‘Trevor: The Musical’ Review: He’s Coming Out

Trevor is a fictional boy with real world impact. In 1995, “Trevor,” a 23-minute film about the bullied eighth grader, won the Academy Award for live action short; three years later, its creators founded the Trevor Project, a crisis intervention organization for L.G.B.T.Q. youth, and recently allowed the story to be reworked by the stage director Marc Bruni into an adamantly chipper Off Broadway musical that ran last fall for eight weeks and lives on in Robin Abrams’s energetic and tonally discordant filmed recording.

Set in 1981, the story is dated by design to evoke a less permissive, more inarticulate era. Trevor (Holden William Hagelberger) fumbles to explain his feelings for a football jock (Sammy Dell), even to himself. “It’s like, I’m like, I don’t know,” he croons. For help, the confused boy cries out to his goddess Diana (Yasmeen Sulieman) — Ross, not the Roman — who appears, sequined and shimmering, to belt out her biggest hits (which get louder applause than the show’s original songs).

Adult performers are vastly outnumbered by a strong company of singing and dancing children, who in the school scenes form phalanxes and mazes, physically cornering Trevor into being isolated and judged. These classmates’ talent show intrigue and crossed crushes only exist to pad the thin plot. The book and lyrics writer Dan Collins is better at his insight into the young characters’ melodramatic point of view — none of them can imagine this rather rote story has ever happened to anyone else.

In different times, the original short injected morbid comedy into Trevor’s habit of pretending to off himself for attention. Today, the suicide element has been softened, though one wonders if this generation’s more attuned and sensitive kids will find this staging of “Trevor” quaint, kitschy — or perhaps still universal.

Trevor: The Musical
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Watch on Disney+.