Wilbur Cross Goes To "The Prom"

Top: Daniel Cardenas and Iris Baden-Eversman in The Prom. Bottom: Ava Palmer. Lucy Gellman Photos.

It was a rainy Wednesday night on Mitchell Drive, and inside Wilbur Cross High School’s auditorium, the PTA was at an impasse. On one side of the room, the group’s president stood, eyes blazing, furious at the principal for proposing a prom that included LGBTQ+ students. On the other, student Emma Nolan looked ready to melt into the floor. She inspected her shoes, her mouth twisting as she listened.

“This is big government taking away our freedom of choice!” PTA president Mrs. Greene shouted angrily. There was a hot, barbed edge to her voice. Before the principal could respond, a light shifted somewhere onstage, and reality crept back in for a moment.

This wasn’t a PTA meeting at all, but a performance of one—and a reminder of the young lives, hearts, minds and memories hanging in the balance when basic human rights are under attack.

That meeting sets the scene in The Prom, the riotously funny, sweet, and exuberantly gay (in all senses of the word) 2018 Broadway musical running at Wilbur Cross High School through Saturday night. A production of the Lights Up Drama Club, the work is many things: a coming-of-age story, queer rom-com, educational and religious critique, and cautionary tale about getting up in other people’s business.

In the process, it becomes a surprisingly sharp commentary on LGBTQ+ rights, chosen family, and the real limits of performative wokeness. Tickets and more information are available here.

“I think it’s an important story to tell,” said co-producer Heather Bazinet at a final dress rehearsal Wednesday afternoon, as rain fell outside and actors scurried around the auditorium, making sure their microphones were securely fastened. “I think that things are going in the wrong direction. We’re somehow becoming less tolerant.”

Set between glitzy New York City and small-town Indiana, The Prom tells the story of 17-year-old Emma Nolan (Ava Palmer), a student whose request to bring a girl to the prom (Journey Rosa as a closeted Alyssa) draws the attention of the PTA, and then a cancellation of the event. In particular, there are a few parents (Dez Page Macklin as Mrs. Greene) whose use of scripture to defend their bigotry would have Jesus flipping tables. 

It's a fictionalized and mellifluous account of the real-life story of Constance McMillen, a Mississippi teenager who in 2010 watched her school district cancel the prom after she announced that she would be bringing a girl, and wearing a tuxedo. Back in 2010, prominent gay actors including Ellen DeGeneres (whose own very public coming out in the 1990s is now cultural canon) and Wanda Sykes amplified her cause, turning her into a cause célèbre for just wanting to dance with the date of her choice, in the outfit of her choice.

In the play, Emma is the first to say she doesn’t want to be “a Gen Z Rosa Parks,” but soon the State Attorney’s office is getting involved, and the principal (Ethan Bazinet as Mr. Hawkins) steps in to try to smooth things out. Just as it seems that parents might hear Emma out, there are meddling, washed-up Broadway stars on a mission to revive their own careers, which the show introduces in a series of parallel vignettes.

They include Barry Glickman (Daniel Cardenas), Dee Dee Allen (Iris Baden-Eversman), Trent Oliver (Jack Vann) and Angie Dickson (Jarelis Calderon), whose jazz hands, big-voiced bravados and over-the-top antics are not particularly well-suited to the Rustbelt. So of course, heads are going to butt when they descend on a PTA meeting, and decide to dig in their high heels and stay a while. 

“It’s a good lesson, a good moral,” Palmer said in a phone call Thursday, just a few hours before opening. “Instead of judging someone before you get to know them, say hi once in a while. Kids and parents should be able to know who their kid is and who their friends are.”

In the show, just as in McMillen’s life 16 years ago, regional differences are a pronounced, sometimes painfully loud part of the plot, with jokes around Applebee’s, monster truck rallies, and working-class jobs that amplify the Broadway crew's tone-deafness. But from the moment actors are on Cross’ stage, the musical feels like it could be set in New Haven, and not just because Glickman may be the role Cardenas was born to play.

Last year, the Connecticut legislature saw challenges to the freedom to read, to gender-inclusive speech in schools, and to youth sports, in an anti-trans panic that Donald Trump spent millions of dollars fanning the flames of before the 2024 Presidential Election. In July, when many of the cast members were on summer break, both Yale New Haven Health and Connecticut Children’s Hospital announced that they would be ending gender-affirming care for minors.

This year, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union are tracking almost 500 pieces of legislation aimed, across the country, at LGBTQ rights and particularly the rights of trans youth. Then just last week, the New Haven Pride Center announced that it would “cease normal operations,” leaving LGBTQ+ programming and events like an annual “Pride Prom” in the balance.

Even in an ostensibly blue city, where the Board of Education has policies meant to protect LGBTQ+ students, the moment feels delicate, precarious—and worthy of as much resilient joy as students and staff can muster. It’s what makes songs like “Dance With You,” in which Emma and Alyssa reach out towards each other, their fingers barely touching, seem twice as precious.

No wonder, then, that it has struck a chord with members of the cast, many of whom identify as part of the LGBTQIA+ community, or as straight allies and accomplices. Cardenas, who once dreamed of having a lead role, was ecstatic when he learned that he’d been cast as Glickman, whose own story of rejection and abandonment gives his character a depth he was excited to take on.

“I just love his attitude,” Cardenas said at Wednesday’s dress rehearsal. “He funny and he’s blunt and he’s also a sweetheart. I just love his story arc—he goes from being a total narcissist to this loveable gay man.”

The role has also helped Cardenas think about what it means to be comfortable in his own skin, he said. In his four years at Cross, he’s gone on his own personal journey of self discovery. As a Latino student living in New Haven, he’s also acutely aware that he’s a target, even if sexual orientation never enters the equation. He sees the show's message as one that bullies, from high school hallways to the White House, could learn from. 

