‘Dear Evan Hansen’ Has a New Evan, and a New Balance

NEW YORK — Everything is the same. And everything is different.

And then again, everything is the same.

Yes, “Dear Evan Hansen,” which officially introduced Taylor Trensch as its new Evan on Thursday, is still a gut-punching, breathtaking knockout of a musical. But it is differently gut-punching and breathtaking now than it was during the year that Ben Platt led the cast.

It would have to be. Even before Platt opened the show on Broadway, he had been living with Evan Hansen for years: He played the role from the very first reading of the musical, in 2014. In some ways it seemed that the authors (songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul; book by Steven Levenson) had sewn the character directly onto his skin.

Certainly he yowled as if they had; it’s difficult to recall another Broadway musical performance so saturated with pain and confusion. The role could absorb it, though; when Evan tries to comfort the family of Connor, a schoolmate who has killed himself, their need for information gets tangled with his need to be noticed and a moral nightmare ensues. These are big issues.

Playing the anxiety-riddled high school senior, Platt provoked in the audience a reverse suspension of disbelief: As he cried and belted, often at the same time, it was hard not to fear for the actor’s own well-being. On the two occasions I saw him in the role, I wanted to dose myself afterward with a cocktail of Zoloft and Mucinex.

Trensch — who recently finished a 10-month run as a zany Barnaby Tucker in “Hello, Dolly!” — is not playing his illustrious predecessor. (Noah Galvin took over the role during a two-month interregnum.) He has pruned Platt’s armamentarium of tics and twitches to just a few blinks, a stammer and some wringings of the right hand. He is more naturalistically and intermittently troubled than Platt was, more apprehensible as an actual 17-year-old.

This shifts the gravity of the story somewhat. Platt’s expressionistic performance made Evan’s descent into a hell of misrepresentation seem inevitable; someone so desperate would of course make those mistakes. He was thus, in a way, blameless and sacrificial. But because Trensch’s Evan is less tortured, he is also more culpable. You can see him choosing, however ruefully, the wrong path.

The shift helps clarify the story’s logic — a fair trade for the slight dimming of Evan’s vocal and emotional fireworks.

Another fair trade: With Trensch’s Evan less dominating, the weight of the story is more evenly distributed among its eight characters. The excellent work of Michael Park as Connor’s stony father and Laura Dreyfuss as his ambivalent sister reveals itself more than ever. (The entire cast has dug deeper into its roles.) I also noticed more clearly how the director Michael Greif’s relentless staging figures in the storytelling, as if it were a ninth character. This is high-def theater: full of color and information wherever you look.

But not everything that feels different about “Dear Evan Hansen” is a result of the cast change. A story that turns on a high school tragedy naturally plays differently so soon after the shootings in Parkland, Florida. The audience Tuesday gasped when a character described Connor’s look as “very school-shooter chic.” And when social media turns his classmates into famous survivors — then turns on them with suspicion and vitriol — I felt nostalgic for a time, just a year ago, when that plot point seemed like a stretch. Turns out, it was prescient.

Even so, and despite the intensity of interest in the title role, “Dear Evan Hansen” remains — for this father, anyway — most moving as the story of two mothers. Connor’s (Jennifer Laura Thompson) is naturally crushed by the death of her son. Evan’s (Rachel Bay Jones) tirelessly enacts the role of cheerleader-in-chief for her lonely boy. But both are also dealing with something I suspect every parent in the audience understands: their terrifying responsibility for the happiness of their children, coupled with their marginal ability to do anything about it. When Jones sang the song “So Big/So Small” near the end of the show Tuesday, there wasn’t a dry eye in my face.

So “Dear Evan Hansen” has not changed after all. It has survived the big cast change that many predicted it couldn’t, and, the succession assured, seems likely to thrive on Broadway for the foreseeable future.

Critics shouldn’t care about that, of course; box office is not our concern. But if there are going to be long-running Broadway musicals, we can at least mind which ones. A run of three or five or even more years multiplies the impact of a show’s story enormously; such spans are generations in the lives of young theater geeks.

Many of those theater geeks see themselves as invisible Evans already, which is why even those who may never see the show in person have it in their earbuds and argue about it online. But eventually a lot of them will also be parents. When they are, they could do worse than recall what “Dear Evan Hansen” says (and sings) about the compromises and heartbreaks of the job.

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Event Information:

“Dear Evan Hansen”

Music Box Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, dearevanhansen.com. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.