It's almost fatally modest. But it has a sweet spirit, and it offers only one true moment of inadvertent camp: a (lame) finale featuring an African dance routine completely at odds with all the white bread we've just been served.
– Michael Phillips,
Chicago Tribune,
25 Sep 2009
rotten:
I don't mind the cornball and I don't mind the cliches, but I just think that the thing has to be executed a little better than this.
– A.O. Scott,
At the Movies,
28 Sep 2009
fresh:
There are enough hoary soap-operatic plottings for a thousand Gossip Girls (emotionally distant parents, almost-rapes, suicide attempts), yet Tancharoen individualizes each crisis so that no one character comes off as a mock-universal surrogate.
– Keith Uhlich,
Time Out New York,
30 Sep 2009
rotten:
Members of the class of '80 struggled to stay in school despite homelessness and crime; the greatest crisis in '09 finds a student's Sesame Street work schedule affecting her GPA.
– Michelle Orange,
L.A. Weekly,
1 Oct 2009
rotten:
The high school is so sanitized that there are no drugs, cutthroat competition, or-inconceivably for a theatrical milieu-no gay students.