Aging & Wisdom Quote by Randal Kleiser

Kleiser is selling a lie that isn’t really a lie: a “bigger than life musical” where adults play teenagers, and the mismatch is the point. The key phrase is “a style” - not an apology, not a workaround, but an aesthetic doctrine. He’s arguing that realism would be the wrong contract for this story. By calling it “a kind of surreal high school,” he frames adolescence less as a documentary subject than as a collective hallucination: hormones, hierarchies, longing, and performance, all slightly too bright and too loud to fit inside naturalism.

The intent is practical and persuasive, likely aimed at calming a skeptical collaborator (an actor? a producer? a parent?) who worries the casting will look ridiculous. Kleiser’s counter is that the production is already operating in musical logic, where feelings arrive as choreography and narrative turns into melody. In that world, late-twenties bodies don’t “break” the premise; they heighten it. The audience reads maturity as polish, confidence, and control - exactly what movie musicals need to deliver fantasy at scale.

Subtext: high school is theater. Everyone is acting older, tougher, sexier than they are, and the camera can literalize that by casting performers who actually are. The “surreal” tag also anticipates the cultural afterlife of films like Grease: not a snapshot of teen life, but a stylized memory of it, the kind that sandpapers away boredom and replaces it with myth. Kleiser isn’t chasing authenticity; he’s manufacturing an archetype.