School Dance
The Blue Light Disco finally gets its due theatrical attention.
Overview
Co-ordinating your outfit for the Blue Light Disco. Feeling so nervous about slow dancing at the formal you could hurl. These are iconic experiences of youth, shared whether you were cool or a dork. School Dance finally brings these experiences to the stage, with emphasis on the undervalued dork. "Darwin's theory of evolution at its cruellest," the omniscient narrator reminds us.
Windmill Theatre, who produced the show, are actually a children's theatre company, but with School Dance they expand their remit to include adults who like an excuse to get a bit silly. Director of both company and show Rosemary Myers decided to prod the seeds of an idea that had been planted in an earlier collaboration with writer Matthew Whittet, sound designer Luke Smiles and set and costume designer Jonathon Oxlade, who reminisced on their teenage nerdom while working on the show Fugitive.
The men play Matthew, Luke, and Jonathon, three fictionalised versions of themselves at an earlier, unaware age. Best of all, the now mid-30-year-olds grew up in the 1980s, so references to Gremlins, E.T. and acid wash denim abound, wrapped up in a high-energy, Scott Pilgrim-esque package. Was music ever finer than in the '80s? The answer is clearly no, because each track played tonight is better and more rapturously received than the last (although Bonnie Tyler and Spandau Ballet are undeniably climatic points in the mix).
The action veers onto course when Matthew literally starts to disappear, shortly after being ignored by the popular girl Hannah Ellis (Amber McMahon, who adroitly handles all the female roles). His legs go first, followed promptly by his torso and head. On stage, this is shown through the wearing of a black, slightly sparkling body stocking — one of the many creative, smoothly plausible tricks of staging going on. The set, lighting, and foley provide constant wonder. To rescue Matthew from the 'land of invisible teenagers' (a tentative title), the teens will need to call on Jonathan's knowing older sister, He-Man, a unicorn, and a massive act of bravery.
The experience of watching this show is one filled with laughter, cheering, applause and squeals of recognition. It's ecstatic and triumphant, bonkers yet homey. It's not highfalutin — there's hand farting, an extended, glorious passage of it, causing the kid behind me to lose his head — but School Dance reaches special heights all of its own. It's obvious a lot of love went into it and the audience can't help but reciprocate.
This review was written in January 2013 based on the Sydney run of School Dance.
Image: Jonathon Oxlade, Luke Smiles, and Matthew Whittet by Lisa Tomasetti.
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