School of Rock
book by Julian Fellowes
Lyrics by Glenn Slater
music by Andrew Lloyd Webber
directed by Laurance Connor
Winter Garden Theatre
June 20, 2016
Production website

💉💉 out of 5.

I knew it was going to be loud. I knew that lights were going to bounce out and blind you. I knew that the audience was going to be full of tourists that would be flashing their cell phones, chomping their gum, and and doing live-time commentary on the show as it played out. I knew that the stage was going to have lots and lots of cute kids. I mean seriously cute kids. I mean where in the world did they grow these cute kids? I knew that the electric guitar was going to be the selling point of the evening. And I went.

To be honest the guiding reason that I saw this show is that it is one of the very few in NYC that actually runs on Monday evenings – – and I GOT to see theatre each and every day!

Here are my thoughts on the show:

It felt, and my students verified that this was a duplication of the film – – line by line, character by character, joke by joke it was the same. This made me feel oddly removed from the story. It was if a group of people had custom tailored clothing and then later donated them. They are pretty clothes; they fit pretty well – but you NOW they were made for someone else. I just felt they didn’t let the actors do much of the all important personalization that sets live theatre apart from all of the other arts.

Certainly the WOW factor of the show is that you can have these oh, so cute little children hands these adult musical instruments with a kind of savant skill and grit. That is cool. That is almost worth the ticket. But – – I found it interesting that in a pre-show announcement the producers wanted to remind the audience that the children in the show would ACTUALLY be playing the instruments. Thanks for the announcement, but I would love to have had more of the wow being witness to this. The show was so heavily orchestrated from the pit that they really COULD have had the children fake the instruments. They didn’t have to have them fake it – – but the fact that they could have takes away a bit of the magic. I would make it so wonderfully obvious that the only electronic guitar music that you are hearing is coming from the 8 year old girl on stage. Why hide or minimize this magical moment?

Lastly, I felt that the central character, Dewey, just didn’t have the play with the audience. Granted when I saw it, it was with the understudy – but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he had no relationship with the audience. As a narrator to the events and given his irreverent style I rather expected him to move away from the text of the play and really see us – – connect with us. There was one jab at Donald Trump i.e. the song “Stick It to the Man” that was perfect for the audience. We connected; we felt he was in the room with us. But during the majority the story he played TO us and not WITH us.

School of Rock felt like a theme park at its very techno best! It was a crowd gatherer and a crowd pleaser. Of course it was well done – but gratefully it is not the only source of theatre in the city.