Ryan Murphy’s film adaptation of the Broadway show is a patchy form of resistance. At least Meryl is charming!
Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix adaptation of the 2018 Broadway musical The Prom has a lot to live up to. The musical garnered a devoted audience and critical acclaim over its short run, as well as seven Tony nominations. And while it didn’t actually win anything, its glitzy tongue-in-cheek showbiz narrative about two girlfriends fighting to attend their high school prom made it perfect fodder for Murphy’s small-screen milieu of mixing queer stories with musicals and camp. On Netflix, The Prom has gotten a glow-up, with its Broadway cast of veteran character actors traded up for A-listers across the board, including Meryl Streep and James Corden as aging Broadway divas clinging to relevance by turning to social activism. Their focus? A small Indiana high school where a civil rights battle over prom night leads to a noxious moment of small-town ostracism — one based on an equally ugly true story. The Prom’s solution to the deeply complex problem of American bigotry is to do theater to it. Its conceit is one part a blatantly romanticized show of optimism wrapped in a love letter to Broadway, and one part a bittersweet gesture of empathy toward anybody who’s grown up as a small-town misfit. Oh, and it’s also a musical comedy in the classic singing/dancing/jokes sense. I wasn’t sold on this concept when The Prom debuted onstage, because it felt too easy, outdated, and possibly even exploitative. And I had my doubts about whether Murphy would be able to more successfully meld the show’s exploration of queer identity with its over-the-top Broadway fantasy. But while the film has made very few changes to the stage version, the small-screen treatment blessedly works just fine: The jokes land, the cast is superb, the score is still charming, and fans of the show will have little to complain about. A small town’s furor over gay rights becomes a dramedy of errors when Broadway stars arrive Our story opens in the middle of a two-fold crisis. At James Madison High, the local PTA, headed by an angry mom (Kerry Washington), has just voted to cancel the spring prom over one student’s request to attend the dance with her girlfriend. The principal (Keegan-Michael Key) vows to petition the courts over the PTA’s decision, much to the chagrin of the student herself, Emma (newcomer Jo Ellen Pellman, cast after a highly publicized nationwide talent search, just as you’d expect from the creator of Glee). Meanwhile, in New York, a crew of self-absorbed theater veterans (Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Rannells) is facing a crisis of their own — a flood of bad reviews. Newly downtrodden, they decide to embark on a show of social activism to make themselves look good to critics. Their cause celèbre, chosen entirely at random, is Emma’s quest to go to prom with a girl. The city slickers promptly travel to Indiana and barge into the situation unannounced, with loud, showy messages of tolerance.
