2013 or 1957? High School Musical Canceled Over 'Racy' Elvis Songs

In news straight out of 1957, a high school’s production of a show called “All Shook Up” has been canceled because a parent decided that the Elvis Presley songs were too sexually suggestive.

Here’s a shocker: This happened in Utah. The AP reports that the show “borrows from Presley’s songbook and puts a modern twist on William Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night.'” Which means, in addition to lyrics about how some chick’s “lips are like a volcano that’s hot”, there was a bit of cross-dressing involved.

“I’m at a loss,” Jill Fishback, whose daughter worked on the production, told The Salt Lake Tribune. “They’re singing Elvis songs. A girl dresses up as a boy and kisses a boy. … It’s not promoting homosexuality. It was supposed to be a farce.”
It wasn’t the first time some Utah parents put an end to a school drama. In August, the family values group Eagle Forum got Jordan School District administrators to cancel a production of “Dead Man Walking,” a play about a Catholic nun who counsels a death-row inmate in Louisiana.

Look, I mean, let’s not even get into what does and what does not constitute “promoting” homosexuality — that is not A Thing. It’s beyond cray cray that 56 years after Elvis sang the songs, they’re considered objectionable. Obviously the parents complaining haven’t heard any recent tunes by Nicki Minaj, Rihanna or Ke$ha; the new kids make “Don’t Be Cruel” look like a psalm. But even more disturbing? These fools are censoring Shakespeare. What the fuck. No wonder the world mocks the American education system. Pull yourselves together. To the parent who shut down the production, here’s a message for ya from Kent in Lear:

A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of thy addition.