next to normal

We don’t expect mental illness to be the subject and a bipolar mom to be the protagonist of a Broadway musical, but this basically sung-through drama is an engrossing, rewarding surprise. To start, “Another Day” brings to Stacia Fernandez’ magnetic Diana pain from a death in the family and nearness to another breakdown. Yet she has blank feelings induced by years of medication.

For Diana’s husband Dan and daughter Natalie, the dawn also brings hurt -- from Diana’s lack of real attention to them, their insecurity about her love of them, and their anxiety about her health and how it will affect her.

It’s a particularly bad time for Natalie (winning Ashley Picciallo). She’s in senior high and being offered her first serious love by Henry (James LaRosa, credible and nice), while dealing with involvement in the major family problem.

Diana is fearfully about to leave the heavily medicating and somewhat supercilious Dr. Madden for Dr. Fine (both distinctly different as portrayed by Scott Guthrie). Fine recommends electro convulsive therapy. Dan (whose worries and struggles for wisdom Leo Daignault ably guides us through) is as worried about that treatment as he and Natalie are about anything, themselves included, “setting off” a manic-depressive episode. Chief concern for Diana all the while is her son Gabe’s insistence (via intense Mike Backes, with the strongest voice and rock-beat songs in the score) on her paying her attention exclusively to him. And vice-versa.

Stacia Fernandez lets us get into Diana’s mind and shifting feelings, beautifully sung as well as acted. With her penetrating voice and projected emotional turmoil, Ashley Picciallo’s excellent Natalie is her mother’s daughter. If there’s any problem, it’s that she and James LaRosa’s Henry seem a tad older than teens. Perhaps make-up and costuming could take off a few years.

Director Richard Hopkins assures that there’s no sensationalism in any of the performances, even when events get farther than “next” to what we might expect. He keeps things moving at a clip on a clever abstract set of metal levels with underneath spaces containing props handy for use.

Blues and black predominate under atmospheric lighting and in the background, with a range of musicians behind a scrim upstage. They seamlessly handle 39 pieces of music from ballads to rock, from prelude to bows and exit. Like the principals, however, they don’t need as much amplification as they get.

Touches of humor help us, like the characters, get through a serious subject without feeling only gloom and doom. At FST, we can empathize with a family that could well be like that of people we know. Maybe even ours. And we see that we can benefit by supporting each other and by caring, perhaps even for those we don’t know.