Porthouse’s marvelous ‘Next to Normal’ is everything but entertaining Bob Abelman Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal Member, American Theatre Critics Association Porthouse Theatre patrons still enchanted by the wonderfully effervescent, welcomingly escapist, highly entertaining production of “Anything Goes” are likely to experience severe vertigo during Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt’s musical “Next To Normal,” now on stage. In addition to its multiple 2009 Tony Awards, the show won a 2010 Pulitzer Prize. That year’s Pulitzer for feature writing went to The Washington Post for its haunting story about parents who accidentally kill their children by forgetting them in cars. A Pulitzer in theater suggests a similarly serious, thought-provoking, buzz-killing enterprise. The musical is about a contemporary American family crippled by mental disease. It offers a portrait of a chronically manic-depressive, delusional mother and how this disease infiltrates and infects her compassionate husband and teenage daughter. The production, directed by Jim Weaver as if its characters’ lives depended on it, is emotionally gripping from start to finish. So gripping, in fact, that you forget to blink, you forget to breathe, and the sound you hear underscoring the orchestration is the audience’s gasping. For more of this article, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/bob_abelman/