REVIEW: Next to Normal - Millennial Productions

Next to Normal

Produced by: Millennial Productions

Presented at: Ron Hurley Theatre, Seven Hills

Date attended: 26 September 2026

Music: Tom Kitt | Book and Lyrics: Brian Yorkey

Director: Taylor Atley

Associate Director / Intimacy Liaison: Ellen Axford

Musical Director: Victoria Keomahavong

Production Manager: Jaime O'Donoghue

Stage Manager: Daniel Lelic

Lighting: Pavani Wickremasinghe | Sound: Lane Agostinelli

Costume: Ned Kelly |Props: Lauren Bensted

Mental Health Consultant: Maddison Joyce

Photography: Jacob Atley

“We haven’t had a normal day in years.”

I’d never seen Next to Normal before, but with Millennial Productions’ reputation and this creative team behind it, I knew I was in safe hands. The tissues being sold at the bar should probably have warned me what those hands were about to do though... By the end, I understood why.

The Goodman family have spent seventeen years arranging themselves around grief and mental illness. Diana (Morgan Heynes) swings between mania and medication. Dan (Conor Ensor) keeps reaching for the next practical fix, as though enough appointments and reassurance might hold the house together. Natalie (Madeline Harper) retreats into piano and perfection. Gabe (Jackson Hughesman) hovers close to Diana, loving and unsettling in equal measure. Henry (August Cocks) tries to reach Natalie from outside the family’s orbit as her sweetly persistent boyfriend. Diana’s psychiatrists, Dr Fine and Dr Madden (both played by Sam Ford), are entrusted with decisions that can alter the shape of her life.

Director Taylor Atley places the Goodmans in a recognisably suburban home where they move around each other on autopilot. Lauren Bensted’s props fill it with the usual family clutter, right down to medication bottles scattered across the kitchen bench. A raised level stretches above the set, creating space for characters who are present yet seem detached from the reality below. Pavani Wickremasinghe’s lighting, including LED strips framing the upper level and doorway, shifts the house between warmth, unease, memory, and the cooler world of treatment while the scenery itself stays fixed.

That domestic ‘normality’ feeds straight into “Just Another Day”. Everyone races through the morning, performing the rhythms of a functioning family while the routine is already fraying around the edges. Brian Yorkey’s writing can jump from observational humour to absolutely vicious within moments, and this production embraces that whiplash. “It’s Gonna Be Good” lets the room relax into laughter before “You Don’t Know” tears straight through it with Diana’s rage. Nobody receives the courtesy of one emotion at a time.

Morgan Heynes has an enormous task as Diana, vocally and dramatically, and never flattens her into a diagnosis. Her acting keeps Diana mercurial: she adores her family, resents them, reaches for help, rejects it, and describes herself with the beautifully understated, “My mum called me high-spirited” (relatable). Heynes’ control of those shifts is as impressive as her singing. In “I Miss the Mountains”, Diana has reached the point where medication has dulled everything, including the parts of herself she misses. Heynes changes her vocal texture as the song grows, letting rough cries break through the cleaner phrases until the desire to feel anything becomes physical. Later, following ECT, she alters Diana’s entire presence. Her gaze disconnects, her responses arrive differently, and familiar people seem to be standing in the wrong places inside her own life. The contrast is unnerving, showing just how much detail Heynes has built into Diana beyond the score.

Jackson Hughesman as Gabe initially appears protective, a son hovering near his mother when she needs him. The gentleness of his character makes his eventual pull over Diana far more disturbing. In “I’m Alive”, Hughesman unleashes a voice full of riffs, height, and rock power, but distress and torment sit underneath all of it. Gabe wants to remain. He wants to be remembered, not erased. Depending on where Diana is emotionally, he shifts between comfort, grief, temptation, and threat. His physical presence feeds that unease. He climbs onto furniture, looms above the family, and draws Diana towards the promise of peace with a magnetic insistence. He occupies the house completely while remaining unreachable to everyone living outside Diana’s reality.

And then the production turns Gabe towards Dan. I won't discuss that sequence in detail because I’d like at least one other unsuspecting person to suffer as I did. Ensor and Hughesman’s “I Am the One” had people all around me wiping their faces. Ensor’s reaction strips away years of repression in seconds. Conor Ensor is excellent at showing exhaustion without playing Dan as permanently defeated. Earlier, “I’ve Been” gives him space to admit what maintaining this family has cost him. His support for Diana is loving, desperate, and increasingly threadbare. The production also lets us see the much younger Dan and Diana, full of hope at 22, before parenthood and loss rearranged their lives and love.

Natalie is dealing with a different kind of disappearance. She’s gifted, driven, embarrassed by her family, frightened by what she sees happening to her mother, and woefully aware of how frequently she is overlooked. “You tend to miss a lot of things,” she tells Diana. Madeline Harper has a beautiful, expressive voice that rises easily through Kitt’s demanding score. In “Superboy and the Invisible Girl”, resentment keeps cracking wounds open, while “Catch Me I’m Falling” builds into the panic of a daughter asking to be noticed before she disappears completely. And when Diana decides to stop taking her medication, Natalie begins self-medicating.

August Cocks brings a welcome softness to Henry, keeping him warm, earnest, and slightly awkward. His “This planet is pretty much broken beyond all repair” philosophy is perhaps not the cheeriest opening gambit for teenage romance, but his scenes with Harper have an easy sweetness that lets Natalie briefly drop the hyper-achiever armour. Their relationship gives the show room to breathe, even as the chaos at home keeps pressing in.

Sam Ford’s doubling as Dr Fine and Dr Madden marks one of the production’s more theatrical departures from the Goodman household. Diana’s treatment suddenly resembles a rock concert, her psychiatrist elevated into “Doctor Rock” as medications, diagnoses, and treatment options fly at her. The humour evaporates once those choices carry frightening consequences. Diana needs medical care, yet handing parts of her mind and body over to treatment is terrifying. When the pain of living is unbearable, which is worse: the illness, or what the treatment takes from her? Is feeling nothing preferable to feeling everything? With Maddison Joyce as mental health consultant and Ellen Axford as intimacy liaison, the production approaches Diana’s illness as lived experience rather than spectacle. And Dan and Natalie’s exhaustion, neglect, and fear are given equal weight.

Musically, this cast is formidable. Victoria Keomahavong guides a score that barely gives its performers time to breathe, and the layered harmonies in numbers like “Song of Forgetting” are so beautifully controlled. The main issue is sound balance. At points, the underscoring sits too loudly beneath dialogue and lyrics, swallowing lines that carry important information in an already dense story. Still, this is a musical built around people missing things. Diana loses pieces of her memory, Natalie is missed in plain sight, and Dan hides grief from himself.

Next to Normal is brutal, but Millennial Productions doesn’t leave us entirely in the dark. “Light” arrives as a beautiful sliver of hope after so much trying, failing, and trying again. Around me, the audience quietly wept and gathered themselves after everything that came before.