Playwright: Music and lyrics by Nick Blaemire, book by James Gardiner. At: Refuge Theatre Project at the Flatiron, 1579 N. Milwaukee Ave. Tickets: 773-342-7691; www.refugetheatre.com; $20. Runs through: Sept. 20
This pocket-sized musical isn’t based on a movie, but feels as if it was—possibly because regarding the past through a nostalgic haze constitutes a major obsession of post-World War II youth culture. Beginning in 1951 with Catcher in the Rye, the artistic refrain of the last 60 years has been beery-teary baby-boom brats howling, “Things is never the same!”
Nick Blaemire and James Gardiner are not of this generation, though. Indeed, both were college freshmen at the time of their first collaboration, barely older than their play’s four teenage chums lingering on their former high school’s athletic field a year after graduating. The ostensible purpose of this rendezvous is to engineer a prank on the football team that once rejected them, but delays in implementation of the plan lead to idle chat and swapping of confidences. Since the Retrospective Reunion literary genre mandates reversals, and fiction permits male characters only one kind of those, we wait to hear which of the lads will announce that he’s gay. This being 2008, his peers greet this revelation with varying degrees of acceptance—all but one, whose unease eventually finds its voice in a misdirected homophobic slur.
Gardiner’s book employs a plethora of obstacles—a journal left conveniently unsecured, a stubbornly uncooperative accomplice—in order to keep his characters interacting for a full 80 minutes, while Blaemire’s songs recall the full-throated emotionality of Stephen Schwartz, Jonathan Larson and even a bit of ’70s-era angry-young Billy Joel. (The satirical “Generation Apathy” and raunchy “We’ve Got Girls” provide lighter moments in the procession of reach-for-the-sky melodies dominating the score.) What justifies the trek to Wicker Park’s Flatiron Building is the quartet of cast-to-age actors and four-piece stageside band, operating under the direction of Matt Dominguez, who deliver their bromantic anthems with a now-or-never conviction conveying the desperate bravado and poignant vulnerability of soon-to-be adults contemplating the abyss that is the rest of their lives.
Whether this will prove sufficient to accomplish Refuge Theatre Project’s goal of attracting “hipsters under 25″—a demographic notorious for embracing impermanence—remains to be seen. In the meantime, playgoers who survey their early years from the perspective of mature hindsight (i.e., geezers like me) may recognize the irresolute comrades’ distress at the prospect of change as a response, not to regret over the changes that have occurred in their world, but to apprehension of the changes about to occur—an ambivalence that individuals of all ages can share nowadays.