Christopher Sieber, Angie Schworer, Beth Leavel, Brooks Ashmanskas and Josh Lamon in The Prom at the Longacre Theatre, New York. Picture: Deen van Meer
The Prom continues at the Longacre Theatre, New York.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
“Straight people like Broadway, too,” says Mr. Hawkins, the very straight, very theatre-loving high school principal in a very small Indiana town.
“You know I’ve heard that,” responds Dee Dee Allen, the fading Broadway star, who is bedazzling him at a lunch in the town’s chain eatery, “but I always thought it was a fairy tale. So to speak.”
The exchange pretty much exemplifies the level of humour in The Prom, the new Broadway musical that wraps a welcome message of inclusion in a worn-out blanket of tired showbiz jokes and weary gay humour.
The show opened in late November, and the stars must have been in extraordinary alignment, gaining it bushelsful of rave reviews. The reviewer at the all-important New York Times fairly gushed, describing the show as “a joyful hoot. With its kinetic dancing, broad mugging and belty anthems, it makes you believe in musical comedy again.”
The show certainly has its assets, especially in its tuneful, fairly traditional score, with music by Matthew Sklar and lyrics by Chad Beguelin.
Beguelin also co-wrote the book with Bob Martin, who had a hit not too many seasons ago with The Drowsy Chaperone. Also adding to the creator credentials is Jack Viertel, credited with “original concept”. In addition to being senior vice-president of the Jujamcyn Theaters company, Viertel is artistic director of the invaluable Encores! series at New York City Center.
Nevertheless, The Prom suffers from its cliched look at homophobic small-town America and its array of familiar, self-deprecating, supposedly inside pokes at Broadway. “Now I know what the original cast of Carrie felt like,” says one of the characters after a particular disastrous turn of events.
Furthermore, the production, under the helm of much lauded director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw, demands an enormous amount of tolerance for the aforementioned “broad mugging” overdone to a fault by its indubitably talented cast, toplined by a squadron of Main Stem veterans.
The show tells of a quintet of Broadway people who journey to the small town in question to come to the aid of a lesbian student, Emma, whose request to bring her girlfriend as a date has resulted in the high school prom being cancelled.
The cancellation was forced by the officious Mrs. Greene, head of the Parent-Teachers Association, who doesn’t want her own student daughter and the other children of the town exposed to such deviation from the norm – rules that state dates must be of the opposite sex. A big plot reveal is that had the prom been held, Mrs. Greene’s own daughter, Alyssa, would have been Emma’s secret date.
As you might have guessed, the motives of the Broadway folks in helping Emma are hardly altruistic. Allen has just starred in a musical on the life on Eleanor Roosevelt, a show that has closed abruptly after a vicious skewering by none other than the New York Times.
She is accompanied by Barry Glickman, her co-star who played Franklin D; Trent Oliver, a serious actor who between gigs was working as a waiter at the Eleanor Roosevelt woeful opening night party; Angie, who relates bitterly that she’s just quit after being in the chorus of Chicago for 20 years and never been asked to play Roxie Hart, and Sheldon Saperstein, the hard-working press agent. They hope their rallying around Emma will mean loads of publicity to revive their sagging careers and prove to the nation that actors are not narcissists.
Things at first do not go well, as the outsiders foment situations that only heap more discomfort and humiliation on the shy and soulful Emma. But eventually, the show folks’ humanity comes through. They encourage Emma to find the strength to tell her story via the internet and win over widespread sympathy, and finally, they even cough up their credit cards to pay for a prom welcoming all varieties of sexual persuasion.
And happiness reigns supreme in Edgewater, Indiana, as the mature showbiz folks join the kids in a final round of Nicholaw’s highly-energised arm and leg-pumping dance. (Yes, the show gives us yet another display of high school hijinks, so prominent these days on New York stages.)
If only the production or the writing had allowed any sense of reality to creep into these characters along with the opportunities it offers to show off their musical talents. As Dee Dee, Beth Leavel demonstrates the strength and presence that has carried her through a dozen other Broadway shows and won her a Tony for her work in The Drowsy Chaperone. She belts out her 11 o’clock number, ‘The Lady’s Improving,’ with unquenchable pizzazz.
While taking Barry Glickman to stratospheric levels of feyness, Brooks Ashmanskas impresses with breathtaking lighter-than-air movement in his dance numbers. Christopher Sieber, playing Oliver, also shows off his ample song-and-dance man skills, and Angie Schworer’s Angie makes a strong case for the in-depth talents of Broadway’s gypsies.
A couple of subdued performances by Michael Potts as Mr. Hawkins and Caitlin Kinnunen as Emma somewhat – but hardly totally – relieve the irksome exaggerations that dominate elsewhere.
Still, there is the score to relish, with its flavour of vintage musical comedy. Kinnunen’s Emma gets two particularly affecting ballads, expressing the character’s inner yearnings, ‘Dance with You’ and ‘My Unruly Heart’. Potts delivers a gently touching description of his feeling for actors in his song to Dee Dee, ‘We Look to You’, while Ashmanskas commands the stage whirling about like a will-o-the-wisp in ‘Barry is Going to the Prom’.
Angie gets her big moment with ‘Zass’, in which she tells the diffident Emma how Bob Fosse encouraged a Roxie Hart understudy to take over at short notice. Among other highlights is the gospel-flavoured ‘Love Thy Neighbour’ with Sieber’s Oliver trying to get the town’s kids to do just that. Larry Hochman’s orchestrations enrich the musicality.
On the optics side, the set design by Scott Pask and the costumes by Ann Roth and Matthew Pachtman take us credibly from the glitz of Broadway to the hominess of middle America.
But in total, The Prom, like so many other events in teenage life, is a mish-mash of both pleasure and pain.
Ron Cohen
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