Alice Ripley, center, with AaronTveit, left, and J. Robert Spencer in "Next to Normal."
Photo by Joan Marcus.

"Next to Normal," the Broadway musical by Tom Kitt (music) and Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics), has won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for drama, it was announced Monday.

The musical, about debilitating grief and mental illness in a suburban family, will make a tour stop at St Paul's Ordway Center next season (May 10-22, 2011). The Broadway production was directed by Michael Greif, who also helmed the world premiere of Tony Kushner's "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide" at the Guthrie last year.

The Pulitzer citation called "Next to Normal" "a powerful rock musical that...expands the scope of subject matter for musicals."

That this show won was a surprise to many, including some on the Pulitzer jury that was chaired by Los Angeles theater critic Charles McNulty and included Hedy Weiss of the Chicago Sun-Times and playwright Nilo Cruz, who won a Pulitzer for "Anna in the Tropics."

The way the Pulitzers work is that a jury of experts forwards finalists to the Pulitzer board, which then selects a winner from that culled list. This year's jury narrowed the field to "The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity," a work about wrestling by Minneapolis-based Jerome Foundation Fellow Kristoffer Diaz that opened Friday at Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis; "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo," Rajiv Joseph's play about the Iraq war; and "In the Next Room or the vibrator play," by Sarah Ruhl.

Joan Marcus, Star Tribune

But the board is not bound by those recommendations and can freely choose anything it likes. This year, it chose "Next To Normal," which opened a year ago on Broadway and won three Tony Awards, including best orchestration and a trophy for Alice Ripley, who played the mother who loses it.

The Pulitzer board reached beyond the drama jury's picks before. The same thing happened in 2007, when the board chose "Rabbit Hole" over the finalists suggested by that year's jury. (Full disclosure: this writer served on that jury.)

That year, there was public fretting about the relevance of the Pulitzers for arts and letters in general and the drama prize in particular and whether or not the drama prize was a leading or lagging indicator. This year, it seems that the winner and the finalists seem to all push the field forward, even if "Next to Normal" was a dark horse.

Jury chair McNulty wrote a spirited piece on the board's selection, faulting the board's stodginess, historic errors and geographic bias in favor of plays that are produced in New York.

"Does anyone really believe that 'Next to Normal' would have been chosen had it been submitted when it was at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.?"