July 2008 Satellite Theater
Shamrock McShane

Study Break

College is not just a time of life; it is a state of mind.

There is the first freedom and the loneliness that goes with it. Then to realize the difference between loneliness and being alone, and that you can hate one and love the other.

There is the immensity of the library, the thrill of the lecture hall, the fireworks of discussion and debate that rages in the classroom and in the dorms.

There are the epiphanies. Classes can be cut. Pass/fail. Study high, take the test high, get a high grade.

Or here in Hogtown where students spend nights studying under the stars and hunting for shrooms.

College, the Musical, now playing at the Hippodrome State Theatre, by Scott Elmegreen and Drew Fornarola, has the generic tone that goes with institutions, begging the question, why not Prison, the Musical, or Hospital, or perhaps best, Post Office, the Musical? The Hipp would be the perfect venue.

As for College, the Hipp gives it the old college try. The cast is talented, the production values top notch. This is the time of year when the Hipp tries its level best to give the locals what they want, a mindless summer musical that will allow them to keep cool and have a few laughs and maybe a wistful moment or two.

College should make you appreciate your own college career — which was probably about something.

Director Lauren Caldwell's trademarked interactive staging gives College a kind of Frankenstein's monster life. It's hideous, but it moves.

College. Any college. Having been an undergrad at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb and a grad student at the University of Florida, I know there isn't anything like Any College.

Scott Elmegreen and Drew Fornarola have given it the old college try too. The boys from Princeton who wrote the book and music have obviously seen a whole lot of Broadway musicals, and College sounds like all of them.

For instance, "The Future Belongs to the Idiots" is a retarded homage to the Nazi ballad "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from Cabaret.

None of the songs sound as if they'd been written in the past ten years. The actors sing sweetly, but the songs are instantly forgettable. The virtual orchestra obviates the need to compliment the band.

How can there be a dozen singing, dancing college students in a dorm room and nobody's got a guitar?

The main drawback of the generic title is that it can make for an industrial generic set, sound, characterization, plot, production.

Don't worry, at this college nobody dies.

And that's the problem. In order to have a happy summer musical a College must be conceived within certain parameters. So here we have a College where there are no killers, no war, no elections. There is no anthropology, no sexism, no libertarians, no Marxists, no existentialists, no nihilists, no anarchists, no Goths, no Indians, no Asians, no Krishna, no date rape. There are no ideas, no theory, no lecture, no discussion, no books, no Aristotle, no Freud, no Nietzsche, no cigarettes, no pregnancy, no abortion, no lesbian till graduation, no ideology, no idealism.

They go to college and never ask if there's a God? They demand no answers?

If character is action, what do you call a bunch of kids who don't do anything?

Where are the smart kids? Where are the frat boys? Where are the professors?

In the world premier production of College here in Gainesville anytime the generalization shades toward the particular, something is glaringly out of whack. For instance, when everybody coincidentally remembers that we just happen to be playing FSU in football right now!

Not only are there no professors, the students don't even talk about them. It's as if there is a parallel universe where mindless young people play video games and get drunk and party all day, and they call it College.

If you sing twenty songs an hour a couple of times and keep dancing around your dorm room, you can call it a musical.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a group of college students sharing the joys and tribulations of college, but it boils down to Boy meets girl; girl meets boy. It's not a premise; it’Äôs an axiom.

If you watch College as if Animal House never happened and Rodney Dangerfield never fell for Sally Kellerman quoting the end of Ulysses, yes, it can work.

Of the energetic ensemble including Casey Ford Alexander (Simon), Jennifer Anderson (Officer Agnes), Nicholas Barnes (Rob), Kimberly Bates (Katharine), Marty Austin Lamar (Jay), Jake McKenna (Nathan), Kim Mead (Sarah), Mary Elizabeth Runyon (Lindsay), Jennifer Shorstein (Adrienne), and Ted Stephens III (Will), it is Bryant Smith as Eddie and Jorgia McAfee as Amy who stand out.

Bryant Smith as the Gym Rat manages to be both funny and believable.

Jorgia McAfee is the hidden jewel of the play. Her Amy is the only one of the students who seems to recognize a world beyond herself and actually cares about something, and Jorgia McAfee can really sing.

They can all sing.

The Hipp is an intimate theatre with a wonderful thrust stage, like Shakespeare's, and no seat is more than thirty feet from the stage. Yet the singers are all amplified. It's like using a microphone in your living room.

They could still wear those little headsets they're so enamored of, because they look cool — at least they did when everyone was wearing them on Broadway in Rent — just don't turn them on.