Review 13 The Musical

13 The Musical
Music & Lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Book By Dan Elish & Robert Horn

Your Town Becomes Our Town
http://bit.ly/13themusical

There's a young newcomer in an Indiana town at Dan Quayle Junior High and within this institution's walls are the jocks, the popular girls (aka mean girls), the nerds and the geeks - and now there's Evan.

13 is probably every fish-out-of-water comedy drama/sitcom and middle and high school musical you've ever seen (or not seen) with a touch of South Park to boot.

Yet this is a true children's musical -  all the roles are the age of the title - and the show therefore relies on the charm of its cast.

Luckily the present production has a cast, directed and skilfully choreographed by Ewan Jones, with spadefuls of it, even as the show itself lays on the clichés in digger truck loads.

Evan is just about to turn 13 and apart from a zit or two, life seems unproblematic in metropolitan Manhattan. Then pow! His parents divorce and kapow! His mother whisks him off, for unexplained reasons, to Appleton, Indiana.

At 13 such problems may be magnified into a horror movie in teenage minds (there's Carrie, that other high school musical to verify that). 

So we follow Evan, hailed and then derided as "the Brain" and two other young misfit Indiana natives, Patrice and Archie, in their various The Wonder Years' missteps and victories until everyone gets their priorities sorted and are ready to start on the business of Life with a capital L.

Milo Panni makes an exceptionally cute Evan who finds himself the victim of his own schemes to make himself popular. Madeline Banbury as fellow outcast Patrice proves a polished, confident performer right from her first solo "The Lamest Place In The World".

Ethan Quinn, previously seen in Ragtime, is an engagingly kooky Archie, a cross between Tiny Tim, the lame boy in the Pied Piper of Hamelin and a dark-humoured stand up comedian in "Get Me What I Need".and "Terminal Illness".

There's able support from Lewis Ledlie as the school jock and Chloe Endean as the school's cheerleading object of desire. Isabelle Pappas also delivers the goods as the jealous friend whose power of rumour mongering in "It Can't Be True" would be the envy of many an underhand politician 

There's an entertaining-in-its-own-right backdrop (along the lines of Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover) design from Tom Paris and excellent lighting and sound from Edward Pagett and Andrew Johnson.   

Now the nitpicking.This production embraces the conventional tropes of the high school genre, life-and-soul-of-the-party popularity, "All Hail The Brain!", finding who your true friends are. "

But maybe the clever ceremonial but heartfelt message and juxtaposition in Becoming A Man in the midst of acrimonious divorcing parents "I don't know what a man means/The rule book grows, but noone knows/What all the rules allow" and the final "A Little More Homework to do"  become a bit lost.

There was also a bit of unevenness in diction with a couple of the male leads at the beginning which did wear away as the show progressed. There was certainly a good balance between Chris Ma's four-piece band of keyboards, guitar, bass and drums.

But this is  TLT and her (sole) automotive clique member being picky, This is an intricate show, needing spot-on timing, mastered well by an accomplished young cast.

It's certainly an enjoyable show with enough edge (especially in the light of current events in the USA) to keep a wide age range entertained during the school summer holidays and it's a green light. 

Review Consensual

Consensual 
By Evan Placey

Cuckoo In The Nest
http://bit.ly/consensualNYT
 
Along to the Ambassadors Theatre off Shaftesbury Avenue for the coming generation and the production of Consensual by Anglo-Canadian playwright Evan Placey, developed with the  National Youth Theatre Repertory Company.

And it all revolves around  teacher Diane (an excellent Lauren Lyle) as she navigates the classroom minefield and her relationship with pupil Freddie (Oscar Porter-Brentford growing in confidence as the play progressed) against a background of sexually charged music and media. Diane's subject being PSHE.

PSHE???

It's many years since TLT's schooldays when she and her 11+ contemporaries indulged in minor vandalism changing with the inky nibs of their cartridge pens  the title of text book The Road To Latin to The Road To Eating ... Anyway,  according to the first sentence in the Wikipedia entry PHSE was created in 1990 by Harry Styles.

In case you hadn't realised,  we think this may be the online equivalent of TLT's textbook graffiti (catch it, before someone corrects it, now we've pointed it out!).

PSHE stands for Personal, Social, Health And Economic, part of the National Curriculum since 2000, and by the look of it covering - just about everything which isn't otherwise in the syllabus. 

In TLT'S day, teachers taught the content of books. Now it looks like they have to teach - life or something like it. 

But isn't this often what a good play covers, personal, social, health and economic - in short life?

Directed by Pia Furtado with original accompanying music by Jim Hustwit, the play begins with pupils, seated in school chairs, their backs to us, as an audience. Before they break out from passive consumers to actors with, to use a cliché of youth theatre but in this case true, raw energy.   

The action takes place in two time zones. A drink in the pub in the present day. Bank employee Freddie accuses his former teacher 29 year old Diane, now heavily pregnant with her second child, of grooming and having sex with him seven years previously when he was a troubled 15 year old. 

 And Freddie has made a statement to police. 

Diane, at the time a teaching assistant, denies everything and this obviously catches the currency of the times. 

Meanwhile in her class there are swirling theoretical discussions amongst the kids intertwined with their personal insecurities, surrounded by porn, computer games and aggressive competition. 

Outside the classroom, the income tax affairs of Jake (Cole Edwards) Freddie's car mechanic brother  and Diane's well-connected husband Pete (Conor Neaves), enough of a new man to don a red apron for housework when necessary, tangle up to shape the conclusion of the case. A sub plot with a Pastoral Assistant Mary (Megan Parkinson) and sexually precocious schoolgirl Georgia (Grace Surey) mirrors Diane's and Freddie's tangled story as the scenes flash past us.

And the original charge? Innocence, criminality, wilful negligence, entrapment? Sex as a contract between two parties signifying consent or a battlefield in a larger arena?

Crouching below the stage, the students (after all maybe Sondheim got it just about right about children) watching like nesting chicks. Participants, a Greek chorus, a jury,  a paying audience consuming edited entertainment or any of these changing at will?

As we learn what may be the truth of the fatal attraction in the bedsit second act with its deliberately more traditional staging, Cecilia Carey's set design and costumes referencing another age give us a clue that all may not be as it seems.  

So lots of (satisfying) question marks in a filmic play by Evan Placey  reflective and self-reflexive channelling the concerns and vulnerable characters of the screen-led age, energetically and perceptively handled by ensemble cast and director, with Lauren Lyle giving a central absorbing performance as Diane. An amber/green light.