THIS MUSIC IS KILLING ME - Next to Normal | Composer Reacts - PART 6

Comments · 69

• LU

  @lux6785 · 1 year ago

  The best/most painful part of How Could I Ever Forget for me is when the two are singing “this is the day I lost you”, Diana is looking up and talking about her son, while Dan is looking at Diana

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• LN

  @lnng8421 · 1 year ago (edited)

  This production really made me appreciate Aftershocks and "you wonder which is worse, the symptom or the cure" is a bar. Jack's voice is so great as Gabe.

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• US

  @user28688 · 1 year ago

  fun fact jack wolfe (who plays the son) will be the next orpheus on broadway!!

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• JE

  @jetkestrel · 1 year ago

  Dan&apos;s just as traumatized by the death of their son as Diana is. She&apos;s erasing their son&apos;s death and he&apos;s erasing their son&apos;s existence, because neither of them is able to handle his loss. Dan just gets away with not dealing, because he&apos;s hiding his own issues behind the mask of being the family rock who holds everything together. He&apos;s not the guy who gets therapy! He&apos;s the guy who drives Diana to therapy and manages her mental illness. So when Diana has been prepared to deal with the reality of their son&apos;s death at last in act 1, and she&apos;s sorting through the baby things, Dan can&apos;t deal with being there for her because he hasn&apos;t come to terms with his own grief. <br> <br>Then when Diana forgets, Dan wants her never to get those memories back, because that&apos;s his own coping mechanism. He ends up gaslighting his wife about the existence of their first child (actual, classical gaslighting! she knows something is wrong; she&apos;s telling him that she knows there&apos;s an important piece missing from the story of her life, and he&apos;s assuring her that her unreliable memory is simply wrong, there&apos;s no tragedy, their lives are good and her mental illness is the only problem.) It&apos;s an absolutely horrible thing to do to her, but he&apos;s telling himself that this way, she&apos;ll be able to be okay, because she&apos;ll be seeing their past the same way that he, The Family Member Who Is Okay, wants their past to be. Just like leaving her alone to unpack their son&apos;s toys and clothes, it&apos;s not a malicious act, it&apos;s one that comes out of his own pain, but that pain makes him cruel to her when she&apos;s in a really vulnerable position. <br> <br>Honestly, it&apos;s hard to blame the therapist, because he TOLD Dan to tell Diana about the loss of their son but to do it in a gentle way and not hit her with all the details right up front. He has no reason to suspect that the attentive, concerned, loving husband he sees in his office is outright deceiving his wife about her central trauma the moment he has the opportunity to erase it. <br><br>The important thing here is that neither of their coping mechanisms are actually healthy. Remembering, grieving and sitting with the truth of what happened is what they BOTH need to do in order to engage with their real life, and while Diana starts doing that in the first act with the help of intensive daily therapy, Dan is only now, in this song, starting to acknowledge his own emotions (and not yet really acknowledging his feelings about their son even here - he&apos;s talking about losing Diana while she&apos;s talking about losing their baby.) <br> <br>And poor Natalie is caught between two parents who both have these delusional coping mechanisms. Her mother&apos;s too busy looking at their dead child and her father&apos;s too busy looking away from their dead child for either of them to see their living daughter. It&apos;s no wonder she winds up abusing drugs: that kid is dealing with a LOT....

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• HA

  @hanonondricek411 · 1 year ago (edited)

  Ideally the goal of ECT is to &quot;wipe the hard drive&quot; of the brain so the memories and PTSD and emotions about trauma get reset, and the goal isn&apos;t to &quot;forget&quot; the trauma, but the patient can basically, when ready and balanced, be told what the trauma was and hopefully view it objectively as a bystander without the direct pain of experiencing it.<br><br>Also it&apos;s easy to blame the therapist who only sees the patient occasionally, but I think in the show he&apos;s meant to represent <i>multiple</i> doctors - especially the psychopharmacologist is a different physician than the therapist later in the show who helps Diana through the ECT.

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• BR

  @brenda5073 · 1 year ago

  I’m glad you focused on Dan in the beginning because I feel the most empathy for him(and nat). His role in this dysfunctional family makes me cry every time I think about it. Everything he does make sense to me and is understandable. Watching him become more and more jaded while trying to stay strong enough to see his family overcome everything, even as the doubts start to creep in on him.

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• KA

  @katinka01114 · 1 year ago

  This show makes me so sad, cause none of them are ONLY wrong. They are all severely traumatized people, DESPERATELY trying to hold some semblance of life together. Diana, disappearing into her grief through delusions, Natalie fully neglected and messily raising herself, because Dan is suppressing the trauma and is desperately pretending things are okay and normal, while a ghost haunts their house. None of them are okay, and it makes me so sad, I cry every time I watch it

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• AM

  @AmaC-t5w · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U--iSF9kNkY&amp;t=1313">21:53</a> RIP &quot;I don&apos;t know, I don&apos;t know, where the fucking pieces go&quot; possibly my favourite line delivery

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• TH

  @the_conqueer · 1 year ago

  Imo ( <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U--iSF9kNkY&amp;t=1350">22:30</a> ish ) the doctor did what he needed to do. He warned Dan that he NEEDS to tell her, and Dan NEVER intended to. If Dr. Madden hadn&apos;t told her, no one would have. Tbf psychology was a wild field during this timeframe so there should have been things he could have done, but unfortunately there just wasnt

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• JA

  @jayvansickle7607 · 1 year ago

  changing &quot;Sucks&quot; to &quot;Stinks&quot; was weird.....

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• ST

  @steviehills4256 · 1 year ago

  🥹 It&apos;s okay to cry, you know? I cried my eyes out watching this when it came out. It&apos;s was very cathartic.

  11

• TD

  @TDSiren · 1 year ago

  The only problem about so many parts... I get impatient waiting for the next one! I cannot wait to see your reaction to the end of the show!

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