Glee

I dragged Cas to my students' high school musical last night, but as we were having something to eat before the show, he was trying to get a read on what he was about to see.  Is it like Glee?  Not really.  Is it more like High School Musical?  Not exactly.

I hadn't seen the show until the same moment he did, but our school has a proud tradition of the choir director writing an original winter musical and putting a whole bunch of kids on the stage.  The plot is usually a little tricky to follow, as there is far more singing than there is dialog.  I told him that the best comparison I could make was not with Glee or High School Musical, but with X rated movies.  There is not much dialog, and the spoken words exist only to advance the characters to the next important thing.  In the case of these kids, it is always a song.  In the case of X rated movies, the important thing is something quite different.  That has been true with every one of these musicals I have attended.  Yesterday did not disappoint.

I have to start out by saying that the singing was wonderful.  The choir at our school is very talented, and some of my best students were on the stage.  Thumbs up all around on the singing.  The plot, however, was a little trickier.  Generally, there was a high school and some of the kids didn't really fit in.  They tried to find their place through song.  I guess that about tells the bulk of it.  There was a new kid, an awkward nerdy girl, a snarky cheerleader type and a jock who *gasp* sings with the choir.

One girl played a mom, one played a guidance counselor and one played a choir director.  A boy played a coach.  Miraculously, all these "adults" attended the homecoming dance and celebrated with the kids.  I think the whole school all went to the same church, as recommended by the custodian (who was also in the football team, when not trying to find true love with a student in another scene...).  Must be a different set of rules at this imaginary school.  There was a strange moment with a singing puppet who poked out of the curtain, and Cas made my hands-down favorite comment of the evening.  Through peals of laughter, he said, "That just happened!  I want that as my wake-up alarm on my phone."

Anyhow, I was gad for the company and impressed by the talent.  I'm going to talk to the girl who voiced the puppet on Monday and see if I can get a recording of her singing her puppet song, but in the meantime, it's Hoofbeat weekend, and those newspaper pages aren't going to edit themselves.