of Evan’s two high school cohorts in whipping up a social media tornado deliver on the comic sidekick goods.

Analisa Idalia, as Alana, is aggressively upbeat, generating self-aggrandizement through unrelenting industriousness at social media engagements.

Gabriel Vernon Nunag, a veteran in the role from a national tour production, makes for a suitably smart-alecky Jared, Evan’s “family friend” (not, as Jared smarmily points out, to be mistaken as a real “friend”).

Nunag nicely evolves from whipping out fast faux bro cynicisms to baffled hurtfulness when he suffers the stinging social blow of being casually dismissed by lowest-on-the-totem-pole Evan.

Best of the principal adult roles are actors Josh Adamson and Jill Van Velzer as a distanced husband and wife, abruptly and awfully redefined as grieving parents.

As Larry, Adamson comes to the fore in his well-acted singing in the duet number “To Break in a Glove” he has with McCall.

As Cynthia, Van Velzer is impactful in leaking desperate grief breaking through her earlier self-absorption as a distant, upper income wife and mother.

“Dear Evan Hansen” is an 11-year-old musical. In its original Broadway and national tour incarnations, the show’s electronic displays on a screen bedazzled with rapid-fire tallying of ever-mounting, internet page views.

Here, the production updates the show’s electronic background on La Mirada’s sizable LED backing screen.

Projection Designer David Murakami’s successful imagery now reproduces key words from Evan’s personal journal in oversize block type, blurring in and out other online comments and through deploying a barrage of swelling and shrinking Instagram feed images.

This adds up to only one aspect of the backing. Separately, there also additional, abstract geometric patterns updating in different, shard-like patterns, changing colors and mirroring the jagged themes of loneliness or anxiety affecting mostly Evan as well as mirroring the other characters’ feeling in the moment.

The visual achievement matches director and choreographer Stephen C. Anthony’s good work being seen on the stage below.

“Dear Evan Hansen” is the latest in La Mirada Theatre’s past couple seasons of producing homegrown versions of very different kinds of musicals — “Fiddler on the Roof” to “Legally Blonde” to “Sweeney Todd” — at a continually high level of execution.

Whatever they’re putting in the backstage water cooler these days, other local houses would do well to get some of it.

‘Dear Evan Hansen’

Rating: 4 stars (of a possible 4)

Where: La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada.

When: Through Nov. 22. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1:30 and 6:30 p.m., Sundays.

Tickets: $15.95-$132

Information: 714-994-6310, 562-944-9801; lamiradatheatre.gov