Movie Review - The Prom (2020)

At the 73rd Tony Awards, Bob Martin and Chad Beguelin with Matthew Sklar were nominated in various categories, including Best Musical. Their stage production called The Prom was based on a real-life incident that happened nearly 10 years prior when a lesbian was banned from attending her senior prom in Mississippi. A group of celebrities banded together to put on an alternative prom for that lesbian and others. TV producer, Ryan Murphy (Glee and American Horror Story) saw the show and got Martin and Beguelin to adapt their musical into a screenplay. Murphy decided to direct. Given that Martin and Beguelin's romp concerns singing-and-dancing in and around high school, Murphy seemed like an appropriate choice to helm. Murphy spent the better part of a decade doing that exact thing on Glee. This film feels like an extension of what Murphy was doing weekly on that show. Except, now he has a lot more star-power, namely two Oscar winners who got to step and belt front and center. Those two Oscar winners include Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman.

The problem is that it's not enough to have great songs, which of course is vital in a musical. One also has to have a story or scenes in between the music that are just as engaging. Glee had an advantage in that it utilized pop songs that most people liked. However, he and his writers could focus on the story and characters to make them as engaging as possible. Dealing with homophobia in a Midwestern state is what that series did from the very beginning. Murphy and his writers for Glee were able to dig deep and explore more of the LGBTQ spectrum. By comparison, this film feels regressive or very basic. It's essentially another coming-out narrative, which is frustrating to see again for any one who has paid attention to queer media, especially since this film comes two weeks after two other coming-out narratives, Hulu's Happiest Season and Amazon Prime's Uncle Frank.

This very basic story is fine, as it allows for a slew of really entertaining songs. While the non-musical scenes are really, really rough, the musical numbers help to pull things along. Tapping your toe and bobbing your head are things that these songs inspire. They're fun and entertaining. All of the characters pretty much get their own song. Half of them work. There are a couple though that could have been left on the cutting room floor. Those include songs performed by James Corden. The one exception is the opening song, which Corden duets with Streep. It's fun because it's a song that's a send-up of Broadway and that spoofs Broadway in a lot of ways, in a BoJack Horseman (2014) way actually.

Unfortunately, there is a song later called "We Look to You," performed by Keegan-Michael Key. It's such a reversal of the opening number. The opening number is rather irreverent and mocking of Broadway. "We Look to You" is instead very self-congratulatory to Broadway and very starry eyed about it that it comes off as sycophantic. Key's character of Principal Tom Hawkins is a self-described fan of Broadway and specifically of Streep's character, Dee Dee Allen who is a Broadway star. I understand the presence of the song as it becomes a declaration of love for Tom who has romantic feelings for Dee Dee. Yet, the Tom and Dee Dee plot-line felt like an odd one to have in an overall story about homophobia. More focus and more explication of the lesbian romance would have been preferred. It also didn't help that Keegan-Michael Key had just appeared in the musical Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey (2020) where the song he performed there, "Magic Man G" was a better song.

The Tom and Dee Dee subplot isn't unusual for a musical. There's similar subplots in other great musicals. Given the themes and some of the irreverence, Hairspray (2007) is a musical that came to mind. There's a romantic subplot there, but it fed into the themes of the main plot. Tom and Dee Dee's subplot doesn't really feed into the themes of the main plot in an obvious way and no one could ever claim that this film isn't anything but obvious in everything it's doing. Streep as Dee Dee Allen does get a solo song early on though that is terrific. The song is called "It's Not About Me." It's a completely fun song that speaks to Dee Dee's narcissism and feelings of being entitled as a celebrity.

Nicole Kidman co-stars as Angie Dickinson, an aging chorus girl who dreams of getting the lead in a production of the musical Chicago. Kidman gets her own song called "Zazz," which shows off her antelope legs, as they're called, and her knowledge of Bob Fosse. Kidman is also crazy sexy in a scene where she's being almost provocative in front of a teenage lesbian character, but it's amazing.

Andrew Rannells (The Boys in the Band and Girls) plays Trent Oliver, an actor who graduated from Julliard, as he frequently reminds, and even starred in a cheesy sitcom but now he's a waiter at Sardi's restaurant. He gets his own song called "Love Thy Neighbor" and it's probably the most infectious and the most fun of all the songs. Trent's character takes over a mall in order to educate the teenagers of Edgewood, Indiana, and James Madison High School. He educates them on the rules in the Bible they choose to ignore on a daily basis. It's a hoot and the one sequence I could watch over and over.

Finally, I should note that one of the teenagers in that sequence and a few others is Nico Greetham, a singer and dancer who actually appeared in Glee but I didn't notice him until I saw him this year in Jonathan Wysocki's Dramarama, which hasn't gotten distribution yet but it was a terrific film that also was about a closeted teenager in his senior year in high school. Wysocki's film had a better story and more interesting or at least more fleshed-out characters in a less caricature sense.

Rated PG-13.
Running Time: 2 hrs. and 13 mins.

Available on Netflix.