Lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
begins not with music, have a single person to whom we can actually speak. We but with noise. As the house lights fade, the audience envisioned two families, each broken in its own way, and is immersed momentarily in the roar of the internet: a two sons, both of them lost, both of them desperate to cacophony of car insurance ads, cat videos, scattered be found. And at the heart of our story, in a world starving shards of emails and text messages and status updates. for connection, we began to imagine a character utterly And then, all at once: silence. On stage, in the white glow incapable of connecting. of a laptop, a boy sits in his bedroom, alone. Though many of the rudiments of the character were Like so many of us, Evan is a citizen of two different already in place by the end of 2011, Evan didn’t fully come worlds, two distinct realities separated by the thin veil of a to life for me until almost two years into the process, when laptop screen. On one side of the screen, the promise of Benj and Justin emailed me a homemade demo of a song instant connection. On the other, a lonely kid, staring at a they were tentatively calling “Waving Back At Me.” blinking cursor, as desperate to be noticed as he is to stay This was to become “Waving Through a Window,” hidden. Evan’s first sung moment in the musical, when we see, Benj Pasek, Justin Paul, and I first began to create with incredible vividness, how the world looks through the the character of Evan over several months in 2011.
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