SCHOOL OF ROCK doesn’t make the mistake that BIG did 20 years ago.
One reason that the 1996 musical didn’t succeed involved the famous FAO Schwarz oversized floor piano keyboard on which Josh and his boss-to-be danced. Each key lit up when a foot touched it, yes, but no music came from it. When their feet were supposed to pecking out “Chopsticks,” pianists in the orchestra played it instead.
No – theater is about doing everything live and performing without a metaphorical net. We should have seen Daniel Jenkins and Jon Cypher making their own music and not taking the easy way out.
So credit SCHOOL OF ROCK director Laurence Connor for what he demanded for this musical version of the 2003 film. Remarkably enough, the kids portraying the Horace Green Preparatory School students who become a rock band indeed play the instruments they’re holding.
The production is so understandably proud of this that it makes a point of mentioning it along with the usual pre-show announcement about cell phones and candy wrappers. Of course management doesn’t add that the kids are also sensational; it knows that we’ll soon see that for ourselves. How nice, too, that at the curtain call they’re all introduced by name and position: “Evie Dolan on bass! Dante Melucci on drums! Brandon Niederauer on guitar! Jared Parker on piano!” The applause is appropriately appreciative.
Did the kids in the original movie play their own instruments? Even if they did, they mightn’t have got the whole thing right until Take 23. At the Winter Garden, Dolan, Melucci, Niederauer and Parker dare to do it live and succeed mightily.
Haven’t seen the film? Dewey Finn is behind on his back rent to his good friend Ned Schneebly. However, Ned’s girlfriend Patty DiMarco wants the money NOW. “You can’t let people push you around,” she tells Ned before giving him a solid push.
Dewey really means it and sees no lapse in logic when he grouses “I’m sick and tired of being the person people come to when I owe them money.” It’s one of only many terrific new lines that librettist Julian Fellowes has added to the script.
Ned – uh, Patty, really – says pony up or get out on the horse you rode in on. Any hopes that Dewey’s band Maggot Death will have a quick payday are squelched when his fellow musicians dump him.
So when the call comes in from Principal Rosalie Mullins of the posh prep school – “Mr. Schneebly, can you substitute-teach tomorrow?” — Dewey pretends to be Ned and takes the job. Dewey knows nothing but rock, so that’s what he teaches the kids en route to forging them into a group that will compete against his old comrades in a Battle of the Bands.
SCHOOL OF ROCK has been compared to THE MUSIC MAN because it too offers an impostor who inspires kids to play in a band. Actually, the plot more resembles THE SOUND OF MUSIC in which a new adult comes on the scene, wins the kids’ love and admiration and spurs them to take a new musical adventure.
Lyricist Glenn Slater embraced that plot point that’s not explored in the film. “If Only You Would Listen” has the students complain about their parents’ attitudes, which range from disinterested to too interested to demanding. (Two of the parents are male gays; they bear a strong resemblance to Messrs. Schwartz and Grubenierre, who had quite a few opinions on how to raise their daughter Logan in THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE.)
The way the parents are written nicely sets up the kids’ ready need for a surrogate father — and along comes Dewey. The applause that “If Only You Would Listen” received suggested that the sentiment was being appreciated as much as the song itself.
(The SCHOOL OF ROCK story must have seemed awfully déjà vu to Slater, who was the lyricist on SISTER ACT. Both properties have an authority figure doing battle with a rebel subordinate, although both parties come to understand the other a little better.)
Sad to say, a few believability problems from the film haven’t been changed. How can the students play rock all day in the classroom for weeks at a time before even one (and only one) teacher finally grouses about the noise seeping through the walls? In reality, only seconds would pass before some teacher in this tony prep school would hear the garish sounds and register a complaint.
In the film, Dewey does mention that the room would have to be soundproofed, but nothing more is made of it. And yet, that’s more than we get here. And to think that this dilemma can be so easily solved! Once Dewey is introduced to Mullins, she should meekly say to him “I must apologize, Mr. Schneebly, but a water main broke in the classroom where you were to teach. Alas, for the foreseeable future, we must move you into the basement. It’s a terrible room — all cinder blocks with no windows — but we simply have nowhere else to put you.”
No one would hear them there. Besides, having Dewey and the kids out of sight would also help them to be out of mind, too.
Actually, Mullins MUST be out of her mind to believe that Dewey is any kind of teacher, what with his unshaven face topped by a bed-head. If Dewey would clean himself up – which any first-day employee would do instead of looking like the wrath of God — the audience would get an extra laugh as soon as he entered looking preppy.
Dewey makes no effort to make a good verbal first impression, either. He should EddieHaskell the woman. As it stands now, a principal who in one scene is shown to be one of those She-Has-Eyes-in-the-Back-of-Her-Head teachers should easily see through Dewey. Any principal of a $50,000- a-year school would give Dewey one look-and-listen and then rush to her office to make phone calls in a desperate attempt to find a substitute for this substitute. Because Mullins doesn’t, she emerges as clueless – and unbelievable – – as Margaret Dumont was in the Marx Brothers movies.
Or does SCHOOL OF ROCK want us to believe that any principal in a bind would accept some substitute, ANY substitute? If so, early on we should see Mullins make repeated phone calls and be refused by recent substitutes who’ve found it a thankless and difficult job. “Nobody Wants to Sub,” she could mourn in song before rejoicing that “Ned” is willing.
Considering that Dewey couldn’t make it as a pro and is now coaching kids, SCHOOL OF ROCK does reinforce the misconception that “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” What a shame, too, that one regrettable film scene has been retained. The kids arrive too late to audition for The Battle of the Bands, so they lie to the promoters, claim they’re terminally ill and ask for one brief shining moment before they die. To make so light of a serious issue must pain some of the audience. The scene becomes unbelievable, too, after the promoters acquiesce and the kids play so strongly that no one would believe they’re sick.
The musical does improve on the film’s implication that Dewey was as much out for his own glory as the students’ success. Instead, Fellowes has Dewey tell one boy “You’re 10 years old and you’re better than me.” Grammar aside, it’s the thought that counts. He’s tender, too, when trying to convince a distinctly “uncool” kid that he has potential to be whatever he wants to be.
But these speeches should have been songs; so should have Dewey’s straightening out the kids’ parents on how they’re handling – and hurting — their kids. It’s a musical, guys.
What a marvelous Dewey is Alex Brightman! His dynamic performance assures us that he would have easily handled anything the creators handed him. Brightman has the spirit of the film’s Jack Black but doesn’t remotely channel an imitation. He also has the confidence that tells an audience “I can do this job. No matter how much they put on my shoulders, I’ll carry the load.” Brightman could be upstaged by the kids – or vice versa — but no one is. They’re all willing to share the glory.
Oh, yes – Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the music. Whatever anyone wants to say about The Lord, his brand of rock is easier on the ears than the sounds concocted by many other contemporary composers. That’s one reason why true rockers hate him.
Speaking of hate, I’ve always had one hope for every Battle of the Bands. Let’s enlist all those groups whose “music” sounds more like convicts enduring Death Row electrocutions. Have them battle until every one of them kills the other.
Oh, but not these little pros in SCHOOL OF ROCK. They’re to be cherished.
