At Cabaret On Main, School Is In Session

Sue Kessler Photo.

Rosalie Mullins is having a day, and it’s not yet 10 a.m. Inside Horace Green Prep, the elite school where she is principal, something has started to crack. Students seem more antsy than usual. There’s strange music in the hallways. Someone has slipped the phrase “stick it to the man” into their vocabulary, and it’s sticking a little too well.

Mullins frets, aware of how quickly a little slack can unspool into chaos. At stage left, a door swings open: it’s the substitute teacher, holding a slurpee that glows a fluorescent, radioactive green. He’s unkempt, with a pilling, polyester vest and a bad case of bedhead. And for a moment, we in the audience think: this is not the kind of man we want teaching our children.

Or is it?

That question is one that actors play with—often trying to make each other laugh in the process—in a sweet, silly and student-studded production of School of Rock: The Musical, running at East Haven’s Cabaret On Main Theatre Fridays through Sundays through May 10. Directed by Neil Fuentes with big Broadway energy from Nick Rapuano and Lilly Parady, the performance finds momentum (and cheeky delight) in actors’ ability to make fun of themselves, while learning to listen to the youngest voices in the room.

It is presented by the Broadway On Main Theatre Company, the in-house company for Cabaret on Main, and features several students from the New Haven Academy of Performing Arts (NHAOPA), the educational arts hub that occupies the second floor of the building. Tickets and more information are available here. The theater is located at 597 Main St. in East Haven.

“I had to really do my research with this show,” Fuentes said during intermission at a matinee performance on Sunday, a headset still perched over the crown of his head like a halo. “I have to feel a show, and when I watched the movie, it made me cry. At the end, I fell in love with the musical.”

For him, he added, it’s about making young people—and all people—feel seen and listened to, even if their dreams seem out of reach or arbitrary to everyone else in the room. Written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and based on the eponymous 2003 film with Jack Black, School of Rock follows Dewey Finn (Rapuano), a washed up, sloppy twenty-something with rock band aspirations and an unkempt aesthetic that both seem more appropriate for high school.

His adolescent fever dream is catching up to him: the rent is past due, his job at a record store is a bust, and his roommate Ned Schneebly (Ethan Craig), who happens to be an educator, wants him out—or at least pretends to, in order to placate his girlfriend (Piper Stepule as Patty di Marco). So when the principal of Horace Green Prep (Pardy as Rosalie Mullins) calls with a teaching offer for Schneebly, Finn does a little switcheroo, pulls up to the school, and pretends to be his roommate so that he can make rent.

Nothing can possibly go wrong, right?

There’s plenty to shrug off as juvenile in this script, from fart jokes to Schneebly’s seeming inability to grow up. But there’s so much more to be interested in, particularly as a small and mellifluous crowd of young people, all uniform-clad students at Horace Green, fill the stage. As they begin to learn from Finn, who is masquerading as Schneebly, the story picks up with both humor and heart. Thanks to Fuentes' lighting design, it's also an immersive experience, with projections that extend to the walls.

In no small part, that’s because Rapuano (as Finn, and also as himself) follows a truism of education: he learns as much from the students as they learn from him. There is, for instance, Freddie Hamilton (a winning Ava Palmer), a whiz on the drums whose rebellious streak has its hard boundaries. There’s Zach Mooneyham (Kash Small), whose dad’s constant underestimation and lack of attention (Micky Akridge as a vampiric stock broker) has worked its way beneath his skin. There’s the buttoned-up and chronically anxious Summer Hathaway (Bianca Dacosta and Nicole Floran share the role), whose complexity deepens as the play moves forward, and the enigmatic Tomika (Sophia Marin), who is mousy until she isn’t, and uses her big voice to shift the whole vibe of the show.

