The Prom

The Prom

Bob Martin & Chad Beguelin (Book); Matthew Sklar (Music); Chad Beguelin (Lyrics)

Foothill Music Theatre

At the small-town high school of Fulton, Mississippi in 2010, a high school senior girl was refused the right to bring her girlfriend to the prom, leading to an ACLU suit in court; an eventual prom where only seven students joined her and her date; and a secret, alternative prom the rest of the class attended.  Social media protests exploded online, with celebrities joining in to demand and win the right for a ‘second-chance’ prom where all were welcome.

That sequence of hateful discrimination, clandestine plotting by parents, and an uprise of support beyond the borders of the homophobic town became the inspiration for Bob Martin & Chad Beguelin to pen the 2018-premiering, Broadway musical, The Prom, with Matthew Sklar contributing the music and Beguelin, the lyrics.  Their fictional version inserts into the narrative four narcissistic, Broadway, has-beens who decide that saving a little lesbian in Edgewater, Indiana (“whether she likes it or not”) could just be the trick to resurrect their doomed careers and to put them back into the limelight of the Great White Way.  And while they proclaim emphatically that it is not about them, the town, the girl, and all of us know that of course it is — and that becomes the key source of the musical’s fun. 

Sporting stage presence and command almost as large as their hyper-inflated egos, four hilarious and talented actors parade unabashedly on the Lohman Theatre stage their self-import as these Broadway failures.  They are joined by a large, enthusiastic cast to stage a highly entertaining, heart-warming The Prom by Foothill Music Theatre.

Please continue to Talkin’Broadway for the remainder of my review.

Rating: 4 E

The Prom continues through March 16, 2025 in a two-hour, thirty-minutes (including intermission) production by Foothill Music Theatre at the Lohman Theatre, 12345 El Monte Road, Los Altos Hills, CA.  Tickets are available at https://foothill.edu/theatre/The_Prom.html. 

Photo Credits: Stanley K. Dylan