“I love everything about me,” he said. “With this cast, we love everyone. This program is literally a program of acceptance. It’s this beautiful gay show … Barry sees himself as larger than life, and I’ve had so much fun playing him. I feel most like myself [in the role].”

“So many lives are changing due to the way America is right now,” he added. “There needs to be love and acceptance in the world. The purpose of this show is getting that point across. This show is magic. No government, and no orange man, is gonna do anything about it.”

As students buzzed around backstage, making sure they were in their costumes before curtain call, that message resonated for several of them. Yasnierys Delgado, a sophomore who plays an administrative assistant named Shelley, pointed to the thick, sometimes stifling stigma surrounding LGBTQ+ issues in her home, where family members are fairly religious and socially conservative. For the first time in as long as she can remember, the play has given her an opening to talk about it.

“I feel like it has such a beautiful message,” she said. “It’s taught me to speak up.”

Palmer, to whom the show belongs, can also feel that current of accidental activism flowing through the script. As a freshman, she initially tried out in honor of her older sister, Erin Palmer, an actor who graduated from Cross last year. What she wasn’t expecting was how deeply she would identify with Emma, from her nonchalance to a Canadian tuxedo that Palmer put together herself. And “because I also like girls,” she said in Thursday’s phone call, with a smile at the edge of her voice.

“Sometimes the world can seem unfair,” she said. When she read the script, Palmer felt for Emma, who faces bullying in school, and has weathered several years of transition and alienation at home. While that hasn’t been Palmer's own lived experience, she knows what it feels like to face the overwhelm of a large public high school each day, because she’s living it.

“It's really a wonderful thing to be honest,” she said of being in the show. “I get to meet a lot more people, and make a lot more friends.”

She’s learned, in turn, “to always be yourself and not to change for anyone,” she said. “It's a very important lesson.”

After weeks of rehearsal, a listener can hear and feel it as Palmer walks onstage, piano bouncing under her, and sings out the words “Note to self! Don’t be gay in Indiana,” with a kind of deep, crisp deadpan and vocal eye roll that was contagious. From that first moment, she’s fun to watch, as she grows into her own with the support of a village she has built around her.

Around her, nobody misses. Cardenas is sharply funny as Glickman, over the top until all of a sudden, he’s giving Emma a pep talk and it's nearly impossible not to cry. Sophomore Iris Baden-Eversman, who identifies as queer, comes in swinging, and doesn’t stop for over 90 minutes, making the role and the lyrics entirely her own. Vann, as a Julliard grad who is known for his role in a nineties sitcom, is heart-meltingly good as Oliver, with an ability to laugh at himself that comes through in numbers like “The Acceptance Song.”. Even Macklin, who at first is just a walking billboard for homophobia, nails the role, with an emotional depth that feels impossible at the beginning of the show.

The acting, of course, is parody until it's not, and these students totally get it. As Oliver, Vann channels the wokest of the woke, bringing on fellow members of the cast for "The Acceptance Song" until people are singing along in synchronized ASL and crop tops patterned with rainbows. In the process, he reminds the audience that New York is, in fact, not the center of the universe—and that there are both allies and adversaries everywhere, including in former factory towns in the Midwest. 

At Cross, it is also very much New Haven’s version of the play, with casting decisions that are both spot on and hilarious (did anybody put their money on Cardenas doing a Fiddler riff with a sassy hip pop when he was playing Schroeder as a freshman?). Unlike very white productions of the show that ran on Broadway, and have since made their way into school theaters across the country, this student body looks like New Haven, where a diverse and polyphonic population is one of the city's greatest strengths. 

The result is not just heart-warming high school theater, but a show that also feels brave and necessary. Yes—The Prom has punchy language (although “you bet your sweet MILF ass we can” is almost certainly tamer than what 99 percent of students see on TikTok) and not-subtle digs at conservative America, but what feels exciting about the show is its total celebration of LGBTQ+ folks, and ability to poke enough fun at liberal East Coast stereotypes in the process.

The town’s residents don’t seem so different from real-life parents who showed up at Board of Education meetings in Guilford and Newtown three years ago, to discuss potential book bans on LGBTQ-affirming titles like Mike Curato’s Flamer and Craig Thompson’s Blankets. Or the group of parents who wrote in to the New Haven Free Public Library in September 2024, demanding the cancellation of drag queen story hour shortly before the city’s Pride Month celebrations.

To all of it, these students shrug their shoulders and let it roll off, using humor as both bond and balm. At moments, it’s incredibly sweet: when Emma and Alyssa reach towards each other in “Dance With You,” a person can see the spark traveling through their fingers. When Glickman tells Emma his own story, a listener can feel their chest squeeze tightly with the words. There’s a soaring rom-com feel that rivals Rachel Meredith’s Girl Next Door, with more pomp and less PG-13 rated content.

It’s also genuinely funny: the Broadway crew manages to make “lesbian” rhyme with "thespian,” and then bathes the first in a bright, layered harmony as they clink champagne glasses. Cardenas-as-Glickman keeps the jokes coming, with a sensitive edge that Palmer teases out the more time they spend together. As Allen, Baden-Eversman doesn’t hold back: she embraces the star’s big-voice, literal jazz hands and inability to read the room, and it’s so much fun to watch. From the moment she enters a PTA meeting, arms waving, voice undulating, she’s magnetic and squirm-worthy all at once.

For junior Jarelis Calderon, a first-time thespian who plays the out-of-work star Angie, the play meets the moment in all of the right ways. This year, it was her younger sister, who came out as gay a few years ago, who encouraged her to try out for the show. Calderon is so glad she did.

“I really did it for her,” she said as she headed backstage to slip her costume on before warmups. “I think this show just teaches us to be kind and support each other.”