Coming of Age to a Bouncing Backbeat

[kweerwolf]

(During the discussions of "ex-gay" groups several posters brought up the comedy movie "But I'm a Cheerleader" about a teenager who gets sent to one of the camps. Well now it looks like "But I'm a Cheerleader" is coming to Broadway!)

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/theater/reviews/20chee.html

Fluffy as a pompom and savvy as an A.V.-club nerd, the new musical "But I'm a Cheerleader" would be just another oversold confectionary treat without its big, beating heart. In their adaptation of the sweet-spirited if self-consciously quirky 1999 film, the librettist and lyricist Bill Augustin and the composer Andrew Abrams have improved on the original by taking its ironies seriously and giving them a bouncing backbeat.

Like the film, "But I'm a Cheerleader" is an idealized coming-out fable more concerned with the blooming of young love than the angst of teenage sexual confusion. Megan (Chandra Lee Schwartz ), an impossibly happy young high-schooler, only discovers her budding lesbian orientation after her family and friends intervene, on comically slim evidence (vegetarianism, a love for "Xena: Warrior Princess"), and send her off to an institution that promises to "cure" nascent gays.

This absurd boot camp, True Directions, is presided over by a brittle, pink-clad matron, Mary (Blair Ross), and a facilitator, Mike (Kevin-Anthony ), a not very convincing "ex-gay." The unintended effect, of course, of the camp's transparently silly re-gendering exercises is that it demonstrates to its young charges just how unstraight they really are.

It doesn't hurt that a pair of defectors (Tom Richter , Eric Lochtefeld) are on hand to spirit a few willing teenagers away to a gay bar for an alternative education, or that proximity allows romance to blossom, as it does between Megan and the precociously confident Graham (Kelly Karbacz).