PROM QUEEN
“I just want to dance with you,” the character Emma Nolan sings to her girlfriend, Alyssa Greene, in a romantic number in The Prom. It’s a simple love song in a scene that feels as though it were plucked from the heyday of the American musical film. Except, rather than featuring a white heterosexual couple, it centers an interracial teen queer girl couple. What makes the scene and the characters even richer for LGBTQ+ viewers is that both rising star Jo Ellen Pellman, who plays Emma in her first major role; and Ariana DeBose, who plays Alyssa and stars in the upcoming West Side Story, are queer.
“I don’t want to start a riot / I don’t want to blaze a trail,” the song begins. Of course, those
