Brat Pack is Back in New SBHS Show

Considering how many 1980s movies have been turned into Broadway musicals – from Footloose, Heathers, and Little Shop of Horrors to Fame, Xanadu, and even Back to the Future – it’s almost shocking nobody has adapted John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club for the stage. After all, the iconic film praised for its authentic portrayal of high school students’ emotional lives and exploration of the surprising (to them at least) commonalities between teens from decidedly different cliques – in the opening scene referred to as “a brain, athlete, basket case, princess, and a criminal” – who are stuck together for detention on a Saturday was a huge hit and has influenced countless coming-of-age stories. But with no published adaptation, Santa Barbara High School theater Department Head Gioia Marchese decided to try her own hand at turning the film into a stage play.

“I wanted something that was teen focused that would work well and be fun for the kids that we have this year, who are really good actors,” she explained. 

The themes of the movie play out every day at SBHS as in high schools across the country, making it an ideal show for the teen actors, she said.

“You’ve got five really distinct type teens who are thrown together in detention with a very aggressive principal who tells them to sit there quietly and think about what they’ve done and ultimately write an essay of who they think they are,” said Marchese, who grew up in Montecito. “As the day goes on, they slowly open up to each other and learn more about why they’re there and what they’re dealing with at home. These kids who might never speak to each other at school before discover that they have a lot more in common than they thought.”

Marchese used the film as a jumping off point to create something more theatrical, employing dance numbers and projections to recreate some of the more iconic moments for a show that’s set in the school’s library.

“All of the iconic moments, the characters, costumes, songs, and the famous lines that people love are there,” she said. “But of course we can’t do montages or closeups, so there’s a lot of movement and dance, expanding on what’s in the film in creative ways.” 

Marchese, who has fond memories of seeing the movie in the theater with her mom back when it came out in 1985, said that a lot of her actors also have sentimental connections to The Breakfast Club with their parents, albeit on DVD or streaming. 

For her adaptation, however, Marchese decided to cast her actors in creative ways, not simply dividing the 18 young thespians into three different casts, but rather rotating them in at least two different roles and pairing them in different groups, so that no performance shares the same group of actors. 

“It’s harder because you don’t get to work on building relationships and chemistry with one team, but at the same time they’re all learning that they have to be in the moment with whoever’s on stage with them,” she said. 

Which perhaps mirrors in a minor way the concept of the story, breaking out of a habit to see people in the moment as they are. 

While the movie and some of the expressions – i.e. “eat my shorts” – might be 40 years old, the struggles faced by high schoolers are not very different, and might even be exacerbated by mobile phones and isolation, Marchese said.

“Being an adolescent and going through that really painful time where you’re trying to figure out who you are never changes,” she said. “That’s just part of our physiology, a universal part of growing up. The slang is different, but the emotions are the same.”

(The Breakfast Club performs November 7-9 & 13-16 at SBHS Theater. Visit www.sbhstheater.com.)