malls and cemeteries, to the wistful production number staged among gravestones, but the experience, the limbo, if yoCOLMA: THE MUSICAL is a serious, sophisticated piece of filmmaking that takes three kids suffering post-graduation blues and makes their struggle to get on with their lives speak to everyone, not just 18-year-olds. The setting is Colma, the suburb of San Francisco known for its malls and its cemeteries, where the dead outnumber the living by a startling proportion (1500 to 1). It’s a film that is place-specific, from the opening number about those u will, of being between high school and adulthood is a familiar landscape no matter what your hometown might be.
The protagonists, played by a strikingly charismatic cast, are Billly (Jake Moreno), Ro (H.P. Mendoza, who also wrote the screenplay and the score) and Maribel (L.A. Renigan). Three solid pals whose differences, also addressed in that opening number, are about to split them up in spite of themselves. And that’s part of the sophistication of this film. The musical numbers aren’t stunts or a chance to indulge in a few smooth moves in either dance or song. The songs move the plot along while defining the characters in the same way that the choreography does. Swearing off love in a bar where the patrons burst into song along with the stars, mouthing off because it’s fun to be annoying. It even catches the hopeless self-consciousness of not having established an identity yet by being self-referential, with the actors announcing that they will or just have broken into song. And not just any songs, these are Broadway ready and then some.
Billy longs for a life in the theater that doesn’t involve working a crap job at the mall. Ro longs to have his father accept his sexuality. Maribel (L.A. Renigan) longs to be older, like the college kids with whom she likes to party, while the rest of her life stays the same. Everyone has a dream, but some are more easily achieved that others. They negotiate, and sometimes mourn, the lack of structure of their lives, and irritate each other with emerging worldviews at odds with each other. Yet never once does the script shortchange the emotional ties they have to one another, making the proceedings all the more poignant. The result is giddy and sublimely profane, with no better exemplar than Ro holding a note for a ridiculous length of time in order to not finish singing a word that would no doubt have garnered the film a rating of a very hard R, at least. The anticipation it engenders in the audience is reflected in the company on screen, as the camera focuses on their faces in various stages of shock and awe awaiting the enunciation of those last two letters. Director Richard Wong plays the audience’s emotions with the same assurance as he handles a dazzing bit of camera work or Mendoza, a soulful arpeggio.
COLMA: THE MUSICAL is breezy and irreverent in idiom, yet it examines with sometimes wry, but always unflinching, even brutal, honesty, the impact and consequences of emotional betrayal. And it does so without missing a beat, or a combination step.
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