'13': A sweet show by and about kids
NEW YORK - The new musical called 13 is every bit as sweet as your first kiss. And maybe even as memorable.
NEW YORK - The new musical called
13
is every bit as sweet as your first kiss. And maybe even as memorable.
It opened last night on a Broadway stage filled with teenagers - both the 13-member cast and the accompanying musicians range in age from 12 to 16. And by the time its 90 minutes pass, a child shall lead them has a fresh theatrical meaning.
You couldn't ask for a more tightly constructed musical, this riff on teenage life in contemporary small-town America as told by a transplanted Manhattan boy. It's savvy and satisfying, with enough style to fully charm adults and speak eloquently to kids; my guess is, it'll be a big holiday ticket.
The premise of 13 is that American kids, with G-rated values and PG-rated social customs, live in an R-rated culture and are besieged by X-rated desires - no matter whether they're from the Upper West Side or the Upper Susquehanna. Given all that, the show is almost uncannily wholesome for Broadway.
On the flip side, it can also be wonderfully politically incorrect in, say, the way one kid talks (or here, sings) about another's illness.
The show's clever book, by Dan Elish and Robert Horn (TV's Designing Women), wisely takes a backseat to Jason Robert Brown's music and lyrics. Almost all the action happens in those snappy songs, which move the plot forward like a burst of hormones.
Brown - who wrote the score for Parade, which won him a Tony, Songs for a New World and The Last Five Years - is decades older than the teens who sing his words, but he's nailed the language and sentiment, making 13 a stark juxtaposition to Spring Awakening, the intense Broadway chronicle of stifled teens.
The kids in 13 are anything but repressed; they the bomb, as they say nowadays, but without Spring Awakening's fatal explosions. They're also, as in many musicals, blatant stereotypes, manipulated to work because here we feel so connected to them.
What do you want when you're 13? they ask. For Evan Goldman, it's getting through his bar mitzvah, in which a Jewish boy leads a prayer service and thus becomes a man. "I'm becoming a man," he sings. "I don't know what 'a man' really means. . . . No one tells all us scared in-betweens."
Just before his bar mitzvah, and the perfect party he wants, his parents split and he moves with his mom to small-town Indiana. In Jeremy Sams' fluid staging, the story is a yin/yang of jubilation and desperation on David Farley's fun set and with Christopher Gattelli's simple, effective choreography.
Evan is the delightful Graham Phillips, with a face like a pubescent, innocent Mick Jagger. The nice Catholic girl-next-door is Allie Trimm, whose clear singing voice transports a teenager's optimism.
Eric M. Nelsen is the mop-haired bully, Delaney Moro the girl of his dreams, and Elizabeth Egan Gillies the schemer who wants him. Aaron Simon Gross turns in a lovely performance as a boy with a degenerative disease. The supporting cast knows how to make everyone look good. Ah, to be a kid again.
13
Playing at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St., New York. Tickets: $76.50-$121.50. Information: 1-800-432-7250 or www.13themusical.com. EndText