Legally Blonde: three cheers for Elle, but where are the great songs, m’lud?
As 21st-century entertainment franchises go, Legally Blonde has been almost stupidly successful, given its simple scenario: first a novel, then a hit film that “made” Reese Witherspoon, then a sequel film, then a Broadway musical, with tie-in reality TV show. The musical’s 2010 West End premiere won awards, with Sheridan Smith a big draw as the bubbly blonde heroine Elle Woods, who conducts a romantic raid on Harvard Law School, getting enrolled to win back ex-boyfriend Warner. The cad has dumped her on the basis that she’s far too shallow to settle down with, proving himself the very model of superficiality.
Now, ahead of yet another film next year, and launching the Open Air theatre’s summer season, the stage show has been remounted again, this time by Lucy Moss, co-creator of Six, the most successful British musical for yonks.
The idea is to bring the piece technologically and culturally up to date for the selfie-taking age. On screen, of course, Witherspoon’s Elle didn’t have to contend with social media and smart-phones. And the story’s origins pre-date internet use – Amanda Brown, who wrote it, was inspired by her days at Stanford law school in 1993. As she recalled, her first week involved attending a feminist meeting, where she scoffed at a campaign to change the name “semester” to “ovester”; ostracism swiftly followed.
In that nugget, you glean that it’s temperament not physical type that fed her fish-out-of-water feeling. So the justification for the novel casting here was present at the start, even if it takes an adjustment, given the role’s association with “Barbie doll” looks that Brown referred to in the book. Courtney Bowman, who describes herself as “Afro-European”, takes the lead, in blonde wigs; as with the current casting of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, there’s no singular reading to this fresh approach, the blondeness either an ambivalent gesture or playful provocation.
And as with Witherspoon and Smith before her, we root for her character all the way. Bowman (a former Ann Boleyn in Six) not only possesses a terrific set of lungs, but denotes the character’s journey of self-discovery with nuance, shifting from initial hurt and bashfulness to indestructible resolve. This is a woman who learns how to stand her ground, moving from the frippery of dressing “right” for her hoped-for fiancé to running rings around a courtroom during a murder trial.
You can see why Legally Blonde (score and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin, book by Heather Hach) is so popular, combining feminism and fun – it deploys the colour pink like a celebration and send-up rolled into one. You have to set aside the odd quibble that in a modern-day Harvard, there’d surely be more focus on minimising any disparaging attitudes to difference, and the evening shows its pre-woke age with its narrative hinge-points involving a predatory lecturer (who’d arguably be called out more readily than he is here) and a crucial, very prejudiced supposition about sexual orientation. To request much more realism, though, is to miss the point – rammed home by the fact that an actor (Liam McEvoy) archly bounds about as Elle’s beloved chihuahua Bruiser.
Still, what I would have loved more of is memorable songs. There’s only so much snappy, campy choreography – aping TikTok-style syncing – and more wittering than witty numbers you can take before déjà-vu and déjà-entendu sets in. The shrill opening song – Omigod You Guys – seems to go on for a small eternity, and while there’s something giddily impressive about Lauren Drew’s fitness-instructor client singing and skipping (in Whipped into Shape), there’s little to hit you in the solar plexus. Other, better female empowerment musicals are available, Moss’s superb Six being the perfect case in point, m’lud.
Until July 2. Tickets: 0333 400 3562; openairtheatre.com
