Jerry Mitchell’s musical reboot of the 1990 film is banal and insipid.
There’s a message for you in the entry hall of Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre, spelled out in a series of huge placards: “BOLD WOMAN.” “STRONG WOMAN.” “FUNNY WOMAN.” “SMART WOMAN.” “FIERCE WOMAN.” “PRETTY WOMAN.” If you like, you can buy a T-shirt version of this barrage of empowerment. That is, if you think a play about a bubble-headed, eagerly servile streetwalker is empowering.
All of this messaging is really a disguised meta-message to the critics: “Please don’t hate us.” Too late: They have been unkind. The audience doesn’t much care, so far. The musical version of the 1990 Julia Roberts–Richard Gere rom-com broke the house record at the Nederlander a couple of weeks ago and is hauling in over $1 million a week. The Pretty Woman story — essentially a Hollywood Boulevard My Fair Lady with Gordon Gekko subbing in for Henry Higgins — thrills women (who are the ones snapping up the tickets) even in such an aggressively mediocre format as this banal, insipid show. Directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, everything from the dancing to the acting to the sets is to theater what TGIFriday’s is to dining. As for the blisteringly generic 1980s power-ballad tunes by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance, I’ve heard more creative lyrics in life-insurance commercials. “Never give up on a dream!” “Together forever!” These are actual lines. Edward, the Wall Street shark once played by Gere and now played by Andy Karl, diagrams his character’s arc for us when he sings, “I know this might sound strange / I believe that I can change.” Do tell.
Stepping into Roberts’s heels as Vivian the tart is Samantha Barks, a beauty and a fine singer with the requisite leggy charm (the word “coltish” used to be trotted out in every Julia Roberts profile, and it applies here). She spends virtually the entire show not just smiling but beaming at Karl and the audience. So delightful, this prostitution game! And also notable for the sunny innocence it bestows on those who practice it.
Getting the two principals together requires not just the usual movie meet-cute but a stack of contrivances. He, a New Yorker in Los Angeles to buy and dismember a shipbuilding firm, not only gets lost in Hollywood but can’t figure out how to drive his borrowed Lotus, so he stops to ask the nearest streetwalker for directions and driving advice. Because operating high-end sports cars is exactly the kind of skill possessed by penniless hookers rather than billionaire financiers, he turns over the keys to her so she can drive him to the Beverly Wilshire. The next morning he hires her for the week because, when negotiating a complex nine-figure business deal, one naturally brings a date. And surely one would be unconcerned about whether choosing a prostitute as said date might create some problems.
The show closely follows the same path as the movie script, set in the same chunky-cellphone era and replaying the most memorable scenes (the bathtub scene, the Rodeo Drive scenes, the polo benefit) nearly unchanged. It even rolls out replicas of some of the original costumes. While this musical was in development, it was said to be undergoing heavy reworking under the auspices of the late Garry Marshall (the film’s director, who is credited with the book along with J. F. Lawton, the original’s screenwriter) to make it palatable to today’s more enlightened sensibilities. I don’t see any important changes at all. “I want the fairy tale,” Vivian declares toward the end. Cue the princely suitor climbing up (the fire escape) to rescue her from her worries and presumably take her shopping on Rodeo Drive many more times, ordering the clerks to suck up to her.
Those shopping scenes are the key to the story’s popularity: Pretty Woman is an incredibly cynical ersatz love story aimed at pleasing shallow materialists and status-sluts who crave designer fashion above all else because that’s how to show hoi polloi who’s got the (literal) goods. Karl, even more than Gere did, plays his part as a stiff. There is nothing romantic between Edward and Vivian. They barely connect outside of the bedroom, having almost nothing in common. The whole of his appeal to her is that he’s paying for her shopping sprees. The whole of her appeal to him is that she’s a knockout. Early in the story, when he learns that her price is $100 an hour, he instead buys her services for the night, then for the week. When they stroll off together at the end, marriage presumably awaiting them, he’s simply buying her services for a lifetime.
Despite a preposterous scene in which, after learning from Vivian (of all people) that the heart comes before business, Edward personally co-signs a $500 million loan for the shipbuilding company to continue operating instead of ransacking it, the only thing that’s really changed by the end is that she no longer dresses like a prostitute. If, as is often said, the Pretty Woman is a hooker with a heart of gold, this fable is far more attentive to the gold than the heart.
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