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Reducio! After 18 months, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has returned to Broadway in a dramatically new form. As in its Off Broadway run at Second Stage earlier this year, the musical b Like its closest musical-theater relative, Next to Normal, the show takes on challenging subjects-death, grief, class, mental illness, social media, social anxiety-with unapologetic trust in the power of contemporary pop music to tell complex stories onstage. Simply put: Platt is giving one of the greatest leading male performances I’ve ever seen in a musical, and the thrillingly modern and moving Dear Evan Hansen is worthy of it. He speaks in rushes of instant regret, as though frantically digging a hole to bury himself in, and his intense awkwardness is filtered through first-rate comic timing, high-wire dramatic acting and a gorgeously expressive tenor voice. Yet the effect is not off-putting Evan is immensely lovable, even when he makes terrible mistakes. Platt’s performance extends that to his whole body when he sings, his face often gleams with sweat. Evan is painfully introverted he has no friends in high school, and even the thought of talking to a girl he likes, Zoe (the poignantly unaffected Laura Dreyfuss), makes his palms perspire. What does it look like when a star is born? In the case of Ben Platt, the astonishing young actor who plays the title role in Dear Evan Hansen, it’s a bit like an actual birth: beautiful but strange and wet, tinged with confusion and danger.