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sincerely me || mike faist, ben platt, and will roland || dear evan hansen [3.26.16 - first off-broadway preview].

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i had the day off so i made this (the song is laugh til i cry by the front bottoms)

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The path that brought Be More Chill, the neon, energetic, inventive new musical from Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz, to Broadway was unconventional in both its trajectory and its momentum. A 2015 commissioned world premiere at Two River Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey led to a cast album, which took the internet by storm and exponentially widened the musical’s audience; an Off-Broadway premiere at the Pershing Square Signature Center followed in 2018, quickly selling out and adding an extension to its run.

A few months later, producers gathered the company of the Off–Broadway production to deliver the news that changed everything. Not only was Be More Chill headed to Broadway—but the entire Off–Broadway cast would be going with it.

This cast would include performers like Will Roland and Jason SweetTooth Williams, who stepped into the roles of Jeremy Heere and his father, respectively, for the musical’s Pershing Square production; it also included George Salazar, Lauren Marcus, and Katlyn Carlson, who had been with the show since its premiere at Two River Theatre.

Now, as Be More Chill prepares for its final performance at the Lyceum Theatre on August 11, these five cast members have mined their personal stashes of behind-the-scenes photos for an exclusive look at the show’s journey from Red Bank to Broadway. Playbill posed a series of questions to each of them on the show’s legacy, both for the Broadway community and for themselves as artists who have seen the show along multiple stages of its journey to the Lyceum.

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Backstage at Bonnie & Clyde

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i love broadway because if you look into any white male actor he either was a newsie or he dated one.

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Sincerely, Me- At the matinee performance of the Dear Evan Hansen tour. June 8, 2019. Stephen Christopher Anthony (Alternate Evan), Asher Muldoon (Understudy Jared), and Marrick Smith (Connor).

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jerd klermn

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miss carlson…what are you trying to tell us?

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Basorexia w/ kleinsen?

It’s not that Jared’s desire to kiss Evan is overwhelming. Okay, it totally is, but there are so many other, better words for it: unfortunate, irrational, silly, completely and irredeemably gay as hell… and that’s just for starters.

The Twilight Zone- one of his favorites- is playing on his flat screen TV, and he should be focusing on it, but instead, he keeps stealing glances out of the corner of his eye at Evan’s stupid, shitty lips. (Oh, who is he kidding? They’re great lips. Jared’s not sure if that’s objectively true, but it’s true to him, and that’s enough.)

Keep reading

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new gif for my header thank you also jeremy is a nonbinary lesbian i DARE you to @ me 

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I never really had ships that I was “seriously liking” in deh but kleinsen.... i think I like it

yeah deh doesn’t exactly give you a world of options, and everyone’s a hot mess, but kleinsen? kleinsen truly has it all

pining….mutual pining but they don’t realize it because both characters are clueless and repressed as hell….unrequited love if you want to be tragic about it….childhood friends with a relationship going back at least a decade……sharing a secret….partners in crime….you can explore their post-gfy reconciliation….lost love becoming found….confessions about all kinds of things because neither of them has been talking about their real feelings re anything….apologies….college dating….

like it’s just that real. jared’s motivations in the whole thing are honestly that focused on evan and evan alone and all about being in love with him and wanting that relationship that’s realer and closer. it’s just literal canon that everything he does is because all he wants is a relationship with evan; he’s in love with him. he and evan roleplay this idealized Perfect Friendship where evan projects onto this fictionalized version of himself and jared projects onto this fictionalized version of connor, and jared wants the roleplay to be about being secret gay high school lovers, which, if saying “lovers” wasn’t unhetero enough, he tells evan that he would say there’s something quite beautiful about the love that one man feels for another

then there’s also how a breaking point for jared is just seeing zoe politely kiss evan, which happens after jared offers up the “my parents aren’t home, wanna hang out and drink” situation, which if it was a guy/girl exchange would be read by like 99% of the audience as a come-on, and the way jared is canonically heartbroken after evan lashes out at him. which is also just Interesting because we see that jared understands evan (”you couldn’t stop.”) but the things evan says to jared in their gfy suggest that he’s also understood jared beyond the front that jared puts up, but now he’s lashing out and, like he was with alana, is kind of being cruel about it, which like…..the balance between how they hurt each other and Don’t hurt each other this whole time is just a lot of fun on its own. jared’s supposedly the too-mean guy with how he teases evan and for an unknown amount of time up to the beginning of the play has been maintaining some distance between them, but he also does a lot for evan that might not be what evan thinks his “ideal” is (like say, how jared comes up and talks and listens to him on the first day of school but it’s supposedly a Disappointment b/c he doesn’t sign his cast) and that ends up being fairly taken for granted; meanwhile evan is like, at least politer on the surface lol but the way he ends up dismissing jared is on the passive side, but he’s basically ditching jared entirely as opposed to jared acting like he doesn’t care too much one way or another but never truly committing to Not being friends with evan. just slap a condition on it and you’ve got deniability like, oh no dude i’m just yearning for you because my mom said to. and then he starts helping evan with this wild situation but evan’s ditching him because he has the imaginary friendship jared’s helped him invent and also a gf, which, yknow, nothing straighter than jared being bitterly jealous of that!!! evan is totally a jerk also lol…again, they’re both so clueless and repressed and total messes. therapy for everyone

