Teens & Tunes in Crisis

Featuring teens at the center of stage musicals might seem to be a tried-and-true formula — until you try to take inventory. Grease, that summery paean to high school hiptitude, began life onscreen, and West Side Story borrowed its protagonists from an Elizabethan dude who had written about two passionate, star-crossed Veronese.

Looking more closely at such candidates as Rent or Bye Bye Birdie, we find either the characters or the music slipping away from the genuine teen sphere. Hairspray, a far more successful movie adaptation than Grease, manages to wrap a big adult world around a basic teen love triangle — with a musical palette that spans the idioms of rock, gospel, Latin and vaudeville.

So there’s plenty of virgin soil for Charlotte’s Mike Reardon and Tommy Wrinn to explore as they continue to develop Climb My Mountain, which premiered in workshop form last week at Pease Auditorium. Whole vistas of teen experience open up to their exclusive discovery simply by steering clear of the eternal quest for teen popularity, the catty competition for the schoolyard hunk, the macho camaraderie and slashing violence of teen gangs, and recycled plotlines.

Credit the Climb My Mountain tandem for striking out on their own. Reardon’s book traverses such issues as parental abuse and separation, suicide and a twisted teacher who gets off on failing his students. Reardon hews to the sage advice bestowed upon all beginners in writing his first stage work, drawing from his own experience. Yet he goes astray almost immediately.

Building on songs written by Wrinn as far back as the ’70s, Reardon uproots his 1975 action from anywhere real in his own experience and replants it in a mythical Yourtown, USA. In this ill-advised transit, Reardon jettisons nearly all topical and cultural references that would ground us in the real world of the Ford Presidency. Worse, the flight from specificity strips his high school characters of any interest in an academic field or a workaday profession.

Militant adolescent individuality? No way. All wear black T-shirts bearing their names and speak in dialogue that has been scrupulously purged of all teen slang and scoured clean of all but the faintest traces of style or spontaneity. As a result, the 20 hours we spend with Tommy, his joyless divided parents, his angst-drenched friends and the visionary school janitor are oppressively long and tortured.

Peak moments of pain occurred early on in the tortoise-paced exposition when Tommy is obliged to address his cronies — and his girlfriend — by name. Mighty stultifying when those names are splayed in block letters across their chests. Even when they expand their sphere of conversation, the teens’ gossip about absent members of their circle doesn’t often rise to the subterranean levels of subtlety, sophistication or compression we can witness on the dreariest episodes of daytime TV drama.

In a nutshell, the action of Climb My Mountain launches with the breakup of Tommy’s parents and the teen’s efforts to find intimacy and understanding with Angelina. Meanwhile, Tommy’s best friend Billy has become too needy, clinging and possessive for Megan — and the lost soul won’t quit smoking!

Let me throw a veil over the rest, because the awkwardness of Reardon’s attempts to draw practical lessons from Tommy’s experiences or the misfortunes of his friends — chiefly Billy’s suicide — is even more acute than his ineptitude for credible dialogue. Or story development. Or characterization.

To their credit, the teens in Climb My Mountain empathize with their fellows. Unfortunately, the targets of this empathy are so self-pitying and self-absorbed that no outside contributions are really necessary.

Life, we gather, is sad.

That’s why those rare outbreaks of humor and unrestrained schadenfreude are so welcome when this musical finally decides to sing out joyously. Sparked by nothing in particular when the partying girls in Tommy’s circle sit down to talk, “That Kitty Feeling” does a decent job of evoking that sudden frisson which signals the onset of love.

Later at the party, Tommy attempts to get physical during a moonlit tête-á-tête with Angelina. By the end of their duet, “Let’s Keep It Low Key Baby,” Tommy feels mightily ashamed of his urges. Morality resumes its throne, quashing the brief uprising of raging, adolescent hormones and extinguishing my last flicker of interest in Climb My Mountain.

Ah, but the irritations linger on!

Amid the ensuing turmoil, some of the cast managed to transcend the permeating gloom, the empty platitudes and the wrongheaded moralizing. Permitted to breach the dress code by wearing a hippie bandana, Heather Leanna upstaged everyone as Megan — overcoming the most unintentionally funny line in the show at Billy’s funeral: “That was no way to give up smoking!”

Burdened with stilted dialogue, James Lane had tougher sledding as Tommy, succumbing at last to the teen’s terminal altruism. I did like the kid’s singing before that happened. As Mr. Tucker, Yourtown High’s janitor and our all-knowing narrator, John Price was triumphant, infusing the clichéd claptrap of Tucker’s sweeping pronouncements with compelling conviction and a patriarch’s warmth.

Less fortunate was Brooke Boling as the chaste Angelina. One of the strongest voices onstage, better reviews no doubt loom in her future when she tackles roles with less toxic levels of fairy dust. Likewise, I’m expecting James Walker to blossom once he is liberated from the suicidal Billy’s whiney bile and challenged with more robust flesh-and-blood roles.

It would be cruel to pass judgment on the rest of the cast. They either portray characters who bring the action to a paralytic halt (Mom, Dad, and the evil test-wielding teacher), or they’re losers who elicit perpetual inward groans (the patsy who is abused by his dying grandma — and his pitying girlfriend).

Musically, Wrinn’s score isn’t nearly as lugubrious as the lyrics and the storyline layered upon it. While there isn’t nearly enough variety, I’m confident that two or three of the slower, more impassioned songs would make a more emphatic impact if they were isolated from the overall cavalcade of brooding balladry. Along with the two perkier songs — and the one that actually switches tempos! — these could form the solid core of a massive rewrite.

Wrinn might also profit from speaking up more forcefully behind the scenes. At the Friday night talkback, an audience member brought out a glaring point: Tommy still owes Megan a man-sized apology after excoriating her for causing Billy’s suicide. Quite an oversight in a musical about personal growth, one that Wrinn said he had brought to Reardon’s attention.

Might consider it, Reardon sniffed. Right. I’m guessing that a Tom apology ranks on Reardon’s to-do list alongside such non-priorities as authentic teen lives, a painstakingly recreated era and a real place — with a real mountain.

We could use a fresh dose of abstract thinking in American drama. In moderation. Specificity remains the true gateway to universality, and Reardon needs to find it.

This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2006.