13
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Simi Valley Performing Arts Center
Thru Sept. 18
RECOMMENDED
This 2008 musical (with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, book by Dan Eilish and Robert Horn) is aimed at 13-year-olds and performed almost entirely by teens. (Netflix has just released a movie adaptation). The tropes within its theme of pre-adolescent angst — including its stock boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl again arc — somehow emerge here as something larger, approaching wisdom.
This is largely due to an endearing ensemble which, along with Barry Pearl’s staging, employs charisma and intelligence to cut against the clichés. And when they don’t cut against them, the actors gleefully traffic in self-parody. The voices are largely wobbly but the dancing, with Michelle Elkin’s gymnastic choreography, is top of the line. So much so that, by evening’s end, the company is rippling the theater walls with its skilled vivacity.
The wisdom part comes from the show’s morality-play aspects, which offer sage life lessons to teens that can apply for a lifetime: Beware duplicity; It’s not worth selling your soul to belong to the tribe of cool kids; Beware the pack mentality, its rewards of “belonging” mask underlying viciousness; Celebrate the virtues of friendship (“When you’re at your worst, your friend’s the first one there.”); Avoid the pitfalls of needing to belong and, worse, needing to be popular.
The play’s protagonist, Evan Goldman (Ethan Daugherty) — the only Jewish kid in Appleton, Indiana — has no problem betraying the spurned-by-the-schoolkids girl, Patrice (a smart, stoic interpretation by Mia Akemi Brown), who bonds with him the moment he arrives from NYC in the wake of his parents’ divorce. If he invites her to his bar mitzvah party, the cool kids, led by school quarterback (of course) Brett Sampson (Lucas Panczel), will boycott it — the first in a stream of blackmails. The worst of his fears is that he won’t be popular.
The only adult actor in the show, (David Shukiar appearing onscreen), portrays a local rabbi who sings via incantation: “What would it matter if you weren’t popular. . . Be a man.”
Five musicians led by musical director Lloyd Cooper romp through an array of musical stylings — from a 1930s soft-shoe-and-cane routine (with an able assist by Elkin’s choreography), to an echo of The Ink Spots, to 1950s rock motifs, to repackaged Sondheim, to something approaching but not quite reaching rap.
The insiders/outsiders themes gets a cameo in the form of Archie Walker (nicely played by Peter Umipig) who suffers from terminal muscular dystrophy while pining for the insipid cheerleader, Kendra (Olivia Zenetzis). Kendra’s “best friend” Lucy (beautifully handled by Calista Loter, who could be a fashion model) lives up to the old Jewish quip: “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”
The plot contains a storm of bad behavior from which the musical’s higher truths emerge — truths applicable to situations far beyond the musical’s home turf, The Dan Quayle Middle School (that’s pretty funny). In the wake of that storm stand Ethan, Patrice and Archie, crooning a repeated anthem in harmony, “One foot in front of the other, just keep walking.” When that’s sung by a kid with a crutch from muscular dystrophy, this musical becomes more potent than it first appears.
Panic Productions at the Simi Valley Performing Arts Center, 3050 E. Los Angeles Ave., Simi Valley; Thurs.-Fri., 8 pm; Sat.-Sun., 2 & 8 pm; thru Sept. 18. https://panicprouctions.org Running time: Two hours with one intermission
