BSC's Dear Evan Hansen Opens in Las Vegas — Here's the Full Picture

Broadway Stage Collective's Dear Evan Hansen opened March 26 at Summerlin Library and Performing Arts Center, and it's worth your time. This is the Nevada premiere of the six-time Tony Award-winning musical, and BSC has treated it seriously. The show runs through April 19 — you've got three weeks left, and you should use one of them.

Gus Pappas leads as Evan Hansen, and he doesn't make the obvious choices. This is a role that tempts actors to overplay the anxiety, to signal the panic for the audience. Pappas doesn't. He keeps you at arm's length and then, at exactly the right moments, lets you in. It's a technically difficult approach and he pulls it off.

The breakout performance, though, belongs to Mary Engelhardt as Heidi Hansen. She is quietly extraordinary in this role. Where other productions have let Heidi be swallowed by the show's more theatrical moments, Engelhardt holds on to her character's specific exhaustion — the single mom stretched thin, the parent who can't fix what she can't see. Her "So Big / So Small" in Act 2 is the kind of performance that makes everything else in the room stop. The audience felt it on opening night. She is the surprise of this production, and that's saying something given the competition on that stage.

Shannon Payette Seip (Cynthia Murphy) brings genuine professional scale to the role after her Off-Broadway debut and playing Beverley Bass in the Western Australian premiere of Come From Away. Her scenes with Engelhardt are the most emotionally precise in the show — two women building grief out of completely different materials.

The Direction

Director Jen Hemme has made the right call for this room: intimacy over scale. The Summerlin Library PAC is not the Music Box Theatre, and Hemme doesn't pretend it is. She's built a production scaled to the space, and the show is better for it. The blocking puts characters in each other's space and leaves them there — the Murphy family kitchen scenes have a physical honesty that bigger productions tend to lose when they're staging for the back row.

Holly Stanfield's musical direction is one of the production's clear strengths. Stanfield — recognized by Stephen Schwartz as his 2021 Musical Theatre Teacher of the Year — has brought the cast's vocals to the level this material demands. The Pasek & Paul score is relentless; it doesn't let the cast coast. Under Stanfield, they don't. "You Will Be Found" holds up. "So Big / So Small" lands. That's the musical director's work.

The Performances

Tristen Serpa handles Connor Murphy with the right weight — a role that is almost entirely defined in retrospect, by what other characters project onto it. Emma Phillips makes Zoe real in a way the script doesn't fully earn on its own. Trevor Rounds' Jared Kleinman earns every laugh without collapsing into comic relief. And Khloe Judd, 17, plays Alana Beck with an authority that feels like it belongs to someone ten years older. She's someone to watch.

BSC has partnered with Hope Means Nevada — a statewide nonprofit dedicated to eliminating teen suicide — for this production. HMN representatives are present at select performances. National Crisis Line: 988.