Last summer, Val Emmich’s agent called him with a tantalizing proposal. The creators of the hit musical “Dear Evan Hansen” were looking for a writer to adapt the play into a young adult novel, and they wanted Emmich to give it a try.
Emmich’s reflexive response? Absolutely not. “I realized how big of a phenomenon it was, and that scared me off,” he said.
Then he saw the show for the first time. The audience exploded into whoops and applause before the first line was uttered. A woman in his row warned him that she would be crying through the performance. “I thought, oh man, this is so beloved, I can only screw this up,” Emmich said.
But when Emmich met with the musical’s book writer, Steven Levenson, and songwriters, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, he knew he had to at least consider trying if they offered him the job.
They did, and Emmich spent the next six months transforming the musical into fiction. “Dear Evan Hansen: The Novel” will be released this October by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, in a surprising inversion of the usual page-to-stage adaptation process.
Emmich was in many ways a natural choice for the challenge. A singer-songwriter and actor who published a debut novel, “The Reminders,” last year, he understood the emotional nuances of songwriting and performing onstage. He also felt he could relate to the play’s protagonist — an isolated teenager with anxiety — and saw the potential to capture his voice in a first-person narrative.
“I really connected with Evan’s tortured interior life,” he said.
Plenty of books have been turned into captivating theater: Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and Roald Dahl’s “Matilda,” to name a few. But it’s rare for an original Broadway musical to be reverse-adapted into fiction. How do you translate the emotional highs of live musical theater — where so much drama is communicated through the songs and performance — into prose?
“Dear Evan Hansen” may be better suited to novelization than most musicals. The play centers on a lonely, anxious teenager, Evan Hansen, whose therapist urges him to write encouraging notes to himself every day. When one of his notes falls into the hands of a classmate who commits suicide, Evan pretends that he and the boy were close friends. Much of the story’s drama is internal, as Evan struggles under the weight of his secret — a feature that lends itself to fiction.
There is likely to be a large and eager audience for the novel. The play won six Tony Awards last year and has grossed nearly $100 million.
The show’s creators began thinking about an Evan Hansen novel last year, when they noticed that the story had developed a fan base beyond those who had seen it on Broadway. When the cast recording was released in February 2017, it debuted at No.8 on the Billboard 200 and won the Grammy Award for best musical theater album. People published fan fiction about the characters online.
Some fans said that the story and the music had helped them cope with their own anxiety.
“We have felt a certain discomfort with the fact that it is so expensive to come see the show, we can only have 1,000 people a night, and there are so many people who can’t come to New York,” Levenson said. “There were people responding to the show without having even seen it, and we did feel like, what are some ways that we can get this show to more people?”
The novel fills in scenes only alluded to in the musical, like Evan’s experience as an apprentice park ranger, and fleshes out peripheral characters. Pasek and Paul sent Emmich songs that never made it into the production, and Levenson sent him scenes that were excised from the script. He reworked that material into scenes and dialogue.
When he felt stuck, Emmich played songs from the musical to help him settle on the right tone.
“Whenever I was unsure of what was going on beneath the surface of a character’s emotions, I could always put on the music,” he said.
The collaboration was mostly smooth, although occasionally there was back and forth about how much liberty Emmich should take with the story.
It “was a learning process,” Emmich said. “At first, I was incredibly faithful to the play, and then they urged me to take more chances, which I was happy to do. Then they had to reel me back in.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.