I couldn't stay. No matter how much I thought I could. I wouldn't. I COULDN'T. So I didn't.
Here is my review of what I saw before I walked out of the theatre 20 minutes in.
I think I can, the NAC's presentation of the Dora Mavor Moore award-winning musical that claimed to use hip hop and tap to reach and portray adolescent angst and bullying, was the most stereotypical unoriginal caricaturized portrayal of kids today. It was insulting to the nuanced, sophisticated, intelligent SmartPhone-toting mini-adults I know and see regularly.
I wanna see that musical!
The scene opened with a tap sequence and a promising multi-layered set. The dancing was impressive, even to one unfamiliar with the tap lexicon. Particularly convincing was the character who danced with a limp.
However, the show quickly disintegrated into a series of overused tropes about 10 minutes into the performance. Again, the portrayal of science was reduced to the over-quoted E= mc (squared). And all kinds of disparate concepts were conflated - the writers had clearly either badly parodied science teachers or misunderstood the facts when they wrote the script.
The bullying sequence where "the bully stole my homework but I can't say anything" was once again overused. Stealing homework is the least of kids' worries. When I was mentoring elementary students in high school in the early 2000s, we were dealing with e-bullying, swarmings, gangs, drugs and sexual favours. I think some of those kids wished they could have had their homework stolen instead of enduring some of the experiences they did. Ten years on with the addition of Facebook and Twitter, I can only imagine the challenges of social networking for the socially stunted student or young shunned scholar.
The second problem the company encountered was the lacklustre use of their space. Despite a multi-level set, they spent most of the time tap dancing in formation on the stage.
Then there was the problem of consistency within the world Byfield and Gibson created. It detracted from whatever insight they were trying to communicate about kids today. The kids never spoke. The teacher spoke in her weird, mangled Scottish accent, but the kids moaned and gestured ridiculously. What's the message? Kids have no voice? The inconsistency between human interaction on stage made no sense and it destroyed the willing suspension of disbelief for the reviewer and ultimately undermined the message of empowerment.
The scene with the supposed cheerleader and the boy with the limp droned on too long.
Were I one of the kids in the audience on Saturday night, I would have felt insulted and exasperated that these are still the tropes we think of when we pander to "Youth" theatre. No wonder the NAC Theatre was only half full on a Saturday night. If Peter Hinton wants to keep his theatre full, he had better stop pandering and start envisioning.
Photo Credit: Daniel Alexander, NAC.ca
