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Dear Steven Levenson: How a St. Andrew’s alumnus constructed a Tony Award-winning musical
Almost a year after winning a Tony Award, Steven Levenson ’02 is enjoying both the perks of fame and the pleasures of relative anonymity.
Opportunities are coming his way — new films, television shows, musicals to write. Yet, while the actors of his coming-of-age show, “Dear Evan Hansen,” are greeted by a barrage of fans, he can slip out the theater door unseen.
For Levenson, who wrote the book for “Dear Evan Hansen,” the biggest change is acknowledging that, while the show will go on, it must go on without him.
“The journey for so long has been, ‘Still another step. Hopefully we’ll get there!’ Now it’s over — the show is only what is happening today at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.,” he said. “As big as it can feel, it still has to happen again and it still has to be great for those people. As the writer, you no longer have much control over that. It’s something cool and terrifying.”
After seeing the show through productions at Arena Stage, off Broadway and on Broadway, Levenson won the Tony Award for the Best Book of a Musical in June of 2017, an accomplishment he credits to a challenging, collaborative, and iterative process.
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done creatively. I was naïve in thinking it would be easier,” he said. “You’re basically steering an aircraft carrier. With a play, you can fix it yourself. With a musical, it’s basically getting a hundred people to all agree to move in the same direction — designers, writers, cast.
“It’s a machine, but what is amazing about it is how incredibly satisfying it is when it works. The emotional response from the audience is something I’ve never experienced before. A play doesn’t elicit that kind of response from people.”
Levenson describes himself as the author of the dialogue and the “architect” of the story of “Dear Evan Hansen,” explaining that he was tasked with “building the scaffolding everything is hanging on.”
“It was so much about the characters and relationships — building a really credible world, then seeing how music fit into that. That’s how we wrote it,” he said. “I wrote the entire first act as a play originally, and where we had talked about having songs, I left them blank or wrote long monologues that felt musical to me.”
He shared one of those monologues — the text that ultimately became the song “So Big/So Small” — when he spoke with current St. Andrew’s students during an assembly in October. Levenson said St. Andrew’s was where he discovered his love of theater and his love of writing, passions he would combine in college when he first explored playwriting.
“I learned how to read at St. Andrew’s: how to read critically, and how to understand what language can do and how it can work,” he said. “I learned the joy of theater and the joy of performance. So many of those feelings I had at St. Andrew’s — being part of a family, making a play together — in some ways as a writer I’ll never get that again, that level of just joy.”
“I think my life would be really impoverished without not just making art, but loving art and loving literature and music, and I learned all of that here.”
Upcoming projects for Levenson include a movie musical starring Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell, and TV drama “Adam & Eva,” a modern-day adaptation inspired by the biblical story of Adam and Eve and based on the 2011 Dutch series “A’dam — E.V.A.”
When writing, especially now with “Dear Evan Hansen” behind him, Levenson said he is humbled by the blank page.
“As I’ve been moving on to other things, I’m just reminded every time that it’s hard every time. You work so hard on this one thing and by the end you’re an expert at it, but you’re only an expert at that — I know how to write that musical, but it doesn’t help with the next.”
“It’s a scary feeling and a really hard feeling. It’s sort of part of it — it’s always the same struggle,” he said. “Whatever award you have on your shelf doesn’t help you at that moment. It’s amazing because everybody, regardless of who they are or what they’ve accomplished, when they sit down to write something new they’re in the same place as you are. When it doesn’t feel that hard, you’re doing something wrong. I have yet to do it where it isn’t that hard, banging-your-head-against-the-wall sort of process.”
As Levenson’s star continues to ascend, he said he is still brought back to St. Andrew’s, even when he’s watching his script performed on Broadway.
“I had this really distinct feeling in tech for Broadway. I was in the back of the theater, what I dreamed of my whole life, doing the same thing I did in plays at St. Andrew’s when I was 13 years old,” he said. “Everything you learn about theater, you learn during your first production. The scale changes, but the difficulty of it, the joy of it, the messiness of it, it’s all the same.”
St. Andrew’s Episcopal School is a private, coeducational college preparatory day school for students in preschool (Age 2) through grade 12, located in Potomac, Maryland.