Most of us successfully spent our high school years without breaking into a full-on dance routine in the hallway between classes, or commemorating our early attempts at romance without singing a well-orchestrated pop ballad in a duet with the object of our affections. There were moments, however, when emotions were running high enough that they could have reached the rafters, that maybe we wanted to.
That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t enjoy poking fun at the idea. “Gleek School Musical,” coming to Salt Lake’s Off Broadway Theatre Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays from Feb. 10 to March 10, takes plenty of affectionate jabs at the idea of ridiculously musical students (tickets are available online). The show arrows its sights on both “Glee” and “High School Musical,” parodying both ideas while throwing in the tantalizing-sounding “Hamlet, The Musical” in just under three minutes (there is, in fact, a real “Hamlet! The Musical” out there in the world, which has nothing to do with this but is now something I desperately want to see).
Despite the omnipresence of “Glee,” the tradition of having high school students break out into song at random intervals is much older than that. The movie “Fame” (both the 1980 and 2009 versions) at least had the excuse of having its students attend a performing arts school, but in “Grease”the only justification needed were cars, emotions of any kind, or the fact that their friends were doing it.
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