What could be scarier and more sublime than proposing to Ryan Gosling?

Singing with him. In a “real gig.”

Next weekend in a concert at Vancouver’s Venue, 11 Carson Graham students will sing with Hollywood actor Gosling’s band, Dead Man’s Bones.

“It’s outside school,” says Grade 12 student Rachel Buttrass of the Venue concert. “It’s not just our parents and our friends (in the audience). People are actually there because they want to see the show.”

The concert is a live performance of the Dead Man’s Bones concept record, a ghost-monster love story brimming with synthy, ironic indie ballads. It showcases a chorus of young voices, originally the children’s choir from California’s Silverlake Conservatory of Music.

This weekend, it won’t be the kids from Silverlake, but the crew from Carson Graham dressed in white cloaks with red hoods, holding flashlights under their faces as their favourite heartthrob, Gosling, croons over the piano.

An homage to grade school musicals and good, old fashioned spooks, the Dead Man’s Bones show has earned the band a mix of scathing and breathless reviews across the continent.

The show is “weird. It’s very creepy,” laughs Carson’s Jane Agyeman, Grade 11, one morning in the high school’s choir room. “It’s very Halloween . . . and it gets way creepier.”

Enter “Werewolf Heart “ – a track named for Gosling and band mate Zach Shields’ record label – where little angel-voiced Draculas sing about a doomed love between a werewolf lady and a regular joe. The lyrics go, “my skull is full of sunken ships, my heart’s a prisoner to my ribs . . . without the sun, I’m only shadows in a dress.”

But it can be airy, too, maybe the happiest haunting since The Unicorns sang Ghost Mountain. Imagine a Tom Waits concert in the school cafeteria, one critic said, a dreamy performance riff about wonders and nightmares.

Like the delicious terror of meeting the flesh and blood guy from The Notebook, he who kissed Rachel McAdams in the rain, stopped time as popcorn caught in the throats of women and girls in theatres across the continent.

“I’ll be nervous when I meet (Gosling),” says Isabel Cristina Gonzalo Semidey, Grade 12. “But I’m mostly excited. I’m mostly really, really excited.”

The Venue show will mark the biggest musical milestone since a few of the students recorded their own CD with the jazz choir. At least five of the 11 teens say they plan to study music in college or university, and they hope the Dead Man’s Bones concert will go a long way on their resumes.

“This is a professional standard,” says teacher Polsky. “It’s not just a Christmas concert in the school gym.”

She says she also asked Gosling if he might pose for photo with the students after their three-hour dress rehearsal this week.

“But he said he was hoping for the same thing, that we would pose for his pictures,” Polsky said.

There’s something very puppy dogs and Sadie Hawkins about a Hollywood powerhouse hosting his own talent show – the opening acts are local kid musicians, and Gosling’s publicists at Biz3 say the Vancouver line-up is top secret.

Dead Man’s Bones doesn’t do interviews, either, Biz3 says. “It saps their enthusiasm,” for the earnestness of their soirees.

And so the big screen love god dons a monster mask – as the Dead Man’s Bones band photos show – to dull his splendor, looks for a close, real-time connection with young musicians. And young artists rub shoulders with superstars in their first crack at the professional stage. It seems in the collision of those earnest desires for intimacy, there could be magic, more than just the diamond dust sighs inspired when Gosling locks lips with his costar in The Notebook. But still...

Jane Agyeman shakes her head, grinning, “Ryan Gosling is at the top of the list. Top five for sure . . . Ryan, will you marry me?”

Standing at the back of the group in that Carson Graham classroom, Mark Jackson, one of three guys in the choir, isn’t weak in the knees at all. He rolls his eyes as the girls recount how “cute” Gosling looked in Murder by Numbers.

“We’re still trying to figure out the balancing act, always,” Agyeman says as she points her thumb at Jackson. “And he’s like, Whatever.”

This could be a show worth seeing, brimming with a sweet, nostalgic innocence, a happy spook – one where movie stars roll up their sleeves to accompany the local choir on piano, and their voices rise up with the clouds from the smoke machine, “When I think about you, flowers grow on my grave, grave, grave.”

kmcmanus@northshoreoutlook.com