13: The Musical Is How You Adapt a High School Musical about a Sad Kid Named Evan

It’s tough being a high schooler named Evan who, due to the strictures of the musical theater medium, must sing about all the hard stuff going on in his life. It can be even worse when they try to adapt your travails for the silver screen, as Universal’s Dear Evan Hansen ably demonstrated. Netflix’s production of 13: The Musical, based on the Jason Robert Brown stage musical that originally hit Broadway in 2008 (it was Ariana Grande’s professional debut!), is pretty okay, a solid mid-tier offering from Netflix that is sure to pop up in your recommendations if you enjoyed, say, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before.

But of course, it benefits inestimably from having been released so soon after Dear Evan Hansen, a film adaptation of a musical that managed the dubious feat of being such a bad film adaptation that it retroactively soured its source material for people. I happened to have seen 13, the original musical, just a few years ago when one of our local theater companies cast one of my daughters in it. It’s an okay musical that’s aimed at kids and works best when actual kids are cast in it. I’m not a huge connoisseur of musicals, but you can’t help but be interested in what movie musicals work versus which ones fall flat, right? Especially these last few years, when we’ve gotten some pretty good adaptations like Tick Tick Boom! and In The Heights right alongside absolute madness like Hansen and the 2019 film version of Cats, it’s worth it to consider what best practices are these days.

13 isn’t a tough one to explain: Evan (Eli Golden) is about to turn 13 and finally have his all-important Bar Mitzvah when his father cheats on his mom and splits them up. Evan and his mother (Debra Messing) move out to a corner of Indiana to live with his grandmother (Rhea Perlman!!). Evan has gone from being a regular kid in New York to the only Jewish kid in a tiny town. (I am not the kind of basement dweller who shrieks about representation in movies, but this Indiana town, pop. 2,500, has a cast of kids from every other kind of background, so it sort of confuses the narrative of it being an insular Middle American town.)

As the new kid in school, Evan finds himself standing astride the divide between the popular kids and the outcasts, and the musical’s book follows him as he tries to maneuver himself for maximum people-pleasing so he can make sure lots of people come to his Bar Mitzvah. It’s pretty low-stakes, but there’s earnestness in a few key places: There are themes of teen independence and learning to cope with your parents’ fallibility. It doesn’t hurt that some of the numbers are decent, too. Director Tamra Davis (High School Musical: The Musical—The Series) takes advantage of it, with staging that is dynamic without bending reality or resorting to nonsensical liminal spaces. Stuff like Tick Tick Boom! and In the Heights almost demand that kind of approach when they’re adapted to the screen, but it wouldn’t have worked here and it’s good they didn’t try it. Davis’ more grounded, highly choreographed approach allows the young cast—who are all really good, it must be said—to shine.