I don’t know how I’ve managed to
do it for a major musical, but somehow I’ve avoided all the reviews and almost
all word-of-mouth about Bring It On: The Musical, plus I didn’t really know anything
about its source material or subject matter until I was in the theatre. That
source material is a film comedy and the subject matter has to do with
competing high school cheerleaders.
Highly
unlikely material for me to be liking, but I found myself liking it a lot, not
least because it proves the adage that treatment is everything. Whereas the
hugely overrated (say I) Lysistrata Jones—the
college basketball sex comedy thing which, despite ostensible differences,
seemed to “play in a similar arena”—was obvious, attenuated, a little
smarmy and ultimately exhausting, Bring It On manages to stay relatively fresh for both of its
Acts. The trick to librettist Jeff Whitty’s book (“inspired
by”—I don’t know how inspired by,
but that official distinction
seems a looser credit line than “based on”—a screenplay by Jessica
Bendinger) is that once he introduces the archetypes—to cite
only a few that we meet at the beginning: the good-girl ambitious cheerleader (Taylor
Louderman); the conceited, self-absorbed
cheerleader (Kate Rockwell); the
fat girl wannabe cheerleader consigned to the mascot costume (Ryann
Redmond), among many others—he
wastes little or no time pulling reversals on our expectations: Either they’re
more dimensional than the clichés their types suggest, and/or they’re thrown
into unfamiliar, unexpected situations that force the archetypes to react or
adapt in surprising ways. (I especially admired the treatment of one particular
character played by Gregory Haney:
a transvestite. He’s played, costumed and written to be just noticeable enough,
but—and this is the incredible thing, especially given that this is a
musical about high school students [and ultimately for them, I think, but I’ll
get to that in due course]—no one comments on it. The character, named
Danielle, makes her [?] own reference to it once, and at that it’s implied, but
the otherwise tacit manner in which Danielle’s persuasion is presented speaks
volumes. They trust that we know and don’t need to be told. That
takes a tremendous amount of sophistication and confidence.)
The
score, which mixes songs by composer Tom Kitt and lyricist Amanda Green with
others by composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda (and may include some cross-pollination) doesn’t go
to places quite as new—it tends, quite properly, to park
where the book has driven it—but the music is hip, attractive, and
streetwise; while managing to be both theatrical and bereft of theatrical corn
(by which I mean the ways in which a legit theatre discipline can “round off”
or dilute a pure contemporary imprimatur). As to the lyrics: extreme purists
may wince at some of the false rhyming, but (speaking as a stickler myself)
there’s another kind of purity at work here; the false rhyming is, I believe,
always contained within hip-hop and rap numbers and it’s always a little too
pointed to be taken as lazy or slovenly or as anything but a most deliberately
used device. They seem to exist by way of saying that near-rhymes, arch rhymes
and mischievously bent rhymes are an integral part of the form’s vocabulary,
and indeed—in the context of this show—there’s palpable joy to be
taken in that particular type of verbal smackdown. It wouldn’t sound right if it were Sondheim-neat.
The
direction by Andy Blankenbuehler is skillful
enough in terms of how economically he tells the story and gets his terrific
young cast—whose notable players also include (but aren’t limited to) Adrienne
Warren, Jason Gotay, Elle McLemore and Ariana BeBose—to
define their territory; but his choreography, which includes much high-flipping
of girls, human pyramids and various other forms of stuff that should be
impossible without cables and hydraulics, is often simply breathtaking…and I
mean that literally.
Is
Bring It On for all tastes? Probably
not. There’s a sense in which it
is what it is; you go with the flow or you don’t. I did. But I’m not altogether
sure its producers expect that a traditional all-ages, mostly-adult Broadway
audience will for very long…for at the moment, it’s advertised as having a
strictly limited run. And there’s only one reason why a new, youthful musical
this extravagant and (clearly) lovingly rendered would open with a fixed
closing date: to give it Broadway cred before being made available to schools. Newsies
opened at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New
Jersey similarly—as a response to a generation of young audiences who had
discovered the film on home video, and the advent of some school groups having
staged their own unauthorized adaptations; its critical success and subsequent
transfer to Broadway was an unexpected bonus. I think Bring It On, specifically or coincidentally, is following in its
footsteps. And dance steps. Bring It On, it seems to me, isn’t about Broadway (even though it represents
Broadway at its most skillful). At any rate, it’s not about Broadway as most of
us think of it.
It’s
about the new millennium uses to which Broadway can be put. And given how often
Broadway is (sometimes with justification) painted as a dinosaur refusing to go
gentle into that good night, that’s not such a bad thing. She may have some
life in her yet.
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