The Prom features the central couple singing a love song to one another. It’s a kind of number that brims with love and desire and is familiar to fans of the American musical film dating back to the heyday of romantic pairings played by the likes of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron.
Except instead of a romance between white heterosexual characters, the core love story of The Prom centers on teen girls, one of whom is a woman of color.
And that first number, “Dance With You,” performed by out actors Ariana DeBose (Hamilton, Summer, A Bronx Tale) as Alyssa Green and newcomer Jo Ellen Pellman as Emma Nolan, is a tearjerker for queer girls (for anyone, really) who’ve never seen or imagined themselves as the romantic.