Playwright: book, music & lyrics by Tim Acito and Alexander Dinelaris. At: Bailiwick Repertory Theatre at the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont. Phone: 773-883-1090; $25-$30. Runs through: Nov. 4
Just in time for the fall, a musical with the potential to become an after-school special: the setting is a squeaky-clean (but ethnically-diverse) high school, the score of eminently-hummable ditties repeat the word ‘love’ more times than Hallmark’s on Valentine’s Day, and damned if all this isn’t in service of an uplifting sermon on sex-pref tolerance!
Zanna is a teenage boy endowed with cupid-like magical powers, his mission at Heartsville High to see that every Jack has his—uh, Jack, and every Jill, her—um, Jill. For same-sex allegiances are the norm in this universe, where the Chess Club champion outshines the football team’s captain and the girls on the Bull-Riding squad are the class leaders. But then the drama club decides to stage a controversial play addressing the question of whether heterosexuals should be permitted to enlist in our country’s military forces, and the two young actors playing the major roles begin to feel a stirring that dare not speak its name. Will Zanna come to the aid of the gender-crossed lovers and in doing so, risk his own status?
Lightweight to begin with, this is a show in need of further development: the déjà vu generated by its references to earlier musical-pop styles (including LeRoy Van Dyke’s motor-mouthed country & western classic, ‘The Auctioneer’) and family-fare reliables—Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, et al.—will likely be lost on adolescent audiences. But the script gives the impression of having been trimmed from the wrong end, its leisurely progress at odds with its too many reversals crammed into the last few minutes before we get our happy-happier-happiest ending.
A play in need of only one more rewrite is still a good play, however. Throwaway lines like ‘Omigod! My Moms are gonna freak!’ and an anthem whose chorus starts as ‘We’re gonna go STRAIGHT to heaven!’, only to alter itself to ‘We’re gonna go RIGHT to heaven!’ pull more than their own weight in redeeming the ingenuousness of Tim Acito and Alexander Dinelaris’ vision. Certainly the cast, assembled by director Elisa Woodruff and led by Chicago newcomer Ira Spector as the jolly Zanna, exhibit a sprightly charm as wholesome as ice cream, but the polemics never get sticky at the brisk pace set by Allison Hendrix and Phil Martin on keyboards and percussion, respectively.