Prom Queen: the Musical

Saw this in previews tonight in Montreal. Very early but it seems to have real potential. Some decent songs and one really beautiful one. A strong male lead performance from a young guy who at times evokes Ben Platt.

So it was just announced that The Prom will be heading to Broadway next year while Prom Queen was recently presented at the NAMT Festival with Chris McCarrell and Chilina Kennedy.

A school production of Prom Queen the Musical has upset a school board in Ontario. They cut their funding from the production. The money was made up by an online fundraising campaign. The link below contains an audio interview where a squirming school board member tries to explain that the show had "mature themes" that weren't present in previously produced musicals like Grease, Les Mis and West Side Story.

This kind of nonsense has been going on for years. It helps the show sell tickets and makes the school board look bad. I'm hoping the writers of Prom Queen use this incident to leverage some publicity for their show and score some more productions.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/london-ontario-school-boards-prom-queen-grand-theatre-high-school-project-1.4491600

It's a high school age production/program that is a fully mounted production at a large regional theatre. (so it's not a "high school production" per se) It's only partially funded by local school boards.

^I believe it's 250k (Canadian!) annually for the whole program. Which includes mentorships/coachings and opportunities all year. And the big show is the culmination of that.

Anyway 250k for any fully mounted production at a regional theatre isn't a whole lot these days (high school kids or not).