Posted on October 5, 2008 at 9:46 am

Musical `13′ Tells Gefilte-Fish-Out-of-Water Tale: John Simon
Review by John Simon
Bloomberg News, October 5, 2008 22:30 EDT

Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) — You don’t have to be superstitious to consider “13,” the title of the new Broadway musical (as well as its number of producers) an unlucky number.

Though easily as ailing as our economy, what bailout is there for a show about 13 13-year-olds, one whose chief quandary is whether Evan Goldman, a savvy New York Jewish kid infelicitously transplanted to Appleton, Indiana, can still have a cool bar mitzvah party in the overwhelmingly gentile heartland. (Already “Footloose,” a musical with a somewhat similar premise, nosedived into the dust.)

Evan (ingratiatingly played by the very personable Graham Phillips) is the child of incipient divorce, and because his mother (improbably) has a cousin in Appleton, Evan is summarily uprooted. Dad “got his stewardess,” but “Mom has no one,” so she said to Evan about his moving with her, “It’s your decision,” which, he tells us plaintively, “as we all know, is Jewish for ‘You’re coming with me.'”

I don’t think we actually all know it; only those who dine on a steady diet of Jewish jokes, of which this is a poor specimen, if no worse than others that “13” foists on us. That, however, is the least of its problems. Far more serious ones are the rest of its book, not to mention its lyrics and its music, which fall somewhere between subpar and infra dig.

Kids’ Stuff

Jason Robert Brown, the composer-lyricist, despite some luck with “Parade,” has done poorly with his other shows that, a plethora of awards notwithstanding, have failed at the box office. Brown’s true fans, to be sure, may be juveniles, who could groove on his painfully obvious lyrics and even more painfully tuneless tunes.

A typical lyric:

“If you’re walking beside me
And you want to be friends,
You should know I’m depending on you.
So you gotta hang in there
`Til the whole story ends
`Cause we all have a little more homework to do.”

Another lyric begins, “Day turns to day turns to day/Turns to day turns to day,” and before it’s over, day has turned to day 24 times, with four “day into day” phrases (minus “turns”) as a bonus. Your stomach may well outturn the days.

Pre-High School Musical

As for the tunes, which luckily for Brown I cannot quote, let me say only that they are entirely worthy of the lyrics. That leaves the book by Dan Elish and Robert Horn, among whose credits are a kiddie show (“The Worldwide Dessert Contest”) and a Disney animation “Wild Life.”

Manifestly, the driving force behind “13” was the (undeserved) success of Disney’s “High School Musical” franchise and the assumption that something similar could be achieved with a middle-school musical. I wouldn’t be surprised if “13” could progress from middle school to middle school to middle school.

Just think: the chief dramatic interest — aside from whether Indiana kids will attend a bar mitzvah — lies in whether or not Brett, the high-school jock, will be able to French-kiss Kendra, the high-school belle, at a horror movie that will, presumably, leave her open-mouthed. How tongue-in-cheek can a musical book get?

Especially tasteless is a subplot involving Archie, a boy on crutches, who may have a terminal illness or may be faking it, as another lyric explains, “‘Cause no one says ‘No’ to a kid with a fatal disease.”

Some of the 13 performers are actually 13; others may be old enough to know better. But 13 or not, they come across almost as juvenile as the perpetrators of this infantile concoction.

David Farley’s sets alternate between mildly clever and merely functional, aided by Brian MacDevitt’s lighting. Christopher Gattelli’s choreography is amusing and Jeremy Sams’s staging keeps the show nimbly moving during its 95 minutes without an intermission that might enable spectators to move out with equal speed.

At the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St., Manhattan. Information: +1-212-239-6200;http://www.telecharge.com.

(John Simon is the New York drama critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)