Review: "The Trojans" Trades Spears for Touchdown Passes in Spectacular Synthwave Musical

The Trojans

Book, lyrics, and music by Leegrid Stevens

Directed by Eric Paul Vitale

Presented by Loading Dock Theatre and Nancy Manocherian's the cell theatre at the cell theatre

338 W 23rd St., Manhattan, NYC

March 19-April 19, 2025 [Update 4/1/25: Performances extended through April 26th]

Sam Tilles, Jen Rondeau, Deshja Driggs, Roger Casey, and E. James Ford. Photo by Vivian Hoffman
One of the recurrent stock phrases in Homer's Iliad, as translated by Caroline Alexander (HarperCollins, 2015), is "battle where men win glory" (76), though Alexander stresses in her introduction that the poem "makes explicit the tragic cost of such glory" (xiv). While literal battlefields have hardly disappeared from contemporary American life, sports has long provided an alternative avenue to glory through a sort of ritualized–or theatricalized–evocation of combat. The wildly entertaining new musical The Trojans, with book, lyrics, and music by Leegrid Stevens, makes fantastic use of such martial echoes by reimagining the warriors of The Iliad as players on rival high school football teams; and this reenvisioning not only preserves the sense of tragedy highlighted by Alexander (while also being very funny) but also adds further layers to it by framing the show's football narrative as a piece of local mythology reenacted by a group of warehouse workers in something that itself falls somewhere between theatrical performance and ritual, modes which are hypothesized to have overlapped in ancient Greek theater as well.
Arya Grace Gaston, Alcorn Minor, Emma Kelly, Max Raymond, and Katherine Taylor. Photo by Vivian Hoffman
If classical Greece is one historical reference point for The Trojans, another is the 1980s, or at least, fittingly, the 1980s as refracted through the post-millennial synthwave genre–think the synth-and-neon-soaked films of Nicolas Winding Refn and you won't be far off the smoky, immersive aesthetics of The Trojans' play-within-a-play (including an ingeniously staged car chase). The story of one high school's–and thus town's–brush with state-level football glory is played out by laborers in an Amazon-style warehouse who, when they feel that they have the chance, prefer to attempt this clandestine creativity on the job to more hours of mindlessly scanning shipping labels and moving packages around. The fantastic set design by Simon Cleveland really puts the audience inside the warehouse, with its floor-to-ceiling cardboard boxes, industrial signage on the walls and floors, and PVC curtain leading to a further loading area, and the warehouse employees repurpose the items meant for labor–ladders, pallets and pallet jacks, safety vests, and more–as part of their performance. Suggestions that they have enacted this story before and continue to develop and embellish it (and to disagree on exactly how it happened) point both to their preference for the excitement of a reimagined glorious past over the rather inglorious stasis of their present and to the way in which mythologization maintains its hold and develops over time.  
E. James Ford, Roger Casey, and Sam Tilles. Photo by Vivian Hoffman.

The warehouse workers are from Carlton, home to the North Texas Trojans high school football team, and their story of when "the whole state was watching" Carlton partly centers on running back Keeley (Erin Treadway), a fearsome athlete who quits the team before the big game because of an incident with Trojans quarterback Johnny (Roger Casey), who, unlike most in Carlton, comes from a wealthy background. Johnny is dating Heather (Deshja Driggs), who is tiring of Johnny's focus on football and, in a reflection of the warehouse workers, longs for something more. While Keeley is spending his time with boyfriend Lucas (Daphne Always), the rest of the Trojans team is worried about the athletic ability of Tark (Alcorn Minor), quarterback for the Highland Kings, the Trojans' opponents in the aforementioned big game. Also a student at Highland is Daris (Arya Grace Gaston), Tark's brother, who is, as Heather discovers, artistic and poetic in all the ways that Johnny isn't. And when Heather decides to go off with Daris, Trojan receiver Doug (Sam Tilles) sees an opportunity to motivate his team. Will this end well for everyone? Carlton's resident goth girl Sondra (Jen Rondeau) and her fortune-telling MASH note might have the answer, if anyone would listen.         

Daphne Always. Photo by Vivian Hoffman.
The Trojans gives great, often hilarious, high-school-kid dialogue to these characters, some of which is seamlessly integrated into the show's musical numbers, which are scored using cassette tape loops and vintage analog synths. Standout numbers include "Roof Song," which features a stirring duet between Driggs's Heather and Gaston's Daris, "Phone Song," which catchily plays with end rhyme stresses, and "Boys are Bad," a showcase for Always's Lucas that also makes some explicit lyrical connection to constructions of masculinity that resonate elsewhere in the play as well. Christopher Annas-Lee's wonderful lighting design envelops us in the neon-adorned past and yanks us back to the fluorescent present with equal facility, Melinda Rebman's choreography includes a memorably musical version of a football game, and Bradley Cashman and John Morgan's terrific fight choreography figures in its climactic aftermath. The cast is superb both as the laborers and the younger roles which those laborers inhabit, from Casey's well-meaning but out of his depth Johnny, E. James Ford's affable jock Jack, and Treadway's intense–in both anger and love–Keeley, to Rondeau's yearning outsider Sondra and Driggs's yearning insider Heather. Late in The Trojans, one character says that choice is only an illusion produced by hindsight, which if true means that the warehouse workers can't help in the moment but put on this performance. And we can't help but applaud them. The football Trojans may not have won state, and the historical Trojans, as Keeley points out, may not have won the war named for them, but The Trojans certainly triumphs.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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