Next to Normal review: A musical about mental health that feels too neat and tidy

Powered by huge, messy emotions and gorgeously, earnestly delivered ballads, Next to Normal is a hit rock musical that landed three Tony awards for its 2009 Broadway run; now comes an intimate revival at the Donmar. A suburban mother has bipolar disorder – or schizophrenia, perhaps – and both her doctors and her family are utterly in the dark about how to handle her uncontrollable moods.

Its creators Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics) and Tom Kitt (music) have crafted an unusual, wholly kitsch-free kind of musical, one that’s got the narrowed focus and emotional intensity of a kitchen-sink drama.

American mother Diana (Broadway star Caissie Levy) is waiting up for her son Gabe (Jack Wolfe) as his curfew whizzes by, lamenting her dull life (“My son’s a little s***, my husband’s boring”) – as her spouse Dan (Jamie Parker) complains that he’s “living on a latte and a prayer”. Meanwhile, their perfectionist 16-year-old daughter Natalie (Eleanor Worthington Cox) is hammering away at the keyboard, perfecting her Mozart as she dreams of landing a full music scholarship to college and escaping her parents’ grip.

There’s something overfamiliar, a bit daytime-telly predictable, about the emotional palette here – but soon, a dysfunction of a less familiar kind creeps in. Diana’s frenetic meal-prep attempts cover the perfect kitchen in crumbs, and she’s back to the psychiatrist for yet another spin on the medication merry-go-round, accompanied by pill bottles shaken like maracas.

Levy is wonderful in this central role: it’s worth a trip to the Donmar’s small space purely to see her sing at the kind of close quarters you wouldn’t get on Broadway, filling each note with a yearning and intensity that gives you a sense of a younger Diana, before the nerviness and frustration. “I Miss the Mountains” is a highlight: a bluesy ballad mourning her lost emotional highs and lows after she’s drugged into numbed stability.

Her family don’t miss those highs. Yorkey’s play only gestures to the deeper issues here: the push-pull between bland conformity and painful dysfunction, the sense that Diana’s problems might be exacerbated by her stifling, narrowed life as a housewife. Diana’s episodes have a sanitised, feminised, fairytale dreaminess to them that doesn’t capture the weirdness and messiness of actual mental illness, while psychiatric interventions are quietly dismissed as either dangerous or futile.

Michael Longhurst’s direction adds to that unhelpfully wipe-clean feel. Chloe Lamford’s set design delivers the kind of aspirational, improbably spotless kitchen familiar from any number of plays about well-off suburban families being beastly to each other. The lights are too bright, and the band feel overly compartmentalised in upstairs rooms, like pills in their neat plastic dividers: it’s the cleanest, tidiest rock musical in town.

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In the second act, things start to sprawl a little more, as Diana’s distress grows operatic and Natalie spirals. This small cast brings so much full-throated passion to a score that delivers belting ballad after belting ballad. It’s hard not to get swept up in it all. But all this musical-theatre earnestness doesn’t ultimately feel like the best way to explore the painful, complex themes here, however powerful a drug it might be.

Donmar Warehouse, until 7 October