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NEW YORK — The most remarkable thing about the new musical, “How to Dance in Ohio,” is not that it features seven autistic actors as its stars, although that’s a Broadway first. It’s whose stories it tells: a group of real, young, neurologically atypical persons in Columbus, Ohio, all preparing together for their prom, a proxy for the passage into adulthood.
The premise of this show at the Belasco Theatre is simple enough: Autistic persons have to approach traditional rites of passage — applying to a college, holding down a first job, buying a prom dress, acquiring a date and risking rejection, slow dancing, smooching — in far more complex ways than neurotypical teenagers but they crave and deserve all these things to the same degree. And this show’s message is similarly straightforward: Self-determination is key and well-meaning helpers and counselors from outside that community have to navigate a fine line between help and condescension.
At some moments, “How to Dance in Ohio,” which is based on a 2015 HBO documentary of the same name by Alexandra Shiva, seems to take its cues from “The Prom,” a previous Broadway musical about atypical teens. But that show centered on actors and Broadway do-gooders; the cool thing about “How to Dance in Ohio” is that it centers seven characters who come from a famously mainstream American city and also the seven performers playing them, all making their Broadway debuts.
This diverse septet — made up of Desmond Luis Edwards, Amelia Fei, Madison Kopec, Liam Pearce, Imani Russell, Conor Tague and Ashley Wool — perform superbly well and, more important than that, they cohere as a very memorable and mutually supportive ensemble. Any time you leave a musical wishing you had more time with its characters means that plenty was done right.
All that said, “How to Dance in Ohio,” which features a book and lyrics by Rebekah Greer Melocik and music by Jacob Yandura, doesn’t always live up to its own aims. In particular, it tends to moralize and preach, to tell rather than show, when its real ability to improve the world is in its specifics. Instead of focusing relentlessly on its most important and fun characters, the piece spends too much time on the dull and predictable arc of the counselor, Dr. Amigo (Caesar Samayoa), who seems to spend half of Act 2 apologizing for not getting out of the way of his clients. The audience already has grasped the show’s message and, paradoxically, this reluctance to let the kids dominate their own story actually falls into the very trap the show is trying to dispel.
Yandura’s score is an engaging and artful composition but it also doesn’t know when to get out of the way and let these actors have fun with a decent book scene without so much underscoring. You can feel the audience ready to cheer on the actors in their big numbers, and they do where they can, but there are ways of focusing shows on young stars and this piece, which could have used more development work, doesn’t always do that. Sometimes the music illuminates beautifully, sometimes it intrudes.
I imagine the show had a lot of complicated internal debates about how to best promote the issues it cares about. But the characters constantly tell us that honesty and truth are what they need and there are times when a show overly worried about condescension could have listened better to the actual voices contained within. There are some missed opportunities here; the show requires the audience to grasp the characters’ difference in order for it to work — and yet you feel it worrying about that, even to the point of trying to operate like every other musical. When it doesn’t, it’s at its best.
All that said, there’s no question that persons on the spectrum, a big audience, will see and feel things here they’ve never felt at a Broadway show before; also, the production is simply designed by Robert Brill and clearly intended not to feature the kind of bells and whistles that can cause some folks stress.
Parents also figure in this show and a moving window is opened here into the challenges of being a dad or mom of an autistic kid: the worry and the intensity of the love, and also the increased challenge of truly letting go enough for them to flourish in their own choices.
That’s a public service done by “How to Dance in Ohio,” but the main achievement here is the long overdue empowerment of a group of folks on whose varied accomplishments an entire nation relies on far more than it realizes.
“How to Dance in Ohio” on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre, 111 W. 44th St., New York; howtodanceinohiomusical.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.