also it’s great how evan thinks he has to Act Always Nice and hide whatever he really thinks, but when it’s just evan and jared during sincerely me? evan doesn’t do that, and jared doesn’t mind it in the least, but rather actually enjoys it (also s/o to this scene kind of cementing the idea that jared thinks the only way he can get attention from evan is by annoying him, which only seems to be reinforced later on in act 2 with how evan seems to be brushing him off or trying to deal with him as little as possible, but when jared’s attempts to get his attention resort to “touch on the harsh truths about what evan’s doing,” evan focuses on him). and yknow, speaking of, jared knows the harsh truths about what evan is doing and that it’s messed up and that evan’s motivations aren’t exactly selfless and pure, but he still wants to be actual friends and is still backing him up and even after gfy, jared doesn’t tell everyone everything like he said he could, or do anything else to get back at evan. because evan’s talking about how nobody could know about the things he did and nobody could know about what he’s really like and still love him, and yet jared totally does know so much about the truth of things he’s done and the truth of what he’s like (btw when do we ever see evan being as unguarded and open as he is during sincerely me!! he’s never at ease in that way at any other point!! and jared, who doesn’t want to ever be Actually Confronted, is totally comfortable having these little arguments with evan and getting that reaction of annoyance/frustration from evan, nbd) and does still love him

just like, ugh. jared coming in on the first day of school, trying to seem cool, trying to seem confident, trying to seem like evan isn’t his only friend, and then during gfy having a broken heart because he went and wanted evan too much and decided to actually just try to be close to him……it’s not like evan realizing that he and jared could be Real Friends, even if it’s not evan’s fantasy of what the perfect sparkling friendship would be like, would be bringing that arc with jared full circle or anything!! not like it wouldn’t be right in line with the other Themes of the climax/finale of the show!! nbd!! not like jared, aside from connor, is the only character who hasn’t gained anything at all by the end of the play, only lost something. that something being the guy he was in love with and his only friend. because of the fact that jared started caring even more and actually trying to be closer to evan rather than distancing himself, and if he hadn’t been doing that they wouldn’t’ve had that fight in gfy, and also it’s not like that fight wasn’t something jared needed to do too, b/c jared goes around avoiding confrontation and running away when he’s upset and in that instance he finally was directly confronting evan (and almost directly expressing his feelings, but still not quite) but then evan lashes out and breaks jared’s heart and jared runs away anyhow. and then they don’t get their own reconciliation in any form b/c, we can only speculate why. but we can also easily decide it happens 5 minutes after the play ends, who says that can’t happen. or five years! no rules! and everything would still be utterly canon compliant, because kleinsen is already just that canon

like, they’re both Longing after each other, just that evan’s doing the desperate longing on the first day of school while jared’s trying to act like he’s got no vulnerabilities or real desires, then jared’s desperately longing for evan while evan’s getting distracted by his own antics and caught up in this fantasy life where he has his idea of the perfect family and gf and secret best friend who is no longer alive and an existence that Matters because he’s been validated by the attention being given to tcp. and both of them put up these fronts, and both of them are crap at communication, but if they could get in sync and actually talk and show each other what they’re really feeling………..boy

it’d be great, is what i mean

plus just, yknow, jared is clearly gay as hell but is either repressing that to a degree or at least trying to repress the gayass feelings he has for evan, and evan is probably managing to be even more clueless and repressed on that front, so that’s a further instance of how getting together would mean accepting their Real Feelings in a new way. plus like, you know evan’s dating history is probably just a series of “yearning after some girl he’s never talked to and never will” interrupted by this weird instance of pretending to be the best friend of a guy who died, and god knows if jared ever had a gf it was probably like, a two month occasion that never really got off the ground, also it’s funny to think that it was a girl who was also actually super gay but it was all just pretty much a mishap caused by a paroxysm of feeling the pressure of Compulsory Heterosexuality and trying to interpret any feelings like “hey this person seems cool” as “well, i suppose this is a straight crush” and they’re both kind of actually terrified of doing anything more than maybe holding hands and possibly kissing once and then deciding that they’ve checked that off the list and thus that means they don’t have to do it anymore right? cool. and they kind of just hang out every now and then for a while until eventually they acknowledge that yeah no this isn’t gonna change and then jared just never dates anybody again because unbeknownst to him he’s in love with evan and then maybe eventually it’s beknownst to him, whether its prior to the play or during or afterwards. shoutout to the idea of jared experiencing heartbreak and only figuring out that it was heartbreak like months or years later. gay disaster

anyways the point? evan finding that Person To Know Him So Well And Love Him? jared actually being able to embrace his real emotions and desires he tries so hard to hide and for once be able to be Deeply Secure? well that’s kleinsen.

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tumblr won’t let me show up in the kleinsen tag but it wouldn’t be very excellent of me to not contribute a kiss anyways. thanks again to the anon who made me aware of “slightly sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek songs about unrequited love. jared can relate to that.” i’m! still reeling!!

plus these sketches that are too messy to warrant their own post

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boyf riends commission!!

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I love how elphaba and galinda sing a song about how much they loathe eachother when they’re clearly describing having a crush

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theyre cute..,, kekee