Cygnet Theatre opens its new season's centerpiece production Saturday, staging the Tony Award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen at its still-new home in Arts District Liberty Station, and the company says it wants the show to do more than entertain. Previews begin Friday, with the full run continuing through October 4, and the story of a lonely high schooler swept into a social media frenzy arrives at a moment when local data show San Diego teenagers are struggling with isolation and sadness in significant numbers.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, director Blake McCarty said the musical addresses loneliness, isolation, grief, truth and identity. McCarty, a Cygnet resident artist, also serves as executive artistic director of Blindspot Collective, a San Diego arts group named the San Diego Union-Tribune's 2020 Theater of the Year for creating works centered on youth and underrepresented communities. That track record of community-engaged theater about young people appears to inform how McCarty is approaching Cygnet's staging of a musical built around a teenager's unraveling.
Dear Evan Hansen, with songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and a book by Steven Levenson, opened on Broadway a decade before this production's debut and has become one of the more scrutinized titles in modern musical theater for its handling of suicide and mental illness. The story follows Evan Hansen, whose letter to himself is discovered after the death of classmate Connor and mistaken for evidence of a friendship that never existed, sending Evan deeper into a web of half-truths involving Connor's sister Zoe, Evan's crush, and classmate Alana Beck, who champions the suicide-awareness Connor Project. Familiar numbers like Waving Through a Window and You Will Be Found carry the show's emotional weight, and the Union-Tribune notes the 2021 film adaptation starring Ben Platt was a box-office disappointment even as the stage musical's reputation persisted.
A Cast Grappling With Honesty and Vulnerability
Aiden Meyndert plays the title character in Cygnet's production and has previously worked with McCarty on Blindspot Collective productions Karaoke Dreams and Dive Bar Time Machine. Meyndert told the Union-Tribune the production is about honesty and vulnerability, and cited a CDC finding that 40% of high school students nationwide had persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, along with a CDC survey showing 20% of high school students reported seriously considering suicide. The rest of the cast includes Tyler Martinez as Connor, Nio Russell as Zoe and Tash Gomez as Alana Beck.
Those national figures Meyndert referenced echo closer to home. The 2024–25 California Healthy Kids Survey found that 23% of San Diego County ninth graders and 26% of eleventh graders reported experiencing chronic feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the school year, according to the San Diego County Office of Education. A May 2026 county Board of Education resolution citing statewide findings reported that 94% of California youth ages 14 to 25 experience mental health concerns in an average month, while 57% of California parents report difficulty obtaining mental health care for their children.
According to the California Child and Adolescent Mental Health Initiative's Youth at the Center Progress Report, California's Child and Adolescent Mental Health Access Portal is designed to increase timely access to mental health care statewide. According to the California Health & Human Services Agency's Behavioral Health Transformation report, more than 1.2 million California adults live with a serious mental illness, while 1 in 13 children has a serious emotional disturbance.
Teens Are Already Reaching Out for Help
The demand for support shows up in crisis-line data too. San Diego teens contacted the peer-to-peer Teen Line more than 4,000 times between January and August 2025, with calls specifically regarding suicide rising from 13% in 2024 to 17% in 2025, per data from Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services reported by KPBS Public Media. That surge underscores why a musical built around a teenager's isolation and a manufactured narrative of friendship has resonated with directors like McCarty who work in youth-focused theater.
Cygnet's production became possible after theatrical licensor Music Theatre International officially opened Dear Evan Hansen for regional professional and amateur licensing in December 2025, a shift that let local companies mount their own stagings of a show that ran for 1,672 performances at Broadway's Music Box Theatre and won six 2017 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Original Score, according to Broadway News.
Staged Inside a Converted Naval Building
The production unfolds on the 282-seat proscenium-style Joseph Clayes III Theater, the mainstage inside The Joan — formally the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Performing Arts Center — where Cygnet relocated permanently in September 2025. As San Diego Magazine has reported, the $43.5 million venue adaptively reused Building 178, a former 1940s Naval Base Exchange, into a multi-stage cultural center at 2880 Roosevelt Road. Dear Evan Hansen follows Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in Cygnet's 22nd overall season; Arcadia opened in July 2026.
Liberty Station is the former Naval Training Center San Diego site, where historic buildings and districts have been revitalized through adaptive reuse.
Hoodline previously reported on Cygnet's move from its old venue into the new Liberty Station campus, part of a broader wave of arts and community activity at the historic site. Performances run 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays, 2 and 7 p.m. Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays, with tickets starting at $44 and available through Cygnet Theatre at 619-337-1525.
For readers processing the show's themes, San Diego County operates year-round emergency youth mental health services, including the 24/7 San Diego Access & Crisis Line at 888-724-7240 and the Children and Youth Crisis Stabilization Unit on Third Avenue, according to the County of San Diego.
