Review: Disney-ish tweens in Jacobs Theatre's '13'

Oct 06, 2008 (Newsday - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- DIS | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Imagine "Grease" remade as an after-school special and you have "13," the cheerful and endearing, ebulliently performed and blandish musical that stars genuine tweens as fictional tweens as they all grow into their scary new skin.

Think "Middle School Musical" for the window of demographic opportunity between Disney and "Spring Awakening." Raunchier than "Bye Bye Birdie," more sanitized than Buffy, this 90-minute moptop package explores two familiar agonies -- pre-pubescence and kid-in-a-new school -- with smart-enough lyrics and canny-enough pop-rock pastiche and, despite a general lack of meanness, a bizarre glee in making fun of the dying crippled kid.

That the most original character is a saving grace for the show, which has been skillfully assembled -- yes, I'm afraid that's the verb -- by Tony-Award winning composer Jason Robert Brown and authors Dan Elish and Robert Horn. Played with sardonic adorableness by Aaron Simon Gross, the supporting character gets a bunch of the best lines and a jolly tin-pan-alley showstopper, "Terminal Illness," in which he gets to rhyme "unendurable" with "completely incurable."

If this raises your eyebrows, clearly, that's the intention -- a stab at adult-audience edginess amid the cute-kid irreverent inspiration. Except for some icky-erotic coarseness for hungry young tongues, Jeremy Sams' direction and Christopher Gattelli's streetwise choreography keep the show close enough to the nice side of the street-pee jokes, "Shrek" quips and Jonas Brothers posters -- to live a long and lucrative life on Broadway and in school auditoriums.

Did we mention that the 13 kid-performers and five-piece kid band are terrific? They are, including Graham Phillips as Evan, wrenched from happy New York sophistication by divorcing parents and sentenced to have his bar mitzvah in alien Indiana with mom. Allie Trimm is forthright and heart-tugging as the outcast, though we never know why everyone hates her.

Al Calderon is a standout as a pintsized contender for the future "Jersey Boys" of America. Delaney Moro has the willowy innocence of a nascent beauty queen. Elizabeth Egan Gillies is aptly old before her time as the hard-belting fast girl and Eric M. Nelsen deftly juggles the demands of being both greaser and jock.

There are no guns at this school, no depressed kids, no drugs, no racism, no serious anti-Semitism. There aren't any gays, though there is a shadow of homophobia. Sets by David Farley contrast a glistening New York with the dispiriting small-town vistas. His costumes have the impeccably observed childlike maturity. The authentic young performers will have to be constantly recast. A few even appear to age through the show.

WHERE Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St.

TICKETS $76.50-$111.50. 212-239-6200.

BOTTOM LINE The kids are all right

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