Legally Blonde the Musical: Guilty as Charged

posted by Cheshire on Wed, Feb 7, 2007
in Local Theatre

It's my own fault, really: I let myself get my hopes up. Until recently I wouldn't have been interested in going at all, especially not on poker night. But then, good friends of mine had seen it, and one of them (one of our esteemed company members, I might add) professes to not even like musicals, but even she had a good time. (The other friend likes pretty much every musical, so her opinion was a bit discounted.) Plus, I wouldn't have seen it had it not been for my dear wife, who also likes pretty much every musical. I've managed to get out of seeing A Chorus Line, Cats, and the stillborn Lennon, so even though I swore off Broadway nonsense after Movin' Out, tonight I found myself at Legally Blonde the Musical.

No, I didn't really like it. It wasn't as bad, say, as Miss Saigon (three hours of my life I'll never get back) or the semi-recent revival of Showboat (one of the few shows I've ever walked out on). I had hoped, though, that it would turn out to be more than terminally light entertainment, but in the end that's exactly what it was.

However, what I really couldn't stand about Legally Blonde, and this is something it has in common with the other two shows just mentioned (and probably all of the ones above), was...

...the audience.

I don't know what it was about this audience, but most of the people screamed, laughed, and applauded at the slightest opportunity. And at the end of Legally Blonde, they could not get up on their feet fast enough. Now, I will admit that it was an opening night performance, so it was probably somewhat papered, but o-mi-god, omigod you guys (see, now the show's opening and closing song is stuck in my head) this was the most easily entertained audience I've ever been bewildered to be in.

Don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are musical theatre audiences. No, not exactly, but I have liked a few musicals over the years: Little Shop of Horrors, Chicago, Aladdin, A.C.T.'s Threepenny Opera. I like musicals when the lyrics are really clever or unusual and the music appeals to me. The music is almost always engineered to be appealing and filled with hooks, so really the burden of proof is on the lyrics.

Again, not that this show is that bad, but it's not that good, either. The first half seemed more like a high-school musical (not that there's anything wrong with that, but you don't pay $90 a ticket for high-school musicals -- well, maybe you do for High School Musical). The sets seemed cheap, though the other tech aspects were fine -- that is, unremarkable. The singing was mostly competent, sometimes impressive, though it was frequently difficult to make out the lyrics when members of the ensemble were singing. Didn't matter too much anyway: when the lyrics were intelligible, it usually wasn't like they were that interesting or clever.

The show does shine in places. A few numbers, "Omigod You Guys," "What You Want," and "Whipped into Shape," really are huge, and that's what I expect from a blockbuster musical like this. A lot of the success of these set pieces hangs both on the choreography and the dancing talent, and on these points Legally Blonde delivers. Most of the cast is merely adequate, but Laura Bell Bundy does a great job as Elle. She sings and dances beautifully, though I missed Reese Witherspoon's particular energy and charisma. I also missed Luke Wilson, Jennifer Coolidge, and Selma Blair. The only person I liked better in the musical than in the movie was Andy Karl as the UPS guy.

That leads me to another aspect of the show that was disappointing. Legally Blonde the movie is a pretty light piece of entertainment. It didn't really surprise me that someone would make a musical out of it, since musicals are usually pretty thin story-wise anyway. Honestly, I had no idea it was possible to make the story even fluffier than it already was. But congratulations, Legally Blonde the Musical, you did it. The one thing the show does more deeply than the movie is to give Emmett's character a backstory, which makes his conflicts resonate more. Other than that, the plot is a very thin thread. It's almost as if the producers are banking on the audience members, presumably fans of the movie all, to fill in the story gaps themselves.

And we're back to the audience. Like I said, I know opening night is a bit of a factor, but I've been to enough musical theatre not on opening night to know that tonight's thunderous reaction wasn't a fluke. It wasn't even a generosity of spirit; it was an audience that seemed primed to love everything placed before it. (The audience even booed the villain of the piece at one point, like we were watching a melodrama.)

Plus, what prices people will pay for such entertainment! The bottom price for Legally Blonde is $50, and those are nosebleed seats. The top price is $90, and tons of people will happily pay that. That's 50% more than the top price at Berkeley Rep, and it's 500% more than the top price at our little theatre. No, we don't have fancy technical capabilities like they do, but at least we put on plays that challenge our audiences even while we entertain.

I guess in the end, I thought there were some highlights to the evening, but mostly it was just passable. The audience reaction, however, was overwhelming. What was strange was that I ran into some friends at intermission, and we were all wondering what the fuss was about. The screams were coming from somewhere.

So what is it about musical theatre audiences? Is it just a particular subset of the American theatregoing population that I'm just not destined to be a part of? I want to enjoy myself like that, I really do. I don't want to be a bad date for my wife. I just want to know what everyone else is getting that I'm missing.