Review: Legally Blonde: The Musical (Marriott Theatre)

By Chicagotheaterbeat @chitheaterbeat

  
  
Legally Blonde: The Musical 

Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin
Book by Heather Hach
Directed/Choreographed by Marc Robin 
at Marriott Theatre, Lincolnshire (map)
thru April 1  |  tickets: $40-$48   |  more info
  
Check for half-price tickets 
  
  
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Lovable movie becomes unrecognizable goo

     

  

Marriott Theatre presents

  

Legally Blonde: The Musical

Review by Clint May

You might think you know what you’re getting when you go to something that is based on a 2001 comedy that was in turn based on a book. It’s a fluffy farce that seems to say, “Hey, remember the ‘80s? Remember how good it felt to turn your mind off and watch a fairy tale about pretty people with petty problems?” (And who can say it didn’t?) It was the same with the movie, and any discussion of the musical must draw a comparison to what made the movie an unlikely success and inspired the ensuing franchise that sought to milk dry the story of the little Elle that could. The movie was also a piece of pink bubblegum, but it was packaged in a set of star-making performances by Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Coolidge that elevated it from forgettable to lovable. Anything derived from that, from the sequels to the reality show to the musical, is riding on that charm. Anyone seeking to find that charm distilled into musical form may be disappointed to find it has instead been propped up and bloated until nearly unrecognizable.

The story is simple: Elle Woods (Chelsea Packard) is a “Marilyn” blonde in puppy love with Warren (Cole Burden) at university in LA. He’s equally vacuous, but his breeding won’t allow him to go with anything but a “Jackie.” In a bizarre build-up, he gets down on his knee at a fancy restaurant and….breaks up with her. She’s devastated, and decides the only way to get him back is to become the girl he wants. And what Warren wants is a snooty brunette who “wears black, even when she’s not at a funeral.” With her dedicated (and literal) Greek chorus of sorority sisters, she abandons her party-time ways and devotes herself to following Warren to Harvard Law School. She succeeds, but learns along the way that transforming yourself for a man can end unpleasantly, but also begin a new transformation that ends in self-acceptance with the help of TA Emmett (David Larsen). Anyone who scoffs that such women still could exist hasn’t seen Chicago’s own Trixies trawling around Lincoln Park in search of ‘Chads.’

With its simple, heartfelt themes of sisterhood, perseverance and loyalty, it seems hard to imagine a production could run astray and cruel to criticize it for such an innocent tale. But here again the movie provides the clue to why it could succeed where the musical falls flat—if brevity is the soul of wit, the movie was acutely aware of when to linger and when to gloss over its most silly elements that would threaten its bubble of disbelief. The difficulty with this musical is that it can’t, by its nature, gloss over anything. Exhibit A: the movie quickly skipped past the Harvard board’s debate to allow Elle admittance (sorely missed here is her hilarious video essay, replaced with a mostly-unspent marching band and corporate plug for Jet Blue air dropping Elle just in time to present herself). The musical’s decision to revel in the misogyny of hound-dog old men drooling over Elle as she dances around is funny only if humor is delivered by way of comedians circa 1950.

Any laugh the movie earned has been stretched into an exhaustively pedestrian litany of lyrics. When your keynote song is titled “Ohmigod You Guys,” you know you’re in for a tedious set of lazy rhymes, tired cliches and fad-based exclamations. Exhibit B: “MAD PROPS! He’s the campus catch, you’re the perfect match!” It’d be tempting to say how it all got “jiggy wit it” in an ironic compliment  to the authors so they could get a feel for just how uncomfortably dated that already sounds without the kind of wistfulness you get from anachronisms in “Grease”. To give what some might call depth, extraneous characters are fleshed out with the same care that a mannequin is dressed for a window, no more egregiously than a butch lesbian who provides some homophobic ‘gags.’ Potential offense is furthered by Elle’s case-winning insight that a witness is gay, but it’s cast into doubt when it’s observed he could just be “European.” It all serves to undermine the innocence of the themes by pretending the last several decades didn’t happen and that it’s still okay to use gays as comic relief with Nancy-boy wrists even as it firmly sets itself in the present. And really, an “I see dead people.” joke?

Even this could all be forgiven if it was just entertaining. Here the musical continues to fall flat. The choreography is unmemorable and lacking in spectacle, possibly due to the needs of it being presented as theater in-the-round. Trying to please all angles means no one gets much of anything pleasurable. No show-stopping number leaves you toe-tapping as you leave, and you can go back to the aforementioned Wicked and listen to its superior “One Short Day” and “Popular” if you want to hear them again, since they seem to be cousins to any in Blonde. Sparse staging gives the cast little to do with themselves and further decreases the spectacle nature one rightfully expects from a musical of this purportedly fluffy ilk. The cast as a whole does try its heart out, and that is its one redeeming factor. Elle is sweet and vulnerable as required, and keeps her high energy throughout – no mean feat when most of the numbers belong to your character. Jennifer Coolidge’s Paulette is brought to a new life by Christine Sherill, and she continues to steal the scenes she inhabits with her low-class charms and vivaciousness, even when stuck giving an unnecessary Irish backdrop to her character (it turns out this is just to give an excuse for another dated reference—Michael Flatley). If the key demographic was young women Elle’s own age of around 22, they would have been about 10-13 when the movie debuted, and these jokes would have been fresh then. Not so now. It seems the target demographic is people who have nostalgia for the movie, which for something that is only just over a decade old, seems to assume nostalgia is created on a yearly basis. It’s really difficult to discern who the audience for this would be.

It seems the creators cynically wanted to give the world a musical that was above reproach, with its pedigree and breeding designed to create a perfect product that would be easy to love and hard to criticize (“How can you say bad things? Look at that sweet face…” they might say.). It all seems so much cold pantomime in the execution, designed to extract dollars from an unwitting public and deliver a bill of goods. Stay home, rent the movie, and revel instead in a delightfully nonsense tale that never needed to be exploited in the name of popular pap.

  

Rating: ★½

  

  

Legally Blonde: The Musical continues through April 1st at Marriott Theatre, 10 Marriott Drive, Lincolnshire (map), with performances Thursdays and Fridays 8pm, Saturdays 4:30 and 8pm, Sundays 1pm and 5pm. Tickets are $40-$48, and are available by phone (847-634-0200) or online here (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at MarriottTheatre.com.  (Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes, which includes one 15-minute intermission)

All photos by Peter Coombs