Posted on October 6, 2008 at 9:03 pm

Charming teen stars far outnumber inventive scenes in ’13’
By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY
October 6. 2008

NEW YORK — With the High School Musical franchise raking in the dough for Disney and shows such as Spring Awakening and Legally Blonde luring younger fans to Broadway, it was only a matter of time before producers banked on a project aimed squarely at the tween set.

The musical 13 (**1/2 out of four), which opened Sunday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, is neither a soaring, sobering account of troubled youth nor a glib commercial enterprise. It actually has more in common with its next-door neighbor on 45th Street, Avenue Q, a musical designed by young adults for wannabe hipsters of all ages.

Like Q’s creators, 13 composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown and librettists Dan Elish and Robert Horn serve up pop-culture parody peppered with politically incorrect humor and sweetened with some sentimentality. The plot is utter hooey in this case, centered on a Jewish boy from New York who lands in small-town Indiana when his parents split up just before his bar mitzvah.

Evan Goldman finds a fellow spirit in the alienated Patrice, who tells him that the options in his new town are “limited. … The inbreeding takes up a lot of our time.” Still, Evan longs to be in with the in crowd, a goal made challenging by the coincidence that, except for Patrice and a boy with a degenerative neuromuscular disorder that forces him to walk on crutches, all the local kids are either jerks or figuratively spineless lemmings.

There are jokes about Jews and the physically challenged, and even a song called “Terminal Illness,” in which Archie, the handicapped boy, merrily milks his condition to get a date.

That 13 is seldom either surprising or offensive is a credit to both the limited imagination of its creative team and the winsome freshness of its all-teen cast, directed with obvious affection by Jeremy Sams. With the exception of the strong-voiced Elizabeth Egan Gillies, who is rather too convincing as the precocious mean girl of her class, none of these performers come across as stage kids, and their unaffected energy is undeniably contagious.

Allie Trimm’s adorable, heart-wrenching Patrice is a standout, managing a tender chemistry with Graham Phillips’ goofily cute Evan. (Corey Snide plays Evan at Saturday evening performances.) Aaron Simon Gross plays Archie with wit and grace, while Al Calderon, Malik Hammond and Delaney Moro lend irresistible charm to their less catastrophically addled characters.

Thanks largely to these performances, 13 is, if hardly awesome (not even in the lesser sense of the word), an innocuous and sometimes touching diversion.