TMSR: YOU KNOW NOTHING, VAL DICTORIAN!

I am going to rant now about a musical that I was in when I was eleven-years-old. Most people will not have heard about this one because it is written for kids who are either in home-school groups or big church groups.

This musical was written by Kathie Hill and is titled Promise U. Ms. Hill's work tends to be okay at best (at least from my own experience), and at worst it is simply glurge. And Promise U falls hard into that second category. What a piece of drek! There are five reasons why I say this:

1) The plot does not exist.
    The setting is at a college called Promise University and the whole student body has gathered for a pep rally/study hall Cram n Jam. They are learning about "Precious Promises to Famous Followers of the Past 2,000 Years" or P2F2P2K. Leading the group is the cocky DJ Stan "The Man" and a sexy nerd of a cheer captain Valarie Dictorian. They go through seven so-called Famous Followers, do a cheer after every song and it all culminates in Stan becoming a Christian with everything all hunk-dory at the end. 
    That's it, there's no conflict or anything. All it is is just talking about various people from history and a promise that applies to them. There's no beginning, no middle, and no real end either.

2) The characters are shallow.
     They are little more than cartoony mouthpieces uttering platitudes in stained glass attitudes. A new character comes in every time another "Famous Follower" (oh, give me a break!) is introduced. These characters are not really given a personality so much as they are given a quirk, and these quirks get old really fast. For example, Dee Caffeinate's only trait is her coffee obsession, and Val Dictorian comes off as a condescending know-nothing-know-it-all. 

3) The evangelism is all too easy. 
    Stan admits he's in over his head at the end, but it comes out of nowhere and doesn't feel real. All he has seen and heard was what everyone else was chanting. His character is so flat that I do not believe his life has been changed after accepted Christ. No one talks about dying to yourself and giving up whatever idols are in your life, something that is essential to the Christian life.

4) THE Promise is left out.
    The "Precious Promises" are true, but no mention is made at all of the promise that was made in Genesis Chapter 3 and continues through the end of Revelation; the promise of Christ's sacrifice and resurrection and the hope of eternal life with Him in Heaven. The promises are reduced to cutesy sentimentalism that do not require sacrifice of anything. This is a big "No" when writing Christian pieces. 

5) The Followers were treated without respect.
     If you're going to do a case-study of various Christians throughout history, then the topic needs to be treated seriously. This is not the case in Promise U, instead the Followers are treated with more sentimentality than respect. This is particularly bad with the case of Pocahontas. I'm not going to knock her faith just because it sounded it like the writer was merely speculating. But if she was in fact a strong woman of faith, then she needs more respect than just the Christian version of a Disney Princess!

 In short, Promise U was garbage. It is disrespectful towards Christians of the past, is insulting to kids' intelligence, and it had nothing to offer but preachy nonsense.