By Charles Isherwood

Dec. 4, 2016

As the title character in “Dear Evan Hansen,” a lonely teenager who inadvertently becomes a social media sensation and a symbol of the kindness that is often cruelly absent in high school hallways, the marvelous young actor Ben Platt is giving a performance that’s not likely to be bettered on Broadway this season.

What’s more, this gorgeous heartbreaker of a musical, which opened at the Music Box Theater on Sunday, has grown in emotional potency during its journey to the big leagues, after first being produced in Washington and Off Broadway. Rarely – scratch that — never have I heard so many stifled sobs and sniffles in the theater.

For those allergic to synthetic sentiment, rest assured that the show, with a haunting score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (the coming movie musical “La La Land,” for which they wrote the lyrics, is already generating Oscar buzz), matched by a book of equal sensitivity by Steven Levenson, doesn’t sledgehammer home its affecting story. On the contrary, the musical finds endless nuances in the relationships among its characters, and makes room for some leavening humor, too. It is also the rare Broadway musical not derived from or inspired by some other source, which is refreshing in itself.

Evan Hansen, at first glance, may appear to be a stock figure: the misfit kid who’s too shy make friends and eats lunch in the cafeteria alone. But Mr. Platt’s remarkable performance instantly scrubs free any trace of the generic.

From left, Ben Platt, Will Roland and Mike Faist in the musical “Dear Evan Hansen” at the Music Box Theater.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

His Evan is a startling jumble of exposed nerve endings. His eyes blink in continual embarrassment at the twisted pretzels of words that tumble from his mouth whenever he has to interact socially, which isn’t often. He quails at the thought of having to make small talk with a pizza delivery guy. Underneath the thick layers of insecurity, however, Mr. Platt transmits the yearning heart and the desperation for affection — or even just attention — that ultimately gets Evan into deep trouble.

The fateful encounter that sets the plot in motion takes place when Evan is in the computer room at school, printing out one of the daily pep-talk letters to himself that his therapist has advised him to write. It’s snatched up by another loner, Connor Murphy (Mike Faist), but one with a mean streak. He snickers, stuffs it in his pocket and then, noticing that no one has signed the cast on Evan’s broken arm, mockingly scrawls his name across it in giant letters.

But we soon learn that Connor’s psychological travails run deeper than Evan’s. Not long after this unpleasant incident, Connor kills himself. And when his family finds Evan’s letter, they naturally assume it was written by Connor to his friend. In their bewilderment and sadness they reach out to him, hoping he can shed some light on why their son had become so remote and unhappy.

Although Evan tries to stutter out the truth, ultimately he cannot bear to tell them the real provenance of the letter, for reasons both compassionate — he can sense how dearly they want to believe Connor was not just the alienated kid he seemed to be — and self-serving. Evan has long had a crush on Connor’s sister, Zoe (Laura Dreyfuss). His growing closeness to Connor’s parents — Larry (Michael Park) and Cynthia (Jennifer Laura Thompson) — naturally draws Zoe nearer to him.

Backstage on election night, sometime around 11:30 p.m., Rob Russo collapsed.

It happened before the results were final, but after it had already become obvious that his boss, Hillary Clinton, would not be the next president. He was with three friends from the campaign, waiting for senior aides to arrive in the staff hold room at the Jacob Javits Center. In the crowd, excitement turned to anxiety, then to shock, then to tears. “The air just got sucked out of the whole place,” Russo says. “It was silent. Nobody was saying anything to anyone.”

When he got up, “it sort of became a dream. I felt detached from it, from everything.”

What happened next is still a dim blur. He remembers leaving around 4 a.m., because he took a cab, “which I never do.” He remembers dressing in black the next morning — a dark gray “H” T-shirt, a black cardigan, his only pair of black pants — because he has worn black clothes almost every day since. And he remembers the somnambulant trek back to headquarters in Brooklyn, because the whole staff was there wandering around the office — suddenly without direction for the first time in years.

Russo started packing up his desk. “I didn’t know what else to do,” he says. “It was very unclear to us all what we should be doing.”

This was a new sensation for the 30-year-old director of correspondence and briefings. Russo has spent more than a decade managing Clinton’s “paper process,” a job he approaches with extreme diligence and care and order. He compiles her briefing books, handles her mail, and drafts letters to every corner of the vast and layered network known as Clintonworld: thank-yous, condolences, graduations, and weddings. Maybe you’ve seen some of the them, the letters from Clinton that pop up on staffers’ Instagram feeds or in news stories about the friends and voters who have received them. Clinton is the sender, but each note is also the product of a long-worked-out system that this aide steers.

Russo, slim with a small swept-back pompadour and a neatly trimmed beard, has made a decade-long study of Clinton’s paper process — aka “her paper,” aka “the flow of paper” — passing every draft to his boss in shared “To Sign”/“To Read” folders, then internalizing each one of her edits until writing in “her voice” became something close to “second nature.”

He could show you any one of the 110,000 letters he has drafted since 2008, because he keeps them scanned and alphabetized in a folder on his computer. He could tell you that Clinton’s personal stationery was once cream-colored, with her name at the top in blue, but that now the paper is white with a blue border. He could tell you that for most of her life, she signed her name without looping the “y” in “Hillary,” but that after her first presidential campaign eight years ago, a small almond-shaped sliver suddenly appeared at the base of the “y.” (He would also note, however, that in letters from the ’70s and ’80s, “every once and awhile she does loop the ‘y.’”) And he could tell you that, for about nine years, every letter has been written in Poor Richard, a squat typeface with tiny curled serifs, originally used in Poor Richard’s Almanac, because at some point in 2008, a letter from a friend arrived and Clinton exclaimed, “I love that font,” sending her executive assistant on a hunt to identify it.

As the title character in “Dear Evan Hansen,” a lonely teenager who inadvertently becomes a social media sensation and a symbol of the kindness that is often cruelly absent in high school hallways, the marvelous young actor Ben Platt is giving a performance that’s not likely to be bettered on Broadway this season.

What’s more, this gorgeous heartbreaker of a musical, which opened at the Music Box Theater on Sunday, has grown in emotional potency during its journey to the big leagues, after first being produced in Washington and Off Broadway. Rarely – scratch that — never have I heard so many stifled sobs and sniffles in the theater.

For those allergic to synthetic sentiment, rest assured that the show, with a haunting score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (the coming movie musical “La La Land,” for which they wrote the lyrics, is already generating Oscar buzz), matched by a book of equal sensitivity by Steven Levenson, doesn’t sledgehammer home its affecting story. On the contrary, the musical finds endless nuances in the relationships among its characters, and makes room for some leavening humor, too. It is also the rare Broadway musical not derived from or inspired by some other source, which is refreshing in itself.

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