Is There Life after High School?
The Bridewell has come up trumps yet again. In giving the British premiere
to Craig Carnelia‘s 1982 Broadway show, the company here has uncovered another wistful,
magical, musical gem. A confessional cabaret about school days, as a group
of adults reflect back on theirs, Is There Life after High School sets about to prove that they are not
necessarily the best days of your life. And though this won’t be the best
evening of yours, it’s a surprisingly affecting and effective trip down a
memory lane that many prefer to forget.
All those petty squabbles and minor insults – as refracted through the prism
of teenage eyes so that they’re magnified at the time into events of far
more significance than they really are – come back to haunt the characters’ adult
selves at a college reunion. This is as if Stephen Sondheim‘s
Follies (premiered on Broadway a decade earlier and a clear
influence) has been rewritten not as a reunion of showgirls but of the
far more universal experience of schoolkids. And even if Jeffrey
Kindley‘s book for this show is inevitably of a specifically American
experience – complete with senior proms, cheerleaders and swearing
allegiance to the flag – we’ve all been there in one way or another.
Carnelia’s sweet, melancholic and reflective melodies reveal a delightful
musical voice, delightfully rendered here by a terrific ensemble of nine
good-looking actors and three fine musicians (led by Martin Lowe from the
piano).
Though the Bridewell demonstrates here, as always, that it is at the forefront of
London’s musical theatre developments – and also one of the most versatile of
all performance spaces in the capital – one disservice to the effectiveness
of High School is the seating configuration adopted. This time the audience is seated on two long, facing sides on either side of a traverse
stage that cuts through the middle of them. Nonetheless, if Matthew Ryan‘s production
comes across occasionally as a little clumsy and untidy as a result, it’s
not enough to spoil what is really quite a treat!
