My school is giving its annual Spring Musical tonight.  They’re doing a stage musical adaptation of Disney’s Descendants, which follows the lives of the children of the various Disney villains and heroes.  It’s a cute little musical and it’s always cool seeing what our Drama teacher manages to put together.

The plot of the play itself, however, is classic modern Disney propaganda.  It essentially presents a naïve view that evil is not a real threat; instead, it just needs to be neutralized with tolerance and a proper environment.

The plot is simple:  the soon-to-be-crowned Prince Ben wants to invite the children of four villains (Cruella de Vil, Jafar, Maleficent, and one other I can’t remember) to live in his kingdom, Auradon, in an attempt to reunite the land of the villains with the land of the heroes.  Soon, the four kids, who are used to life on the streets, find themselves adapting their wicked skills for good purposes.  The villain kids’ parents want them to steal the Fairy Godmother’s wand so that Maleficent can restore her magical powers and conquer the world.  The tension, naturally, comes in when the kids—especially Maleficent’s daughter Mal—begin to question whether or not they should carry out their deceptive mission.

The people of Auradon are suspicious, understandably, of the new students.  The play presents this suspicion as unwarranted prejudice, but the kids are clearly doing bad things—breaking into a museum, for example.  When Mal realizes that she can get the wand by getting Prince Ben to invite her to the coronation as his date, she casts a love spell on Ben to force him to fall in love with him—probably the most evil act in the play.

When Ben learns about this deception, he’s angry—and Mal, the girl who put this evil spell on him, is the one who storms off in a huff!  Of course, Ben goes after her, and realizes that he loves her even when the spell has worn off.  Never mind that the girl essentially drugged him to take advantage of him for her own personal gain.  They just fall in love because the script needs it to do so!

It’s a bit of a progressive power fantasy:  just put people from bad environments into good ones and everything will be fixed.  I do think tolerance (not in the lame SJW way) and understanding can go a long way in healing rifts and generational trauma.  But tolerance must be tempered with wisdom.  What tends to happen when we merely change environment is that the new environment is degraded by the presence of the newcomers, not the other way around (the play glorifies this notion, as the orderly students of Auradon suddenly engage in mindless rebellion against their tidy world, glorifying in the “fun” chaos of evil).  It requires a true heart-change for conditions to improve.

There’s a note of pro-immigration propaganda in the play as well:  throw open the doors, and the magic (literal in the play) of this happy land will transform the wretched into paragons of virtue.  Again, the play undermines its own messaging with the evidence of the evil kids’ behavior.

Here is where the play somewhat redeems itself:  the inherent redemption in the story.  Mal and the other kids reform and adapt to their new life, ultimately rejecting evil in favor of good.  However, this redemption is framed as “the skills you learned from a wicked world are useful to the good world, so you were never really evil to begin with.”  There’s no acknowledgment of original sin (even for the good guys, although they’re often presented as snooty and exclusionary).  Basically, the constant, simpering love of an objectively nice guy, as well as Maleficent being a terrible mother, makes everyone good in the end.

Or maybe it’s just a silly play for spunky teens obsessed with Disney.  The whole plot definitely has “theatre kid” vibes.  I will say the play is funny and enjoyable, but the messaging is muddled.  The script indicates that it’s supposed to be about the power of tolerance, which certainly comes through, but it seems to treat the results of that tolerance as unalloyed good.  The badness the new kids spread among the other students is framed as cool and edgy.  But there is a real character arc for the evil kids, and some of them really do have a satisfying payoff without resorting to magical trickery.