My thought on Gabe from Next to Normal (from the West End pro shot)
One thing that made the Next to Normal proshot absolutely breaks me is how Gabe’s physicality keeps shifting from “18-year-old boy” to “small dependent child.”
Yes, Gabe looks grown. He’s played by an adult actor, he flirts, he moves with confidence at times. But so much of his blocking and body language feels so childlike that I don't consider it to be accidental.
The leaning against Diana. The insistence of clinging. The way he curls up in her area. The way she touches him sometimes feels less like "mother and adult son" and more like she is holding onto a child never got to grow up.
Because Gabe never emotionally grew up. He’s frozen at the moment Diana lost him, even if this version of him ages in her mind. He’s this impossible contradiction: an 18-year-old full of the dependency, neediness, and emotional gravity of a little child who still needs his mother for everything.
I also find Gabe’s relationship with Dan that much more creepy. In “I’m Alive,” Gabe places himself in close proximity, almost in a threat zone, between Diana and Dan. The line “I’ll hurt you” in which he immediately addresses Dan also directly turns to Diana and says “I’ll heal you” feels possessive in a way beyond mere resentment. It’s almost like Gabe sees himself as the person Diana really needs, and Dan as the person trying to take her from him.
What completely destroys me, though, is what actually happens in “I Am the One (Reprise).”
Once Diana is out, Gabe is completely defeated. Not pissed or smug or manipulative so much as broken.
Then as soon as Dan begins singing in honor of Diana, Gabe looks towards his father and suddenly the entire energy shifts.
“I am the one who knows you / I am the one you fear / I am the one who’s always been here / I am the one who’ll heal you.”
At first, Jack Wolfe’s portrayal is almost appalling. Behind Dan, he looms as a shadow, a monster and kind of the serial killer, and every time his face sinks he feels this sort of weight of grief and guilt he has no other option but to confront.
In “I know you told her that I’m not worth a damn,” he’s particularly bitter, threatening, in that sense that he wants Dan to confront everything he’s spent years trying not to see.
But then it changes. As the song goes on, Gabe no longer feels threatening; he becomes desperate. When he clutches onto Dan, that doesn’t register with me as violence, it speaks to pleading. Like: see me. Please see me, Dad.
And how Dan actually tries to fight his son off physically hurts so much because Gabe just clings. And there’s something almost painfully childlike about it.
The scene of Gabe grabbing Dan’s shirt is actually like that moment that feels like baby grasping reflex, that instinctual grabbing a parent to not let them leave a parent.
And then Dan moves away and Gabe pursues and pulls after him with everything he has while they sing, “I tried pretending I don’t give a damn,” and Gabe interjects “but you’ve always known who I am.”
And then Dan finally calls his name. “Gabriel.” The first and only one time we hear Gabe’s actual name spoken in the whole show.
And Jack Wolfe’s entire performance shifts in that moment. His eyes go big, his voice softens, and all of the swagger and menace goes away. For one split second he doesn’t feel like the manipulative ghost of this world or this incarnation of trauma, he feels like a kid who’s learned his father finally saw him for what he is.
It’s, literally, one of the most stunning and tearful acts of acting in the whole proshot.
I truly feel like the proshot leans more into the tragedy of Gabe not being a mere memory, he’s a lifelong interruption of development. A child forever mired in grief suspended in despair.