Review: All the World’s a Stage, a Musical Drama About a Closeted High School Teacher

All the World’s a Stage, Adam Gwon’s new musical about a gay high school math teacher in a conservative rural community, is a period piece. It’s set in 1996, which would seem to put some distance between us and the events of the story. Unfortunately, that story is frustratingly relevant in 2025, a time of “groomer” panic, when so many parents think they can shield their children from unwelcome ideas by removing books from the library (much easier to do that than pry the phones from their kids’ hands). But children are resourceful, just as they were in the pre-Internet age. They have ways of finding what they seek.

Sam Bucknam (Eliza Pagelle) spots a lifeline in Ricky Alleman (Matt Rodin), her school’s new math teacher, whom she caught taking in a theatrical performance at a rival high school. Sam is the loneliest of loners—a theater kid at a school without a theater program—but she asks Mr. Alleman to coach her monologue for the upcoming Pennsylvania state thespian conference, where the grand prize is a scholarship to study theater in college. She wants to do Harper’s Ozone monologue from Angels in America, but Ricky steers her toward Shakespeare, correctly anticipating a backlash in this small community where a large proportion of families are congregants of an evangelical megachurch.

But in the grand tradition of teenage rebellion, Sam persists, debuting her pill-popping Harper to a hallway full of her classmates. And this strains relations between Ricky and his good friend, school secretary Dede (Elizabeth Stanley), whose brother is pastor at the megachurch. The school’s arch-conservative principal soon receives complaints from parents wondering how a student ever got ahold of such a play and demanding a complete review of the library.

Closeted at work, Ricky also feels pressure to come out from his newish boyfriend Michael (Jon-Michael Reese), who runs the only bookstore in town and defiantly sells “gay-ass comic books” alongside book-club copies of The Notebook. Naturally, he dedicates a whole table to banned books and proudly tells the local newspaper all about it, compounding Ricky’s problems.

Written for a cast of four and a quartet of musicians (Michael Starobin’s lovely orchestrations for piano, guitar, violin, and cello take us back to the golden age of the song cycle), All the World’s a Stage is an ideal chamber musical for a company on a budget. Gwon’s songs are melodic and lyrically clever. When Ricky sings to Sam, “Right there, right inside that smart-ass grin / There’s a story if you let us in,” he harks back to the Shakespeare-inspired title, the roles we all play and the masks we don like armor to survive a hostile world.

Gwon’s songs offer the actors an opportunity to connect directly with the audience, with everyone performing a solo. Rodin charms as Ricky, the awkward newcomer who compares surveying his new environment, with all its variables, to solving an algebra equation in the song “Pieces, Together.” Reese wisely leans into the camp during “I’m Your Man,” a country song from a gay man to his best girlie. Pagelle has mastered the art of affecting a teenage mumble without actually sacrificing the clarity of her diction. Her unguarded performance of “Other Lives” gives us a glimpse into Sam’s family life. Stanley’s powerfully understated performance of “I Don’t Ask” doesn’t just tell but shows us how Dede ignores the obvious as a means of keeping the peace.

Outgoing Keen Company artistic director Jonathan Silverstein helms the production with a gentle fluidity, with one scene bleeding directly into the next as the other three actors breezily sing backup for the soloist. An American flag in the corner, the painted cinderblock of Steven Kemp’s set instantly places us in a public school. Jennifer Paar’s costume for Sam (camo pants and a baseball shirt that reads “whatever”) is a bit on the nose, but then again so are American teenagers. The pristine sound (by Megumi Katayama) and dreamy lighting (David Lander) make the whole event feel like a hard-wired memory in which every detail may not be perfectly recalled, but the emotional ripples are still keenly felt.

That’s appropriate because All the World’s a Stage is a musical reminiscence of a small act of bravery that left a lasting impact on all involved. That’s an important story to tell at a time when it’s easy to feel small and powerless in the face of world historical events. But more importantly, it is a love ballad to the theater, which for so many of us really has been life-changing.