THEATER REVIEW ‘Girls vs. Boys' ★★½
Through May 20 at Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division St.; Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes; Tickets: $25-$29 at 773-251-2195 and www.thehousetheatre.com. With Nicky Scheunke, Tyler Ravelson and Joel Gross.
You don't really need the subtitle — “a loud new musical” — to grasp that the all-new, hot-to-trot rock musical by the House Theatre of Chicago is trafficking in teenage archetypes. Any show that calls itself “Girls vs. Boys” isn't exactly approaching relationships — emotional, sexual, empowering, destructive — with a glancing blow.
Therein lays this nascent show's greatest strength and its most debilitating weakness.
Teenagers, the simultaneously comforting and alienating creatures with whom this musical (book and lyrics by Chris Mathews, Jake Minton and Nathan Allen with score by Kevin O'Donnell and Allen) is shrewdly concerned, aren't exactly known for shading their emotions. The familiar archetypes — dark-souled geek, sexually adventurous freshman, sensitive brooder, needy diva — are endlessly recycled because of their target audience's endless appetite for reliving them. It's a loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy. And this show has just a glint of the kind of self-awareness that can make it all work again.
“Girls vs. Boys,” which follows a little clutch of over-dramatic teens through parties and deserted playgrounds, looking for love and acceptance even as beats pound and hormones rage, is a bit like a John Hughes movie with original songs, or a musical version of John C. Russell's “Stupid Kids.” It's hardly fresh, but nor is it past its sell-by date. The hoards of pumped-up kids in the audience mosh pit in the middle of Collette Pollard's slick runway-like setting seemed to feel like it was very au courant. And they were, I think, delighted with the show's flashy sexuality and its non-judgmental, empowering tone. You know when a show is on your side. House makes ‘em feel at home.
“Girls vs. Boys” has a mostly percussive-based score that, intermittently, pops out with something sweet, melodic and arresting. It was developed at the American Musical Theatre Project at Northwestern University last summer (I saw that original student production, but did not write about it). Most of a terrible original book has, thankfully, been torpedoed in favor of a more straightforward and empathetic narrative involving six credible teenagers with the usual crises (love, sex, pills, acceptance, the need to perform). As the show mostly takes place at drug-and-booze-fueled parties and, since these characters are inclined toward the dramatic, that allows for an intensely theatrical atmosphere and plenty of naked flesh and amped-up singing (or, in a few egregious cases, screeching).
Every so often, the characters pull out sparkly guns and shoot each other — in the heart, the show seems to be saying. That's a motif only a teen could love, but as the success of “Glee” proves, there are plenty of stage-struck youths and “Girls vs. Boys,” which features plenty of titillation and impassioned performances, will attract commercial attention.
For that attention to turn into anything, it will need another angle. The show doesn't want to be specific about anything like place or geographic milieu, which is fair enough, but it needs something (or somewhere) else for it to hang its hat, lest it drown in its own generic soup for the teenage soul. It need an off-beat nuance, a new motif, a calling card — a sense that today's teens may still worry about this stuff but also inhabit a very different world.
That could be achieved through the music, which is very promising but not always well performed or highlighted; the quality of the singing varies widely, but far too often the lyrics are tough to follow and attitude trumps craft. The same could be said of the choreography. Although the likes of Joel Gross and Kevin Stangler have their moments, the best scenes take place between the two characters, geeks played by the stellar Nicky Scheunke and Tyler Ravelson, who most resist the pervasive partying. The show needs to find them more company.
To be sure, Allen has a very young and inexperienced cast whose intensity, fearlessness and commitment carries this piece mostly though the night (although it's a half hour too long). The ambition of “Girls vs. Boys” is infectious; this is as close as an off-Loop Chicago theater has recently come to a made-from-scratch development of a new rock musical in the “Spring Awakening” or “American Idiot” mode. Allen has to keep his optimistic passion, regardless of cynical criticism. And even though he has neither Frank Wedekind nor Green Day in his corner, he has to find a hook upon which to showcase, and impale, his enthusiastic girls and boys.