‘The Prom’: Theater Review

If Forbidden Broadway and the John Hughes teen films that ruled the ’80s had a queer baby, it might look something like the frothy new musical comedy, The Prom. That means the show is one part satire, packed with delicious theatrical in-jokes delivered with aplomb by game stage veterans playing caricatures of themselves; and one part inclusivity teaching moment, reminding us there’s a place for everyone beneath the Mylar balloons at a high school dance, even in conservative Indiana. If the two halves aren’t entirely seamless, especially in the uneven second act, the show has enough humor and heart to paper over the cracks.

With its elements of cruel ostracism in the high school corridors and its buoyant dance explosions of adolescent hormonal vitality, The Prom sometimes seems just a short hop from director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw’s last Broadway success, Mean Girls. But the affectionate skewering of self-aggrandizing stage troupers also nods back to Nicholaw’s 2006 production, The Drowsy Chaperone, which featured one of this show’s stars, Beth Leavel, as a similarly outsize diva.