Theater Review: 'The Prom,' Lost Nation Theater (2024)

Each new generation of parents and prom chaperones must know, as they discourage inappropriate behavior on that most venerated of American teen nights, that they're on the wrong side of hormonal history. Still, adults persist in their worry that school dances will be gateways to adult situations. It's as if we learned nothing from Footloose!

In the 2018 musical The Prom, the crusade to uphold prom-night norms — hetero norms, that is — bars one same-sex couple from getting anywhere near the dance floor. The play's book, by Chad Beguelin and Bob Martin, took inspiration from the 2010 case of Constance McMillen, a high school senior in Mississippi banned by the local school board from taking her gal to the prom. While Edgewater, Ind., is the setting for Montpelier-based Lost Nation Theater's production of the play, the inciting act of injustice is the same. Bigotry hits hard in this emotionally potent show but also yields to bubbly comedy in a whirlwind of song, dance and skillful acting from its multigenerational cast.

The fictional would-be revelers in The Prom are James Madison High student Emma (Liz Gilmartin) and her girlfriend, whose identity is at first a secret. When PTA president Mrs. Greene (Chayah Lichtig) gets wind of Emma's plan, she cancels prom altogether. Under legal pressure to be inclusive, Greene resorts to even nastier measures to deny Emma her special night.

This grown-up gut punch could probably sustain its own play. But in The Prom, a gay teen's persecution is just one axle on a vehicle that also delivers an unlikely cadre of allies — four actors teetering on the brink of irrelevance a world away in New York City — to something like justice and redemption.

In the wake of withering reviews and career stagnation, actors Dee Dee (Kathleen Keenan), Angie (Taryn Noelle), Barry (Joshua Lapierre) and Trent (Orlando Grant), along with publicist Sheldon (Mark Roberts), decide that taking up Emma's cause could send the world a virtue signal loud enough to herald their return to the limelight. The stage is thus set for comical clashes in this heartland culture-war skirmish.

Director Eric Love manages the mash-up with aplomb, steering this energetic production steadily through sharp emotional turns and latticed plot lines. Musical director Tim Guiles and his band accentuate and anchor the drama with lively playing that helps hold together this tempest in a township.

Even above the din of divas in overdrive, one local voice demands to be heard: Gilmartin's Emma. A recent Ithaca College musical theater grad, Gilmartin is a few years past her, um, prom. But her sensitive turn as the isolated adolescent exudes not just talent but youthful wisdom. Her confident singing voice and expressive presence convey the inner strength that Emma needs to negotiate the treacherous path to belonging, battling forces — some bigoted, some bedazzled — blocking her way.

Gilmartin's soaring, tear-jerking duets with Lost Nation vet and current New York University Tisch School of the Arts student Coyah Mosher, playing peer Alyssa Greene, showcase the depth of young talent among this cast — dividends of the company's long-standing dedication to creating theater opportunities for area youths. This makes The Prom a homecoming dance of sorts for these two players.

To call the Big Apple interlopers supporting characters would invite their egotistical wrath — fragility that lights up The Prom with laughter. Their unsolicited advocacy turns Emma's civil rights fight into a self-serving romp propelled by over-the-top performances that flirt with caricature while tapping keen comedic instincts and versatile vocal talent. Adorned in costume designer Jessica Della Pepa Clayton's pitch-perfect gear, the out-of-towners commandeer Emma's campaign, strategizing that inserting themselves in her story will soothe Broadway's stings — wounds that only good press can heal.

Once the actors begin interacting with locals, as when Dee Dee dines at Applebee's with school principal Tom Hawkins (Kim Bent) — coincidentally a big fan of her work — their inward journeys unfold. Bent's beleaguered administrator is an effective foil for Keenan's Dee Dee. He puts her on a pedestal, but with an insight into what makes theater important to ordinary folk that sparks a subtle chemistry between them. In the requisite blazer and vest, he brings credible world-weariness to his activism on Emma's behalf, framing the incident in the messy matrix of student well-being, parental pressure, budgetary constraints and a postindustrial community with its best years gone by.

Lichtig is believable as Mrs. Greene, a pinched, intolerant mother on a PTA power trip. Her portrayal is at times strident but often measured, cutting the recognizable figure of a conservative mom defending her turf from privileged liberals who presume to know what's right for everyone. Her hom*ophobia doesn't make her a monster — just an ordinary person badly afflicted by this disordered fear.

While The Prom plumbs dramatic depths, technical elements help maintain a brisk pace. Scenic designer John Paul Devlin, lighting designer Sam Biondolillo, projection designer Aurora Berger, stage manager Kim Ward and assistant stage manager and props manager Anna Blackburn have collaborated to make a thrust stage seamlessly transformable into varied settings — an Econo Lodge, a teen's bedroom, an Applebee's, a school gym — through a swift rearrangement of furniture and an upstage basketball backboard that displays projected logos identifying scene locations.

The design creates inviting spaces that, when necessary, afford the Prom dancers, under the guidance of dance captain Sam Empey, ample room to execute choreographer Noelle's fleet-footed, ambitious routines. With roughly a dozen or more dancers involved at a time, these numbers spike this prom with teen spirit. The steps can be a bit loose, but Noelle's creativity and her performers' palpable enthusiasm make for rousing sequences.

Like the basketballs that Noelle's dancers work into some routines, The Prom keeps its bounce from beginning to end, flagging only in the final scenes, when sentimental schmaltz starts to weigh down this otherwise breezy play. Some characters take to wearing their moral improvement on their sleeves, corsage-like, and some awakenings feel a little forced. A notable exception is Trent's hilarious musical number "Love Thy Neighbor," which riffs on Christian hypocrisy with lyrics clever enough to turn the Edgewater teens on to empathy.

At the risk of trading in corny platitudes, The Prom shows that the most important civics lessons are often extracurricular. They take place when people embrace their commonalities, accept their differences and take up the hard work of getting along. In this peppy production, as in real community life, the process can be highly entertaining — and the results quite moving.