ACCESS ALL AREAS (COVER EDITION) with Marcus Harman ✨ I’m so mega excited to launch this part of the series with someone who’ve wanted to follow around for over a year! Marcus and I met at ‘The Show Must Go On’ concerts last June and we connected from the moment we said hi. From that moment I said I wanted to come to Dear Evan Hansen to see what he gets up to before and during the show. Marcus is the alternate for Evan Hansen which means that he is in the building every day, but has 2 scheduled shows per week. He’s in the building just in case Sam needs to go off and does both of the matinees in the week because it’s a very very hard show to perform, especially twice a day. And he also does the shows when Sam is on holiday. He has been with the show since before the pandemic and has done around 100 shows over all. He luckily never had to go on midway through a show. For the people who’ve seen the show, the role of Evan goes on quite a journey and is very difficult to just step into. He rehearsed with the rest of the cast in New York City and then had the regular rehearsal process in London. But because he is the alternate he wasn’t in the ‘regular’ rehearsals and watched Sam’s direction and then made things his own in his own time. When I got to his dressing room he was doing some physical warming up (yoga) and vocal warming up, which made me laugh because he was walking around holding this tongue with a t-shirt so he could do a proper warm up for the big songs. He then said that he most of the time sings through ‘Waving Through A Window’ and ‘If I Could Tell Her’ because these are the hardest songs. Evan is a character that has a broken arm so he walks around with a cast on his arm for the entire first half of the show. It’s a new cast every show and all real. His dresser gets it on him 20minutes before the show and it’s ready after around 10minutes. In the interval they cut it off his arm which is not even 1 minute work haha. It was such a big honour to follow Marcus around as I realise that the character is so hard to play and having me in his space must have been interesting, but I’m so thankful he and the team said yes.