Nothing Glorious About ‘Glory Days’
Erin Hicks
May 07, 2008
It would seem that this is the year of the musical. With In The Heights, Altar Boyz, and Sweeney Todd getting major accolades, the gaping hole Rent is soon to leave once it takes off from the theater circuit in June surely won't have any problems being filled with new musicals trying to establish themselves as not lame.
That said, Glory Days isn’t one of them. Written by twentysomethings Nick Blaemire and James Gardiner, and directed by Eric Schaeffer, artistic director of the Signature Theater, the show not only disproved the conceit that musicals might be the new play, but actually made us never want to watch a show, of any kind, ever again.
The overcooked tale of four best friends who get together one year after high school graduation to talk about college, road trips, and (not) scoring with women is predictable. Their jargon is decidedly hip, veering dangerously close to Diablo territory. Who actually says stuff like, “What up skillet?”
Characters are based on well-trodden high school tropes—the jock, the Michael Cera, the restrained voice of reason, and the recently gay. That’s right, the play is billed as a “coming of age tale,” which means, obviously, that one of the main characters is a brother of the rainbow.
In a recent interview, Blaemire said he wanted to talk about “a generation of overindulged, privileged young people.” He also wanted to capture the self-centeredness of “generation apathy,” as he calls today’s youth (of which he is still a part). Instead of capturing the era, however, Glory Days makes fun of it, and not in the irreverent way one might expect. Rather, the play and its creators take the whole thing way too seriously. All we could do was laugh.
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