[ad_1]
Among the bright, bouncy, and wildly contagious musical numbers that are a big part of what makes Ryan Murphy “The Prom” such an old-fashioned and newfangled blast, one of the show’s highlights is “Love Thy Neighbor,” which Trent (Andrew Rannells), a struggling Broadway drama queen who has landed on the distant planet known as the small town of Indiana, sings with a group of pious and neat Central American teenagers from James Madison High School . They’re in a food court in a mall, where one of the students says to Trent, “We don’t have a theater program,” which makes Trent crack, “That explains your general lack of empathy. . “
He’s not kidding. The kids are united for banning their senior colleague Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman) from taking his girlfriend, Alyssa (Ariana DeBose), to the ball; he is about to teach them an extremely rousing lesson in tolerance. The students insist that they are good, gentle Christian children who all go to church. But Trent points out that there are a ton of rules they break every day – that they choose the Bible carefully. As he begins to sing, he amusingly ticks off transgressions neither of them thinks twice about living: tattoos, lost virginity, masturbation, divorce. Then he gets to the heart of the matter: “There is no way to part, / What rules you can break … Love for your neighbor wins out over all!” The number, which looks like something from the “Book of Mormon” crossed with “High School Musical,” conveys its message in no-frills clarity, as Trent and the kids sing, dance and flip the lights in fantastic ways.
In other words: message received. By the characters and the audience. It sounds pretty conventional, but as the beat picks up and the dancing climaxes, there is something about the funny crazy break of it all, the way the song turns into a gospel revival in a merged mall with an overflowing chorus line that evokes the athletic spirit of Gene Kelly, which makes the message… well, sing. Yes! Love thy neighbor. It’s a thought from a long time ago that America needs to hear again, and “The Prom” is an effusive, fast, glittery purple delivery system for it. The film has a universalist spirit which is linked to its very form. It turns the good thing into a bubbly and exhilarating showbiz.
As a musical, “The Prom”, written by Bob Martin and Chad Beguilin, with songs by Beguilin and Matthew Sklar, premiered on Broadway in October 2019, where it ran for just under a year. I never got to see it, so I got into the cold movie version, but of course I saw “Glee,” the TV musical series that made Ryan Murphy an uber-brand, and this movie. takes inspiration from the best impulses of this show – the dizzying spontaneity of youth quivering with it – which it combines with something I would call a sort of cathartic square. Over the past 50 years, you could say that musical theater itself has come out of the closet, as a number of writers and composers who once should have confined themselves to telling stories in a ‘right’ context didn’t no longer needed to do it. “The Prom” is a shining example. It’s a musical about what intolerance does – the way it torments and crushes individuals, in this case forcing a gay teenager to hide her love.
Yet while “The Prom” is a proudly liberated musical, it’s also such a boxy musical, with a vibe that dates back to the glowing, healthy musicals of the studio system, that it almost reconfigures the meaning of the mainstream. . I very much enjoyed the insider theatrical knowledge, the PG-13 entertainment, and the fashion beards, but in a strange way, it’s the inner perpendicularity of “The Prom” – the fact that this is now a mainstream event – that’s the most adventurous thing about it. There are times when the film seems to have reinvented classic Hollywood for the 21st century.
The opening number is a chic pretense. We’re on the street outside a Times Square theater, where Dee Dee Allen (Meryl Streep), a legendary, high-maintenance Broadway Grandma, and Barry Glickman (James Corden), her co-star in a new musical titled “Eleanor!” (the two play Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt), celebrate the fact that they’ve made it through opening night, and they think they’re having a hit. The number, “Changing Lives,” appears to be an ironic toast to Broadway at its most exaggerated: a celebration of this utterly miserable idea for a wildly misinterpreted musical, served with shameless and glitzy “showmanship.” But then the cast and crew head to Sardi’s, where they read the New York Times review, which confuses the show to be each of those things. He even accuses the actors of “narcissism”. This is a pretty sneaky joke, as it lets audiences know that the deadly diva’s demeanor and the flamboyant bitchery of theater bugs we are about to witness in “The Prom” are, to theirs. way, ridiculous. It is normal for us to laugh not only with it but with it.
