Teen Spirit.(The Talk of the Town)(13)(Theater review)

The other Friday evening, a couple of Broadway stars were on the second floor of Sardi's ordering pre-curtain cocktails. "I'll have a virgin strawberry Daiquiri," the leading lady was saying.

"A virgin pina colada?" the leading man said.

The show is "13," a new musical, at the Bernard B. Jacobs, about the horrors of adolescence. Graham Phillips, a squinty fifteen-year-old in a cardigan and a tie--who took his pina colada with camomile tea--plays a Manhattan teen-ager who is forced to relocate to Indiana ("Noooooooo!") after his parents separate. The entire cast is below voting age, not to mention Martini age. Still, Phillips gulped down his cocktail in a matter of seconds. "If it wasn't for the brain freeze, I'd be having another," he said.

Phillips, a Laguna Beach transplant, was dining out with three of his co-stars: Allie Trimm, a sandy-haired thirteen-year-old from San Diego; Delaney Moro, a Westchester girl and, at thirteen, the Broadway veteran, having played Jane Banks in "Mary Poppins"; and Aaron Simon Gross, the theatre buff--fourteen years old, a Boca Ratoner, loved "August: Osage County." Everyone ordered spaghetti.

Life between performances, they said, had been fast-paced: exploring the subways "without our parents," cycling through Central Park (exactly thirteen miles on a day off). They'd even held a pizza party with their across-the-street neighbors, the kids of "Billy Elliot." "I swear I was going to step on one of them," Moro said. "They were so small."

"They may have looked small," Phillips said, "but I thought they were going to be, like, 'Hey, can I have a beer?' "

"They're, like, seven going on seventy-four," Moro said.