These students—many of whom are also taking weekly classes at NHAOPA, including in its still-nascent rock band program—are the core of the play, and Rapuano is most fun to watch when he’s trying to teach them to break out of their respective boxes. When he asks “What makes you more angry than anything else in the world!?!” and students start to respond, the fire in their voices soon spills over the stage. When he suggests they “stick it to the man,” they are soon singing along with enough volume to outmatch a Broadway ensemble. When he tries to pull a fast one on them, their scrunched faces and twisted mouths are enough to tell him that he will have to try harder.

They rock it, literally, because they are so believable. When Katie (Tessa Vallen) announces that she struggles with being over-scheduled, the strain and frustration in her voice is so real that she could just as easily be a student at Hopkins or Foote or Choate, where the pressure for perfection can be stifling. When Billy (Aiden Masterbone, whose dad Derek is also in the show) learns, tentatively, to read someone for filth, a whole pent-up world of hurt spills out, and he starts down a long path to self-acceptance. And when Tomika finally steps forward, breaking a curtain of silence that has hung over the first act, it’s a small triumph.

At the center of the action, Rapuano is a live wire: he nails the slapstick humor of the role, nearly slobbering onto a microphone early on, during a parody of garage bands that sticks its landing. In the same scene, he caresses his midsection, with a deadpan worthy of Saturday Night Live. As the show unfolds, he makes cat-like sounds with a rollicking growl at the edges and lives on a diet of sugar, slurpees and beer that woud give a MAHA mom an aneurysm.

He does something that is deceptively hard to do in front of an audience: he makes a mockery of himself, without apparent fear or embarrassment, for the sake of the show. It would be so much easier, perhaps, to play a dramatic role (and Rapuano can do drama: he co-directed Steel Magnolias at the theater last month), but Dewey Finn has garishness, rather than gravitas. It means that when his character begins to transform, it’s that much more intriguing to watch.

In the process, it teaches the actors around him, who range from middle school through middle age, to loosen up, be more authentically themselves, and play onstage. The laughter that springs from those interactions is ultimately a balm that the audience may need just as much as the actors. For Rapuano, who has taught at NHAOPA for two years, it hits home too: he’s excited to be playing a teaching artist, because he is one in real life.

“It’s [the play is] silly but it’s very close to me,” Rapuano said after a matinee performance on Sunday, adding that he has believed that School of Rock is a “perfect movie” since he first saw it as a kid, when he was 11 or 12 years old. “My favorite part of it is Dewey refuses to let the kids waste their talent.”

While the role requires immense stamina, he added, it’s one that he is completely delighted by every time: he and fellow actors often see “who can break who,” trying to get each other to laugh as they deliver their roles. Sometimes, they are having so much fun that it’s almost a surprise when they learn to articulate themselves through music.

He doesn’t do it alone: Parady steals the show as Principal Mullins, with a range that is both dramatic and vocal, and taps into parody and pomp as easily as it does full on opera (her riff on Mozart’s The Magic Flute is so compelling that the theater should bring the show to its stage, and cast her as the Queen of the Night). Floran jumps in and out of the spotlight as Summer, with a kind of flair and moxie that fills up the whole theater (Dacosta surely does too; Floran was in the role during Sunday’s matinee). As Billy, Masterbone sparkles, with a personality that is both winsome and sassy.

“It’s such a fun show to be in,” said Parady during intermission, sitting back for just a moment on a couch in the building’s lobby. She praised Rapuano as a dynamic co-star who keeps her laughing. “We need that, especially right now.”

In an interview after Sunday’s performance, Palmer said that sense of community resonates for her, too. For over a year, she’s been studying the drums at NHAOPA. She was excited to put her skills to the test on stage, and show off her development as a musician in real time. The musical has helped her “loosen up” in her practice, she added.

“I like the community, and the learning aspect of things,” she said. “It’s really open.”

School Of Rock: The Musical runs at the Cabaret On Main, 597 Main St. in East Haven, Fridays through Sundays through May 10. Performances are Fridays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets and more information are available here.