With their careers in tatters, Dee Dee and Barry, picking up the actor-slash-bartender Trent and Angie (Nicole Kidman) the lifelong backing singer and aspiring principal woman, decide to pool their resources and save their stars. running along with a social cause. Rejecting the hunger in the world as too great, they attach themselves to the case of Emma, which made the national news. It seems that her desire to make her prom date and just be the person she is caused a lot of confusion, which resulted in the PTA, led by scolding Puritan Mrs. Greene (Kerry Washington), canceling the ball. Dee Dee and her crew will go to Indiana to put things back in order!
It’s a deliberately absurd fish-out-of-the-water premise, with Dee Dee and Barry planting their stage trophies in front of a motel front desk clerk to get a suite or (in Barry’s case) a ” cabin ”, which the motel does not begin to have. These neurotically pampered townspeople have arrived in a small town where the fanciest restaurant is Applebee’s. Plus, they don’t care what they’re supposed to be there for! It’s just a publicity stunt – which sounds like an idea Preston Sturges would have dreamed up in the Instagram age. The reason this works is that the creators of “The Prom”, returning to what John Waters brought in the original “Hairspray” (1988) film, concocted a liberal message film that scathingly satirizes the films with a liberal message. “The Prom” is a musical that has its Hollywood nobility and eats it too, has its camp high and eats it too. It makes for a silly but tasty dessert.
After Dee Dee and her crew make it to a school reunion, Dee Dee requisitions the action by singing “It’s Not About Me,” a song so luscious in its self-delusion that it could be the Hymn of the Warriors of social justice. Streep delivers it with an operatic aplomb that leaves you laughing with joy. The actress has long been celebrated for her chic tweets in the movie “Mamma Mia!” movies, but as much as I revere “Mamma Mia!” as a musical, Streep’s character, as written, has never been that much. Dee Dee, with her drooping vanity and everyone’s life force, is the kind of imperious high priestess of illusion that Streep can put her teeth into, and she does. Especially when Tom Hawke (Keegan-Michael Key), the handsome high school principal, turns out to be one of his big fans. Streep’s Dee Dee is as addicted to admiration as Blanche DuBois, but with a brassy awareness of her own lifespan. She is the spirit of theatrical celebrity incarnate.
There is no denying that “The Prom”, like “Glee” and the “High School Musical” films, is on some level a consciously assembled set of happy and brilliant cinematic and musical clichés. Still, Murphy, working with cinematographer Matthew Libatíque, gives the film an intoxicating visual sweep, and there’s an alluring spirit to the dialogue. “I had to declare bankruptcy after my self-production ‘Notes on a Scandal’,” says Barry, Corden’s sad bag, and in 12 words, we glimpse an actor’s life and his failed dream.
Corden may be criticized in some quarters for portraying Barry as a gay stereotype, but like Christopher Guest in “Waiting for Guffman,” he sinks so deep into the character’s quizzical recklessness that it gives him a three-dimensional essence. He is deeply funny and touching. Streep is sensational, and Key brings a disarming sincerity to his role as a lonely high school lifer who, when Dee Dee is around, seems to be waking up from a dream. He takes her to Applebee’s and sings a song, “We Look to You,” about being a Broadway fan who is so ingenuous it’s almost shocking. Nicole Kidman, all heat erased, gets a big number, the Fosse-esque “Zazz”, and even though she does it charmingly, it’s a little cranky, at least for me, to see Bob Fosse transformed into a brand / meme. / signifier.
“The Prom” is truly a “two Americas” film, and part of its luster is that it portrays the conservative Midwest with dignity, even as it attacks the impulses of bigotry. Regarding the issue of intolerance, the film does not give a quarter, but it separates the sinner from the sin. Jo Ellen Pellman, who sings in a singing soprano, gives Emma a quivering radiance, a desire to be herself that is impolitic and, in a funny way, that makes the film impolitic. She and Alyssa, who is Mrs. Greene’s daughter, are not “fighting for the right” to attend a dance in high school. The film takes this right for granted. They are fighting for the right to love and be loved like anyone else. The timing for “The Prom” seems karmically right, as it is the meeting of the two Americas. Whatever the fate of the movie – just another movie on Netflix? Or Oscar candidate? (I believe one or the other) – it’s a story worth telling, and one that we need to hear.
[ad_2]
Source link