NYT-Brantley quotes: Not a Critic's Pick!
For one thing, it is — by cold critical standards — the worst of the lot, with a repetitive score, painfully forced rhymes, cartoonish acting and a general approach that mistakes decibel level (literally and metaphorically) for emotional intensity. But this ostensible amateurishness may be exactly what sells “Be More Chill” to its young target audience.
Alone among Broadway musicals, “Be More Chill” feels as if it could have been created by the teenagers it portrays, or perhaps by even younger people imagining what high school will be like. Though its production values have been souped up since I saw it in August, the show’s current incarnation — which features the same cast and is again directed by Stephen Brackett — remains a festival of klutziness that you could imagine being put together in the bedrooms and basements of young YouTubers.
The plot, presented in a droller and less hysterical vein in the novel that inspired it, is a sci-fi variation on the theme of social paranoia that has long ruled teenage entertainment. A nerdy, terminally unhip hero, Jeremy Heere (a self-effacing, sweetly adenoidal Will Roland), is offered a computerized pill, called a Squip, that rewires him to run with the cool crowd. Played by Jason Tam, in the show’s slickest performance, the Squip materializes to Jeremy looking like Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix” and proceeds to dictate his life.
He is assisted by his bestie, the forever gauche Michael Mell (the highly emotive George Salazar), whom Jeremy had abandoned on the road to social success. He is also inspired by selfless love — for the madcap Christine Canigula (a hyperkinetic Stephanie Hsu).
This all sounds like more fun than it is — at least for anyone over the age of 21. (That’s a generous cutoff point.) The acting, singing and dancing (choreographed by Chase Brock) are all, to put it kindly, frenetic. The set (by Beowulf Boritt), lighting (Tyler Micoleau) costumes (Bobby Frederick Tilley II) and projections (Alex Basco Koch) bring to mind bright fan fiction comic books drawn in fluorescent crayon.
But it may be its very lack of chillness that has allowed “Be More Chill” to capture so many young hearts. None of the characters on stage really look like enviably glamorous popular people, but friendly nebbishes imitating the social elite with slapdash satirical broad strokes.
The rhymes in Mr. Iconis’s lyrics feel like they might have been improvised on the spot by class-cutting stoners behind the gym. (An example from the showstopping “Michael in the Bathroom”: “II'd rather fake pee/Than stand awkwardly.&rdquo
Doubtless much care and calculation has gone into remounting “Be More Chill.” But it still has the goofy karaoke quality of kids performing boisterously for other kids. It doesn’t try to dazzle its audience with glossy professionalism. For better or worse, this may be the only show on Broadway that a tween could see and think happily, “Hey, I could do that at home.”
"Anything you do, let it it come from you--then it will be new."
Sunday in the Park with George
Updated On: 3/10/19 at 10:10 PM
