By Emily Justine Balter princetonian 'street' writer
Simply stated, "Swimming Upstream" is not your typical play. The performance, showing at the Wilson Black Box Theater, delivers a high-energy atmosphere and a dazzling visual display. It's an appropriate alternative to the Black Box's usual Friday fare: a dance club scene stocked with red bull energy drinks.
"Swimming Upstream" tells the story of Todd (Casey Ford Alexander '09), a new kid at school and an immediate outcast who has one lifelong dream: to create a musical. He finds hope in health class when the teacher assigns each student a creative project about something they have learned in class; the winning project will be presented at a school-wide assembly. Todd realizes his opportunity and begins his magnum opus — a musical about the life of a sperm.
While some of the play's subplots — Todd's romance with the school's Queen Bee, Sally Jo (Allison Squires '06), as he journeys on self-discovery and Sally Jo overcomes her need to be cool — can border on being hackneyed or trite, the overall material is handled carefully with such wit and aplomb it escapes that fate.
Marshall Paliet began writing the musical when he was fifteen years old, along with his father, Al Paliet, and they continue to refine it to this day. While the material deals with kids who are Marshall's age when he began writing the story, its witty and ironic outlook reveal a sort of wisdom that would suggest a much older writer. We are impressed not only with Marshall's sardonic handling of teenage culture but also with his well-parodied use of musical history.
A scene featuring the musical number "LOL" uses, as the title suggests, AOL jargon with perfect comedic timing. In the scene, a group of young girls blow bubble gum, chat cattily in a chat room and sport screen names, like "SkankyHo" that have implications we pray that these young girls do not completely understand.
Another strong number, a song called "The Pirates of Menzpance," runs with its play on the famous Gilbert and Sullivan musical. Like its predecessor, the number combines a melodramatic love story and voices set many pitches too high.
The show is rife with hilarious little touches like Todd's inner voice, Conscience McBadass (Marshall Paliet), whose human incarnation is a masked wrestle that inspires Todd to get the girl. Between scenes, blurry images of sperm, as if coming from a lamentable sexed class video, are projected onto the set, and a monotonous voice narrates the journey of the sperm. Somehow, it seems completely normal that the sperm's journey to the egg mirrors Todd's journey in the play.
The director, Mario Hunter '99, has a keen sense for detail. Todd meticulously straps his backpack around his chest and waist, while the other high school boys let their backpacks hang nonchalantly off one shoulder.
The only real problem is that the music itself is not that catchy, but perhaps this is a sign of changing times in musical theater; while it lacks the bombast of songs from older shows such as "Show Boat" or "Crazy For You," it fits right in with new musicals and modern operettas such as "Caroline or Change." The lyrics are very witty, and often comedic, with lines such as "ain't no time to cry over Lucas — that's some bad ass cervical mucous." Also, the actors, especially Alexander, are given a nice space to show off their impressive voices.
Perhaps the best part of the musical is that we get to watch what the enormously talented cast does with their material. The cast's professionalism comes as no surprise: Alexander has multiple professional credits to his name, Greg Wollaston (Zach/Sue) appeared in, among other things, a one-man show called "Broadway's Bad Boys," and Paliet, a senior at La Guardia High School for the Performing Arts, has appeared many times on Broadway where he took on the role of Sid Sawyer in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." Even the rest of the cast, previous high-school thespians and engineers alike, seem on equal footing with their experienced peers.
Paliet is particularly impressive; his energy is boundless and he glides from role to role seamlessly. Alexander, though he at first did not seem entirely into his role, came to embody the outcast Todd, and proves completely endearing to his audience. Alexander's impressive voice conveys, as a skilled musician should, the inner emotion of his character; by the end his spirit was infectious. Squires was a convincing ditz; her walk and her vocal intonations convinced us of her character.
The show is a joint production of Princeton University Players and Blank Page Productions. The producers brought the play to Princeton because they found it to be a haven in which they could develop their new musical before, hopefully, bringing it to New York City. While there are indeed some glitches to work out, the musical promises to evolve and is not to be missed even at this stage. Unlike the fate of the sperm protagonist in Todd's project "Sperm: The Musical," this musical is a success and looks to persevere even if, like the protagonist, it comes upon, ahem, some boundaries.
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