Picture: Roy Beusker and Annemieke van der Togt
The Prom was reviewed at the Carré Theatre, Amsterdam.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
As part of an extensive tour of Netherlands, the first European production of The Prom had a stop in January at the beautiful Carré Theatre in Amsterdam.
The original musical started out as a tryout at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia in 2016, before transferring to Broadway’s Longacre Theatre in 2018, where it played 23 previews and 309 official performances.
The musical follows four self-involved Broadway actors lamenting the failure of their last show, a musical about Eleanor Roosevelt, who then travel to the conservative town of Edgewater, Indiana, to help a lesbian high-schooler who wants to take her girl to the prom. That thin plot, in a dual storyline, is an excuse for quite a few feel-good production numbers, which made it a good choice for TV musical comedy in 2020 despite its short Broadway run.
Although there was a Swiss-German version in December 2021 – which changed the location from Edgewater, Indiana, to Hinterland, Switzerland, with the four actor-characters not from Broadway but from Hamburg (Germany’s musical theatre capital) – the Dutch adaptation, now touring in the Netherlands and produced by Ruud de Graaf and Hans Cornelissen, is the first production outside North America of the musical as it was originally written.
The essential problem with the piece is that its clever book by Bob Martin – who also wrote and acted as Man in Chair in a much better musical parody billed as a musical within a comedy, the award-winning Drowsy Chaperone – has two storylines that don’t always meld. Written in collaboration with Chad Beguelin, it has the distinction of not being based on a famous movie or play, which is almost always the case nowadays, but it aims at two different audiences: mature musical lovers, who may appreciate the send up of Broadway performers’ opportunistic narcissism, and young audiences, bound to be more interested in the teenage drama than in the self-quoting Broadway divas. The only thread holding the two storylines is some assumed LGBT+ cultural overlap between the very different worlds of theatre sophisticates and queer teenagerhood in America’s heartland, which explains why Ryan Murphy chose to adapt this musical for Netflix.
Most of the punchlines are delivered by the main character Dee Dee Allen, here performed by the ever-excellent premiere Dutch leading lady Pia Douwes, who has been the lead in about every major musical put on in the Germanic world.
The rest of the cast, particularly Joke de Kruijf as Angie, the Roxie wannabe, is top-notch and supported by an equally effective ensemble, shining in the Act II opening Fosse tribute ‘Zazz’, enhanced by a chorus of Derby-adorned silhouettes.
Elsewhere, Chiara Re’s choreography doesn’t quite achieve the polish of Nicholaw’s original dance staging, which he re-created for the movie version, except for the finale, ‘It’s Time to Dance’, a well-done crowd pleaser that leaves the audience on un upbeat note.
Though not a perfect musical, The Prom, with its tuneful and quite hummable music by Matthew Sklar, would be worthy of a UK tour and perhaps, only if it could find a cast as starry as the Netflix movie, a West End run.
Patrick Honoré
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