In the Wings

The new Off-Broadway musical “Next to Normal” is about contemporary suburban life – and two Westchester natives are bringing it to the stage Off-Broadway.

Tom Kitt, the Armonk-born composer who wrote the Broadway adaptation of Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity,” wrote the score.

Jennifer Damiano, a junior at White Plains High School – who, at 16, is already a Broadway veteran, having been the youngest member of the original cast of “Spring Awakening” – plays the 16-year-old daughter.

“Next to Normal” tells the story of the Goodmans, a suburban family where dad Dan goes off to work, mom Diana goes off to Costco and daughter Natalie practices her piano for an Ivy League audition.

“Yale has no place for a basket case,” she sings.

It opens tomorrow at Off-Broadway’s Second Stage Theatre and runs through March 9 with a cast that includes Alice Ripley (“Side Show”), Brian d’Arcy James (“Lieutenant of Inishmore”), Adam Chanler-Berat (“Les Miserables”), Asa Somers (“Grey Gardens”), Aaron Tveit (“Hairspray”) and Damiano.

“I was blown away completely by her singing,” says Kitt, sitting with Damiano in the theater’s cafe.

For her part, Damiano says the role has everything a young actress could want.

“It’s like the role for teenage girls,” she says. “The scenes I got for the audition were pretty angst-y and angry and seemed like a lot of fun for me to do, because that’s how I am a lot of the time. I’m not angst-y – my family’s not at all like Natalie’s – but there are certain levels where I can definitely relate to her.”

Kitt and lyricist Brian Yorkey put Damiano’s voice to work in a score with room-filling rock, softer solos and a conversational series of songs called “Hey 1,” “Hey 2” and “Hey 3” that are reminiscent of Jonathan Larson’s “Rent.”

“It was harder for me to learn those conversational songs,” Damiano says. “Adam (Chanler-Berat) and I had to speak the ‘Hey’ songs to each other all the time and then add notes to it, because it’s literally a conversation. The other songs were just fun to rock out.”

Then there’s also what Damiano calls a “prime Natalie moment” – the song “Superboy and Invisible Girl.”

“I remember singing it so much during the audition process that finally to sing it on stage and have it be my song – let alone Natalie’s song – is really incredible,” Damiano says.

It took several auditions to land the part. Before the final audition, Damiano had a rehearsal at Kitt’s home. There was plenty to learn, Damiano says. “I didn’t know how to pronounce Pfizer and MacGyver. And then there were all those pill names.”

Because this is a story about a family dealing with mental illness, there are plenty of pills on stage. One song is a jumble of psychopharmacological drugs, sung in a Burt Bacharach style.

“As I looked at all the names of the pills in Brian’s lyric,” Kitt recalls, “they just jumped off the page at me as Burt Bacharach, ‘Sundance Kid’ jazz harmonies. That was the spin I wanted to put on it. In our society, it’s an everybody-be-happy-take-the-pills kind of thing, and that’s what was in my head at that point when I saw those lyrics.”

Kitt met Yorkey at Columbia, where they collaborated on the school’s Varsity Show.

They went on to the BMI Musical Theater Workshop and developed a 10-minute version of “Next to Normal.” Two songs from that short piece survive, but they’ve added 38 new songs for the full-length show. Not that you’ll know that from reading the Playbill: The songs are not listed, for a reason.

“Because this story is told so much through the music and the songs,” Kitt says. “We want to protect the story and the surprises. And also, I just don’t want someone to see 40 songs and freak out,” he adds with a laugh. “They’ll think it’ll never end – but it clips along. It really clips along.”

The ride is dizzying at times, with soft songs coming on the heels of power songs that follow tunes that would feel at home in an old-school musical.

“What Brian and I tried to do through the score is to really chart emotion as it would happen in real time,” he says. “If you’re having an argument with someone, you might fire at them for a little bit. Then they’ll try to calm you and then they’ll fire back at you. Human arguments have an arc to them.”

Employing so many styles has two sides to it, Kitt says.

At one point, Ripley, as Diana, finds herself in Costco, in a song that sounds like a vaudeville or musical theater tune. It’s how Diana views her role when shopping in a big-box store.

“Some people will get what we’re doing and some people might feel it’s disjointed,” Kitt says. “I can only say that each song has a specific purpose and it’s doing what we want it to do in the show. It’ll be interesting to see how people react to it.”

If “Next to Normal” is any indication, Kitt has been inspired and influenced by every kind of music he’s ever heard. He will not be pigeonholed.

“I hope not,” he says. “I hope that people will see me as a composer of new musical theater and not characterize me as any sort of musical-theater type.”

The composer says the subject matter demanded an eclectic score.

“I don’t set out to write a score in many different styles, necessarily,” he says. “I set out to tell a story musically and when you’re dealing with a show like this – which shows somebody who’s mentally ill, with a lot of dark and also comic human emotions – you just want the music to capture all that.”

Kitt says Yorkey’s work made the songwriting a breeze at times: “Brian’s lyrics are so beautiful and emotional they immediately put me into a strong musical place. The songs come out of me very quickly when I see his lyrics.”

Damiano – who’ll return to school this week, once the show opens – says she hopes to go back to “Spring Awakening” at some point.

“I still owe that show something,” she says. “I still love it.”

For now, she’s more than happy to share the stage with Tony nominees d’Arcy James and Ripley, a task that became more daunting, Damiano says, after she did a little research.

“I didn’t realize they were Tony nominees,” she says. “And then I went on YouTube and I typed in ‘Alice Ripley.’ And she performed at the Tonys for ‘Side Show!’ I’m not taking anything for granted. I’m just trying to soak it in as much as I can without getting creepy or anything.”

Damiano likes this musical’s perspective, even though it’s dark.

“I think the points the show makes are really intelligent,” she says. “If people want a really, really perfect happy ending they can see another show.”

To quote Natalie: “Happy endings are dumb, anyway.”

PHOTO: By Angela Gaul/The Journal News:
Composer Tom Kitt, right, of Armonk wrote the score for “Next to Normal,” starring actress Jennifer Damiano of White Plains.

‘NEXT TO NORMAL’
Where: Second Stage Theatre, 307 W. 43rd St., Manhattan.
When: Opens tomorrow. Run is through March 9.
Tickets: $80. A limited number of $25 tickets are available for those under 25. $15 student rush tickets are available 30 minutes prior to curtain.
Call: 212-246-4422.
Web: www.2ST.com.
With: Alice Ripley, Brian d’Arcy James, Adam Chanler-Berat, Jennifer Damiano, Asa Somers and Aaron Tveit.

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