Melodramatic Delights On The Dance Floor: 'Prom Night ’99' Lights Up Vegas’ Arts District (The NoPro Review)

The greatest night of our lives is waiting for us in Las Vegas, and by the time the night is through loves will be lost and found, secrets revealed, scandalous bets settled, and a spontaneous yet somehow choreographed dance number will take place on the dance floor.

Prom Night is here, and the year is 1999.

Majestic Repertory Theatre has built dual reputations over the past decade: one for holding the torch for the kind of immersive theatre the enthusiast crowd loves across multiple genres — from adaptations of Jane Austen's Emma to a series of shows based on the dark holiday myth of Krampus. The other, which has raised the company’s profile with the TikTok crowd, has been for jukebox musical movie parodies of the films The Craft, Showgirls, and most significantly Scream. The later – Scream'd – was a breakthrough hit for the company, with musical numbers going viral and leading to multiple remounts of the show at their home base in Las Vegas’ Arts District. The next, allegedly final, is this fall.

Prom Night ’99 brings those two strains together by lifting character tropes from the films that made stars out of the turn of the 21st-century Young Hollywood set and putting them into an airtight 90 minutes where the audience gets enlisted to help the candidates for William Jefferson Clinton High Senior Prom King & Queen settle their unfinished business before graduation comes along and they part ways forever.

The action of the play is anchored on the various candidates, but the competition for King & Queen is just the water in which we all swim. 

Will activist Malora Vale (Maile Onsaga) learn how to take her hair down? Will her brother Joey (Austin Parrales) finish his song and confess his feelings for that special someone? What will become of Laney Sinclair (Carly Salway), the most popular girl in school and her football hero boyfriend with her on the way to the Sorbonne in Paris? Did AV nerd Ricky (Sam Ghaneian) get his scholarship to film school? Just how far is our Prom Committee chair Amanda Whitaker (Emma Newton) willing to go to take down ice queen Taylor Reese (Holly Shaffer)?

There are 12 characters, each with their own story threads to get tangled up in, and the hour and a half of time we have to chase past glories means that you’re likely to only get pulled into a couple of the storylines at most. Which makes Prom Night ’99 perfect for a group outing — NoPro rolled five deep on our prom night — as there’s plenty to trade notes on that happens just outside of eye and earshot for everyone when the big group scenes aren’t running.

Writer-Director Tory Heard has a knack for building characters — through writing and his work with his actors — who are open loops that need the audience to realize their intentions. Here it manifests as smart, satisfying work that is entertaining and emotionally satisfying in the exact kind of popcorn and spiked soda way that the source material were. Everything is played light enough to be approachable but still have heart. This is exactly the kind of work the immersive enthusiast crowd eats up, yet the use of recognizable character archetypes and social scripts means that it should be approachable even for those who have never dipped their toe in immersive waters before. 

My own run was pretty spectacular.

For a variety of reasons, I never went to prom. Not my own. Not a friend’s. At the time it didn’t totally bug me, as the anxiety that came along with all the prom related business were nightmare inducing. Also my family was broke, and if you couldn’t do it right you shouldn’t do something like prom at all. That’s something that’s stuck with me for life.

For the past few years I’ve been hungering for a prom like show, if only to be able to say I went. 

When Heard announced Prom Night ’99 I just about lost it. Not only was it a prom show, but it was set a half decade after when my own was and in an era whose movies I know backwards and forwards, in no small part to the masterful parody Not Another Teen Movie which blended all the tropes together and features Chris Evans at the height of his comic douchebag powers.

While I was able to assemble a squad I didn’t swing a date, so stag it was for me — and that led to me spinning up a little lore. Or course I was going stag. I couldn’t bring myself to date again after what happened to Klara Michelle last summer.

While not necessary, and I definitely don’t recommend coming in and trying to railroad your own plot onto the characters, it did give me a strong point of view to play from. One that by accident just happened to clash — in a good way — with some of the core characters. What started as a flashpoint of misunderstanding between Johnny Vale and myself was turned into the basis of a fast friendship by the end of the night. Even as Taylor Reese was stringing me along for my vote.

The cast I got to play with — primarily Parrales, Shaffer, and Onsaga – were exceptionally game and adept at both banter and making sure that I didn’t fall off the tracks of the show and get relegated to being a wallflower.

This kind of action was happening across the show, with shenanigans happening in the student lounge, by the lockers, and in the janitors closet. All as melodramatic comic plots unfolded themselves with the aid of the audience. That this is in some ways an early experiment with this exact show for Majestic bodes well for how the show can grow into a crowd pleaser that can be exported beyond Las Vegas’ arts district.

In the meantime, for those enthusiasts who are close enough to Vegas, a quick trip to the past is well worth it, especially if you pair it with one of the many immersive options that materialized in Vegas over the past year and change. (Ed. note: Check out our upcoming Las Vegas Immersive FOMO guide for more.)

Prom Night ‘99 runs July 23 - Sep. 5 at Majestic Repertory Theatre in Las Vegas’ Arts District. Tickets are $50.

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