Fame: The Musical showed promise when it premiered more than a decade ago at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. That promise has gone unfulfilled. The Broadway version — along with its national tour, now at the Jackie Gleason Theater — has evolved into a pointless knockoff of the story that inspired it.
A technically smart knockoff, in most respects. The stage version of Fame strikes more than one chord with its primary under-35 target audience. It’s got the sass, the moves, the musical idioms and the characters all down pat, and never slows down long enough for anybody to start asking questions, such as “Why?”
The two dozen singers and dancers plow tirelessly through the mostly high-energy songs and director Lars Bethke’s high-style choreography. The plot, unchanged since the 1980 movie, resonates with the timeless hopes and dreams of every new generation. Kids just discovering themselves, their potential and their sexuality are powerful emotional tuning forks for an audience’s emotions.
Fame: The Musical follows a class from their first day as freshmen through graduation at New York City’s High School of the Performing Arts.
Along the way a street-smart but illiterate dancer (Richard G. Rodgers) learns, almost too late, to hit the books. The talented and egotistical diva (Natasha Rennalls) drops out to prematurely launch — and destroy — her career. The two nice introverts (Jennifer Gambatese and Gavin Creel) learn how to express themselves, both on and off stage. Even the teachers feud and make up, all to a throbbing wall of generic rock-pop music.
The melody of the movie’s title song flirts briefly for our attention in Act 1, but that trademark tune doesn’t show up in earnest until the bows, as an unlisted encore. And that says much about what went so very, very wrong with this show. For though it tries mightily to downplay its sources, Fame: The Musical has no soul to call its own and must ultimately call upon that title track to fill the void.
The story lacks focus, and Bethke — a better glam-rock choreographer than stage director — fails to manage it, weakening the points of interest within. That, in turn, makes Fame’s show-business cliches all the more obvious. Its conventions, assembled as if off a parts shelf, stretch back through the movie and TV versions of Fame to A Chorus Line, Grease and back, back, still further back to Babes in Arms.
Steven Margoshes’ music includes a few deliberate, and well-constructed, show-stoppers. Rennalls delivers one such number early on, with There She Goes (which segues into those melodic hints of the title track), and tries to tear our hearts out in Act 2 with the wrenching dirge In L.A. Other calculated highlights are the students’ hopeful-wistful I Want to Make Magic, Regina Levert’s bluesy teacher’s lament These Are My Children and a series of gospel, blues and torch numbers.
The score, however, never really connects with the characters in the story. It is a musicians’ showcase, a portfolio of big-band show-pop. When it’s not riffing standard progressions, it’s blowing up the tunes into jam session material — great stuff for a concert, but of no service to musical theater.
Fame: The Musical has natural appeal for young audiences and contains no profanity or nudity, but some scenes include blunt physical, verbal and lyrical references to the teens’ active sex lives.
Jack Zink can be reached at or 954-356-4706.
