For all their pre-game woofing at nationals, the Jackson High team tries way too hard to lose the championship. The best of Whitty's storyline comes when Bridget and Campbell reverse roles – or places on the pecking order – at Jackson, with Campbell obliged to dance in a demeaning mascot outfit.Īt the risk of giving away the ending, let me just say that I found it profoundly unsatisfying. Derivative yes, but Ryann Redmond makes Bridget a sunny 3D character. The Hairspray elements come not only from the support Campbell gets from her new black friends in plotting vengeance against her patrician tormentor but also from the blossoming of Bridget, perennially belittled as the ugly, chunky mascot at Truman but suddenly allowed to join the crew at Jackson and then attracting a beau. As Danielle, the crew leader at Jackson, hip-hop diva Adrienne Warren is nearly the co-star opposite Louderman, but there is too little variety in her music, and her comedy is invariably delivered in a Jackée intonation that grows tiresome.
#BRING IT ON SCRIPT MUSICAL FULL#
Elle McLemore is appropriately steely, overconfident, and deranged as Eva, the conniver who manages to usurp the captain spot on the Truman High team by getting Campbell redistricted to Jackson, but her full comeuppance remains on back order.
But unlike the others, Campbell is three-dimensional and changed by the end of the evening, and she sings while flying. As our narrator, Campbell, Taylor Louderman is one of several players who must sing, dance, and fly without the benefit of Foy and his Spider-Man descendants. That is the only genius I find in Bring It On: The Musical, but I did see some prodigious talent. Suddenly, I realized that there is no other team sport I could think of that adapts nearly as well to the stage. Transport that spectacle from the 36-diagonal-inch screen in my living room to the full width of the Belk Theater stage – and nearly all of its height – and those quaint little flying Barbie dolls are transformed into thrilling daredevil athletes. On ESPN2, competitive cheerleading is capable of holding my attention through a maximum of two routines. From beginning to end, the routines are studded with precise synchronicity, exuberant tumbling, human pyramids, and high-risk airborne flips and tosses. What wows us, over and over, is the cheerleading. Whitty's new storyline is more politically correct than the movie's, combining tried-and-true motifs from Hairspray and All About Eve – our evil mastermind is even named Eva – but only one or two of the characters has appreciable depth and neither the personal relationships nor the team rivalry ever catches fire. Yet the writing team is thoroughly upstaged by director/choreographer Andy Blakenbuehler, a Tony winner in his own right for the choreography of In the Heights. Sure, the Kitt-Miranda score (with lyrics by Amanda Green and Miranda) has its moments, particularly when we abandon lily-white Truman High School for hipper hip-hop milieu of déclassé Jackson High. So there were likely heavyweight aspirations when the new team was assembled to transform Hollywood schlock into Broadway gold. Jeff Whitty, the Tony Award winner for the book of Avenue Q, is on board as librettist Tom Kitt, who co-writes the score, won his Tonys (plus a Pulitzer) for his composing and arranging talents on Next to Normal and Lin-Manuel Miranda, co-writing both the score and the lyrics, picked up his Tony for In the Heights. But the producers, led by Universal Pictures Stage Productions, bring an all-star team aboard to lift the story of rival cheerleading teams and enhance the musical pulse.
The lightweight teen comedy, written by Jessica Bendinger, was released in 2000 to a conspicuous lack of critical acclaim or mass appeal. As you might surmise from the title, Bring It On: The Musical is based on a motion picture, one you likely never heard of.
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