It’s no secret that, despite the vast importance of Jewish creatives to the development of early Hollywood, there is a distinct lack of quality escapist content centered around Jewish narratives in modern media. And by this, I’m not referencing quote-on-quote “serious” movies like James Gray’s Armageddon Time, or going further back, Barry Levinson’s wildly underappreciated Avalon. No, I mean silly stuff. Stupid stuff. Like – how many dumb Christmas movies come out every year, Hallmark or otherwise? A lot. Now, how many Hannukah movies? With the exception of Adam Sandler’s animated atrocity, Eight Crazy Nights, the answer is… not many. In some respects, a project like 13: The Musical is pretty welcome. Many Jewish kids who grew up in predominantly non-Jewish areas, this critic included, had to go through the considerable awkwardness of having to explain what they meant when they invited a friend to their bar mitzvah. Is it a religious event? A party? Both? I might’ve laughed when I saw the movie’s thumbnail lingering in the depths of Netflix’s library, but deep down, I was curious.
13: The Musical didn’t spring out of nowhere – though its viewing metrics might reflect otherwise. It’s actually an adaptation of a cult Broadway musical from 2007, with music written by Jason Robert Brown, known for his work on the Tony Award-winning The Bridges of Madison County and Parade. The stage version of 13 ran only 105 performances on Broadway, hardly a smash hit, but managed to score a few unique points for its legacy in musical history. For one, it’s still the only Broadway musical to employ a cast and band comprised almost entirely of teenagers. Oh, and it was also the professional debut of Ariana Grande. The play is a thornier, more honest work than its cinematic adaptation, taking a semi-satirical bent as it delves into the hormonal chaos of middle school social hierarchies. The Bar Mitzvah, itself, is more or less a narrative device to explore the notion of growing up, and what it means to “become a man” at the most awkward transitionary state between childhood and nascent young adulthood.
What’s confounding is that there’s not anything all that offensive or edgy about the original production’s story, and yet a considerable amount has been scrubbed away and altered for the Netflix screen version, directed by Tamra Davis (an apparent mentee of Francis Ford Coppola, going on to direct music videos for N.W.A., Sonic Youth, and Black Flag before directing the Adam Sandler comedy Billy Madison. Truly a bizarre career). Alterations in the process of adapting a work from stage to screen aren’t unusual, especially when it comes to cutting songs that might be unnecessary to the film’s overall framework. The basic set-up of Davis’s movie is roughly the same as the play: Evan Goldman (Eli Golden) is a soon-to-be 13-year-old Jewish boy whose life is turned upside-down when his parents (Debra Messing and Peter Hermann, respectively) go through a divorce. Soon, he and his mom are shipping off to the small town of Walkerton, Indiana to live with his grandma, Ruth (Rhea Perlman), all while he must adjust to life at a new middle school and prepare for his Bar Mitzvah, which he wants everybody to attend.
For Evan, a Bar Mitzvah is everything. “It’s basically the Jewish Super Bowl,” he enthusiastically states to his “cool” rabbi (played by Josh Peck, seen this year detonating a nuclear device Oppenheimer) in the movie’s opening scene. Peck is hilarious in this, clearly on set only for a few days and armed with lines like “It’s God, he wants his language back” and “High five, baby!” Anyone whose been to a New York or Long Island Bar/Bat Mitzvah will know that Evan’s statement is, indeed, somewhat the case. For a lot of kids, it’s not so much about the ceremony but the party afterward, where hordes of sugar-high 12 and 13-year-olds descend onto the brightly-lit disco floor to dance along to tunes like “YMCA” or Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration.” Once in Indiana, the task of getting people to come to his Bar Mitzvah party becomes Evan’s prime motivator. He first befriends Patrice (Gabriella Uhl), a nerdy girl who develops a crush on him, but soon falls into the social circle of popular kids Brett (JD McCrary), Kendra (Lindsay Blackwell) and Lucy (Frankie McNellis). Brett and Kendra have a crush on one another, which angers Lucy, who also has a crush on Brett. Evan seizes on his friend’s relationship dilemmas as a means to gain higher social strata, but soon gets caught in a whirlwind of drama that threatens to derail everything.
With upbeat songs about crushes, parties, texting, and adolescent angst, 13: The Musical aims to gently satirize the smallness of petty middle school drama through the absurd lens of the big screen musical. In middle school, matters of who kissed who or who held each other’s hands at lunch is the subject of considerable discourse. That all starts to feel much less important as you get older, a contrast in perspective that Tina Fey brilliantly skewered in Mean Girls. Unlike Mean Girls, however, the edges of 13 have been sanded down to near-total oblivion. Characters from the musical have been altered to the point that their motivations no longer make any sense, such as Patrice, who comes across as petty and unlikeable where she’s clearly supposed to be the voice of moral reason. Evan, who in the musical bends negatively to peer pressure, comes across on screen as entirely reasonable. When things inevitably go awry and his friendships are called into question, the drama feels unearned. There shouldn’t be any doubt that they’ll come to his Bar Mitzvah – he hasn’t done anything wrong! The end product feels enormously sanitized, even for a project that was clearly aimed at middle schoolers to begin with.
At least the songs bop. The opening number, “Thirteen,” is a thoroughly enjoyable rock-tinged track that recalls the glory days of the Disney Channel Original Movie, much to the excitement of someone who has recently binged movies like The Ice Princess and The Princess Diaries (not a DCOM, but still). “I’ve Been Waiting” is a duet between Brett and Kendra that cutely overemphasizes the excitement of seeing your crush on the first day of school, and “Opportunity” is a ridiculous anthem about trying to steal a crush away from your best friend, akin to the antics of Sharpay in the High School Musical series. At its best, 13 recalls the blandly-over-lit, but legitimately charming, chintziness of these mid-aughts, largely made-for-TV works, the likes of which can now be found in their own streaming hell on Disney Plus. This critic’s quest to find a good, stupid Bar Mitzvah musical would appear to be complete.
But the charm gives way to boredom. Apart from its slick, plastic-like and commercial look, the movie also fails to find a compelling thread in its notion of growing up, leading its characters through a contrived set of machinations that in no way resemble the reality of actually being in middle school. Perplexingly, 13 also has very little to do with being Jewish. We spend so little time watching Evan prepare for his big day that the considerable accomplishment of his Torah reading feels meaningless. Children are likely to be bored with the half-hearted divorce drama, and at least according to online rankings, fans of the original musical have not been kind to the movie either. At the very least, you can find some of the cast member’s talents utilized elsewhere in better projects. Actors Jonathan Lengel and Luke Islam both appear in this year’s well-received Theater Camp, and Rhea Perlman plays a small but pivotal role in the smash-hit Barbie. None of the actors in 13: The Musical are particularly bad, and a surprisingly delightful end credits sequence has each actor clapping the slate (a tool used in film & TV production to help sync sound and video) as their name is displayed. At least they had fun. As for me, I’ll be sitting back and remembering my own Bar Mitzvah party, which was great – by the way. And everybody came.
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