PROM DATE FUROR HITS STAGE
Musical has world première here
With a background in cognitive neuroscience, Marc Hall might be well placed to tell you whether gay conversion therapy actually works. What he can tell you for sure, from personal experience, is whether injunctions handed down by religious-minded authorities can make you think and behave more straight.
In 2002, Hall, then a bluehaired 17-year-old living in Oshawa, Ont., became a national folk hero and an advocate for equal treatment under the law when he took a Catholic school board to court after it forbade him from bringing a same-sex date to his high school prom. The case was immediately covered in a documentary, Prom Fight, then given the television-film treatment in 2004 with Prom Queen. (Hall was played by Aaron Ashmore, otherwise known as Smallville’s Jimmy Olsen.) Now that film’s screenwriter, Kent Staines, has given the material a big and brash makeover with Prom Queen: The Musical, which has its world première at the Segal Centre.
The real-life events had their share of musical-friendly, punch-the-air highs, not least (spoiler alert!) the victory that was communicated to Hall just hours before the prom was due to begin. But there were enough painful moments to perhaps give Hall, now a 31-year-old research assistant at the University of Calgary, some qualms about seeing it all dragged up again 14 years later. For instance, there were the death threats he received. There was the immense pressure put on his relationship with his boyfriend. (They broke up shortly after.) And not the least of it was the underlying message of the prom prohibition: he was not just different, he was lesser.
Speaking on the phone from Calgary, Hall insists he is more excited than apprehensive about seeing those events unfold again, this time as a big-hearted musical (with songs by Colleen Dauncey and Akiva Romer-Segal, and choreography from So You Think You Can Dance star Sean Cheesman).
“It’s awesome that there’s a musical about it, but for me it’s more about being able to continue that conversation,” says Hall. “The messages are still totally relevant, even after all those years. You think about the recent case in Tennessee with Lance Sanderson filing a lawsuit against his high school because
they wouldn’t let him take a male date to homecoming. Before that, there was the Constance McMil len case in Mississippi.”
(In a situation more suitable to Carrie: The Musical, this involved students and school authorities tricking McMillen and her female date into turning up at a virtually empty decoy prom.)
“I think progress has definitely been made,” continues Hall. “If you think about gay-straight alliances in schools, and the whole conversation around gender-neutral bathrooms. Now they even have a pride parade in Oshawa, my hometown, which was definitely not the case before. But there’s still a lot of work to do, right? There’s still a lot of homophobia around; the suicide rates for LGBTQ youth are still disproportionately high.”
As well as holding down his regular job, Hall gives public talks about these issues. He’ll be giving several when he arrives in Montreal for the show (including taking part in a pre-show roundtable on Sunday with journalist Richard Burnett, Staines and producer Mary Young Leckie, moderated by Montreal Gazette deputy executive producer Mick Côté).
Intriguingly, and touchingly, you can see Hall’s evolution as an advocate for gay rights taking place before your eyes in that 2002 documentary.
“At the beginning of the documentary you can tell I’m just kind of shy, really awkward,” says Hall. “I don’t really know what I’m doing. But I can tell by the end of it that I’m more confident, more articulate. I think I grew a lot
during that time.”
Alessandro Costantini, who is playing Hall, touched on this youthful fervour when he joined the show’s director, Marcia Kash, in a phone conversation with the Montreal Gazette.
“What excites me about the show is it’s really about young people,” says Costantini. “It’s our language, it’s our narrative. Young people are very gung-ho and we think we can take on the world, but Marc actually does. He gets told ‘no’ and he kind of (channels) that energy into making a drastic change for society and for his community and for his country. So I think it’s really special that we see a young person doing something so incredible.”
For Kash (who directed the Segal’s Anne Frank drama The Secret Annex this year), the feel-good aspects to the musical should be seen in the context not only of what Hall had to go through, but, less obviously, of what his antagonists had to deal with as well.
“There are many threads to this piece,” says Kash. “Yes, it deals with bigotry, but it’s also about a changing world. I think we’re witnessing that in the U.S. right now. A lot of people are so afraid of making any kind of change, of
going with the times. People try to hold on or go backwards to the old days. There are characters in the show who have very strong Catholic beliefs, and there are others who are holding on to the only lives they know, basically in a one-horse town, a factory town that’s beginning to crumble. And they see this whole new trend and they’re trying to put on the brakes. All of that exists in the show as well, and it’s that that gives it a real foundation.”
There’s also a politically minded gay puppeteer in town next week, along with his dummy sidekick Butch Manly. White Like Me is the creation of American satirist Paul Zaloom, the man behind the ’90s educational television show Beakman’s World (“way hipper than Bill Nye,” according to the Village Voice). As well as the bigoted Mr. Manly, it features lots of puppets created from junk and found objects, all used to sardonically explore the woes and burdens of being white in a world that insists on being diverse and multicoloured.
It’s performed in English with French surtitles from Thursday to Nov. 5 at Théâtre Aux Écuries, 7285 Chabot St. Tickets cost $27. Call 514-328-7437 or visit auxecuries.com.