Photo credit: Marcus Center
Directed by independent film veteran Richard Linklater from a script by Mike White, the 2003 comedy School of Rock was more richly shaded than just about anybody could have expected from an unabashed crowd-pleaser that cast Jack Black against a classroom of precocious kids. The movie’s similarly crowd-pleasing Broadway adaptation is a good deal broader, replacing White’s more nuanced character beats with low-hanging jokes about Taylor Swift and fidget spinners, but it boasts a surefire hook: actual kids playing real instruments. The show was destined to be a hit even before Andrew Lloyd Webber began penning the score for it.
Bringing his ample beer belly and an almost John Belushi-esque slovenliness to the Jack Black role, Rob Colletti of Broadway’s Book of Mormon plays Dewey Finn, a delusional rocker kicked out of his band and short on rent money. The script, by “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes, takes no particular joy in the machinations that land Dewey a gig substitute teaching at a prudish prep school, but once Dewey recruits his charges as his new backing band and those kids, some of them tiny enough to be part of the Peanuts gang, begin pounding away on their oversized instruments, it’s every bit as adorable as promised.
Colletti finds just the right balance of crassness and tenderness in a character that could have easily been grating, especially given the sheer amount of stage time he’s tasked with. And he’s nothing less than sensational in the second act, as the script begins to ease up on the slobs/snobs comedy tropes to put his rapport with his students on full display. Every time the adults disappear from stage and Dewey’s left alone with the children he becomes an unlikely mentor to, the show springs to life.
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“Kids? Is this some kind of gimmick?” a stage manager asks when Dewey’s group of prep schoolers pull up to a qualifying round for a battle of the bands. It is a gimmick, of course—the same one that the whole musical is predicated on—but Dewey’s the only person who can’t see it. It never once occurs to him that hijacking a classroom of elementary school students and using them to live out his rock-star fantasies might be an unusual thing to do. The rest of the world just sees kids. He sees winners.
Through Nov. 26 in Uihlein Hall at Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, 929 North Water Street. For more information, call (414) 273-7121 or visit Milwaukee-Theatre.com.
