A piece of pop culture can mark a paradigm shift, even when it has no idea it’s doing so. The paradigm shifts are often caused by a lack of calculation. That’s what happened in the summer of 1978, when the movie version of “Grease”It came out. It was the one who ruled. “Saturday Night Fever”It had been six months since the last time they were made, and John Travolta was electric in both movies. But “Saturday Night Fever”It was a vibrant and energetic movie that could not be missed. It was like disco Scorsese, with an unruly street vibe, some of the greatest songs — and dancing — ever to appear in a Hollywood film, and a performance by Travolta that was so extraordinary in its authenticity that it just about jumped off the screen. It was close to a great movie, and no one’s idea of a guilty pleasure.
“Grease,”On the other hand, she came at you like a happy box of retro bubblegum, a sugary smack of good vibes. Many tributes to Olivia Newton John last week expressed the deep love people still feel. “Grease,”It was a pivotal film for them. I share the love, though what’s harder to communicate, unless you were around back then, is what an incongruous fit “Grease”It was at the time. It was a squeaky-clean neo-’50s musical that landed, like a space shuttle from the planet Brylcreem, in the middle of the gritty fragmented late ’70s. This is not the norm “Saturday Night Fever” (or “American Graffiti”), it seemed to have nothing at all to do with what was “going on.” But that’s why it changed what was going on. It’s just like “Rocky,” “Grease” — without trying to — glimpsed the future in the past. In a cheeky, sly way, it took us back to a stylized, wholesomeness that was lost throughout the culture. (That’s why the film was perched on the edge of kitsch.) And we’ve been trying, in different ways, to get back there ever since.
“13: The Musical” is a Netflix musical for kids that’s based on “13,”A Broadway show that was only 105 minutes long, it opened in 2008 on Broadway. But it’s been revived a number of times, and that New York production launched the career of Ariana Grande. It’s the only musical in Broadway history that had a cast and band composed entirely of teenagers, and the movie version, directed by Tamra Davis, just ups the ante on that spirit. “13: The Musical”You have a lovely, clean bounce of innocence that appeals to all who love the early years. “High School Musical”Finds and films “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” with its art-imitates-life-imitates-art soap-opera storyline featuring Olivia Rodrigo and Joshua Bassett, to be a little too dark and heavy.
Watching “13,”You can see how an upbeat school of Broadway exuberance zig and zagged from the pastel explosion of “Grease”To the pop-musical exhilaration “Rent”To the “High School Musical”Movies and other Disney Channel song & dance treats like “Zombies”This powdered sugar saga of middle school angst continues right through the end. Is this a movie? “Afterschool Special”Are you looking for happy pills? Absolutely. About a 12-year-old Jewish kid named Evan (Eli Golden) who, following his parents’ divorce, moves with his mother (Debra Messing) from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to the small town of Walkerton, Indiana (pop. 2,246) to live with his grandmother. Rhea Perlman is the only person who knows the word. Tuches? You bet your yarmulke.
The majority of “13” takes place at William Henry Harrison Junior High, which like the teen demimonde of the Disney Channel is a racially balanced, eager-beaver, ’50s-meets-today-through-the-looking-glass version of a world in which the girls are still cheerleaders, the boys are football jocks, and there’s exactly one slightly alienated outsider — in this case, a perky girl in glum pigtails named Patrice (Gabriella Uhl), who in one of the film’s early numbers sings that Walkerton is “The Lamest Place in the World.” The movie may not think so, but she means it, and we can’t help but notice what a pretty song it is.
“13: The Musical” is as synthetic as can be, but every five minutes or so there’s another number, and damned if they don’t pop. Jason Robert Brown’s songs have an irresistible quality. “Rent”Jr. effervescence is a combination of hip-hop and a youthful energy that will reel you in. These kids can sing. Really dance, even as they’re enacting a storyline built around a bar mitzvah, a first kiss, and the scheme that threatens to undermine both.
Eli Golden, Evan’s actor, is easy to listen to. “ethnic” face. He looks like he’s starring in the tween sections of “The Steve Guttenberg Story,” and he’s got a winning sincerity, and a nice voice. Evan, still reeling from his parents’ split (he still isn’t speaking to his father, who left for another woman), is practicing for his bar mitzvah, but his heart is mostly in the afterparty. As the new kid in town, he’s desperate for everyone to come, which is why he agrees to be part of a scheme set up by the popular Lucy (Frankie McNellis), the film’s token mean girl, to stop her friend Kendra (Lindsey Blackwell) from kissing Brett (JD McCrary), the dreadlocked dreamboat they both like, at a Friday-night horror movie. Evan accepts her plan. Unfortunately, it blows up in Evan’s face.
Everyone can learn lessons. But as long as you’re watching songs like the enticing opening number, “13/Becoming a Man,”Oder the cheerleader-chant-driven “Opportunity,” or “Bad News,” which evokes the doo-wop rapture of Supertramp’s “Some Kind of Lady,” “13: The Musical”It’s catchy enough that you will forget how simple it is. It’s not greased lighting, but it glides right along.