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“The Prom” is coming to Netflix next week, and the first review are in, as compiled by Broadway World. The feel good Broadway musical, adapted for the screen, will arrive on December 11th. Find out what the critics had to say about the Ryan Murphy-helmed film, starring Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, Keegan-Michael Key, Kerry Washington, Ariana DeBose, Andrew Rannells, and Jo Ellen Pellman, below. Many thanks to Glenn for the heads-up.
David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter: “Whenever [Streep is] center-screen, this Netflix adaptation of the disarming 2018 Broadway musical sparkles with campy humor. Elsewhere, the starry casting and heavy hand of director Ryan Murphy do the featherweight material few favors, with inert dramatic scenes and overblown musical numbers contributing to the general bloat. The movie’s most undeniable value is in the representation it provides to LGBTQ teens via a high school dance that is every emotionally isolated queer kid’s rainbow dream.”
Mary Sollosi, Entertainment Weekly: “The Prom is narratively sloppy, emotionally false, visually ugly, morally superior, and at least 15 minutes too long (a strong case can be made for 30). It has good intentions, though; or at least it wants to have good intentions. Obviously – and positively! – the film preaches tolerance and inclusion, both of which the world needs more of.”
Owen Gleiberman, Variety: “There’s no denying that “The Prom,” like “Glee” and the “High School Musical” films, is on some level a knowingly assembled package of shiny happy film-musical clichés. Yet Murphy, working with the cinematographer Matthew Libatíque, gives the movie an intoxicating visual sweep, and there’s a beguiling wit to the dialogue.”
Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair: “There’s little good elsewhere in The Prom, save for newcomers Jo Ellen Pellman and Ariana DeBose as the winsome young couple at the center of the prom-troversy. They add dashes of bright theater-kid moxie to the film, conjuring up a bit of what it feels like to sit in a Broadway house and watch a bunch of lovable goobers belt their hearts out.”
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: “The Prom is an outrageous work of steroidal show tune madness, directed by the dark master himself, Ryan “Glee” Murphy, who is to jazz-hands musical theatre what Nancy Meyers is to upscale romcom or Friedrich Nietzsche to classical philology.”
Ben Travis, Empire: “In recent years, there’s been a spate of musicals that you’ll enjoy ‘even if you don’t like musicals’, like Hamilton with its astonishing word-wizardry, or the retro-cool La La Land. The Prom is no such musical. It is intensely, unabashedly, razzlingly, dazzlingly Broadway, a musical for people who love musicals, in which many of the songs are about musicals. Anyone allergic to such things need not apply.”
Tim Robey, The Telegraph: “The whole thing drips with garish insincerity and preaching to the choir. Irony of ironies, that a show about out-of-touch luvvies swanning down to wave their magic wands at red-state intolerance has become… the spitting image of that, as a home cinema offering from Murphy and team.”
Lewis Knight, Mirror: “With glitz and glamour, Ryan Murphy offers a fun and lightweight musical that will certainly not win over the sort of people who detest the genre but will likely entertain those who do.”
