American culture likes to find niches to exploit, to blow up bigger than life to sap all the drama out of until moving on to whatever's next when the life has been bled out of it. Away from this sort of tabloid madness are the "little things" that encapsulate what make our culture great to begin with.
Writer/Producer Chris Lockhart came across the Freddy Awards when surfing YouTube at work, an awards program for high school musicals in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. Most Valuable Players follows three high schools' musical productions, with extensive interviews with the casts, directors, families, and people who mount the Freddys themselves. The audience is granted a view from the inside, and very quickly are invested in all of it, the kids, the teachers, the promoters, and maybe especially in the communal feeling of small-town school theatre programs.
While the set-up is, on the surface, about the competition between schools and casts to reach and hopefully win the Freddy Awards, Most Valuable Players resonates on much deeper levels. Here are the kids who weren't necessarily blessed with sports abilities, who find a community amongst themselves, who show us the best they have to offer, and essentially the best we as a society have to offer as well.
This is as compelling a film as you will see. You will find yourself completely invested in the kids, and although the competition is the framework here, it's the celebration of all of them that is so amazing. This is a microcosm of the coming generation, full of hope and talent, reminding us of the fresh naive kids within ourselves.
Most Valuable Players reminds us of how engaging the human experience can be, taking us to a place nothing matters but coming together to be the best we can be. That sounds cliché perhaps, but the very simple things can feel that way- it doesn't make them any less important, and this does justice to all of these primal, essential experiences like few films you'll ever be lucky enough to discover.
