Save this article to read it later.

Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.

ButscathingappraisalsofDear Evan Hansenstarted to appear online even before the lights came back on inside the auditorium.

Article image

His aggressive, loner-outcast classmate Connor takes the letter.

But when Connor dies by suicide, Evans cri de coeur is mistaken as intimate correspondence between the two.

(This complaintfirst surfaced online in May, when the trailer debuted.)

But he has taken issue with what he characterizes as the personal nature of certain commentary.

I am struck by the vitriol for Ben.

Especially the cruelty, Levenson tells Vulture.

Its totally fine if you dont like the movie.

Or you think we shouldnt have cast Ben in it.

And whatever you think about someones performance or their age-appropriateness, theyre still a person.

The cruelty, I think, is discouraging.

8 on theBillboard200 in 2017 a similar outcome would hardly raise eyebrows.

We really only have a partial sense of the critical reception so far, not the audiences.

If you ever saw the show, you know how powerfully it speaks to many.

I looked at musicals.

This is not a particularly new concept of a character doing terrible things or a character lying.

That is the premise ofThe Music Man, basically, Levenson says.

The irony has not been lost on me and feels weird, Levenson says.

Tags: