Legally Blonde: The Musical
(Book: 2/5, Movie: 3/5, Musical: 3+/5, Broadway cast album: 3/5, London cast album: 3+/5, Musical broadcast performance: 4/5) Yeah. So. Um. Some time ago, I watched Legally Blonde, the movie, mostly because I actually saw part of it being filmed (they used my campus for a couple of the shots, and so I'd be walking to class and see movie cameras everywhere). It was a fun movie -- not least the novelty of seeing my staid, geeky campus being used as a party school. Then through Pandora I started listening to the songs of the musical.
I finally sat down and listened to all the songs, and was intrigued enough to watch the whole thing on a youtube copy of the MTV airing of the musical with Laura Bell Bundy and Christian Borle and... um... really liked it. I'd go so far as to say I'm a little obsessed, if you couldn't tell from the plethora of rankings at the beginning... It's, well, like the movie: pink and fashionable sorority girl Elle (Bundy) isn't taken seriously by her boyfriend Warner, so she follows him to Harvard Law School to win him back... and then it turns out to be a riff on finding one's own place and voice in the world on one's own terms, and not letting a guy dictate one's terms.
The musical's big strength, I think (which it mostly shares with the movie), is that it never really takes itself seriously. (Indeed, "Seriously," one of the early songs, is also one of the best ones for how it very much pokes fun at the generic love ballad.) I mean, let's face it, this is a musical where the heroine gets into Harvard Law by doing a dance number accompanied by a huge poster of her and her ex-boyfriend, after which the old stodgy professors on the admissions committee join in the dance number. Yeah. It's a delicate structure of bouncy absurdities that, if it ever tried to take itself seriously, would fall down catastrophically, but it doesn't. (There are frequent parts where the characters are taken seriously, which is all to the good -- it wouldn't have any emotional depth otherwise -- but never where the musical takes itself as a musical seriously.)
And it has a lot of energy. The bouncing highly-choreographed manic energy of both the songs and the performers is the other great strength, and that energy is used to propel the plot forward (almost all the songs, except for "Ireland" and "Bend and Snap," have a great deal of plot forward momentum. Guess which are my least favorite songs?).
This energy and humor (not least, the contrast between the dark sober Harvard law students and the bright peppy sorority parts) covers some mediocrity in the songs and the performers -- the songs are catchy and cute and never descend to the angsty nonsense of a Wildhorn musical, but they also never make it to impressive, and the performers are pretty much uniformly quite good actors, great dancers (though I have no experience with dance and so my opinion here is worth exactly squat) and adequate singers. (I would... give a lot to see Kristin Chenoweth in the title role, but then again, she wouldn't have much interesting singing to do and a lot of voice-breaking singing, so I can't really see why she'd want to.)
(I also wonder a bit if one of the reasons I'm obsessed is that it's the first show, more or less, that I've seen since I did a very little bit of choreography in grad school, so I now have a very little bit of context to put this kind of thing in. And -- although presumably I would think this about any musical I saw -- I am now very impressed at how much choreography is required for this thing. Also, I thought the ballad in particular was brilliantly choreographed, with the revolving door and the actors singing through the door. I also am completely and totally impressed by the dancing chops you'd have to have to be in this musical. In fact, now that I think about it more, I suspect part of the charm is the insane choreography -- you would have to be in really good shape, not to mention good at changing clothes, to be in this musical.)
Musically, I don't find it particularly interesting in general. There's one nod to relative complexity in "The Harvard Variations," which unsurprisingly is one of my technical favorites (though I must admit I like the Bundy/Borle songs the best, as they just work off of each other so well), but let's just say this isn't about musical complexity. There seem to be quite a lot of key modulations, which is apparently their way of adding interest, but it gets almost laughable when you realize it's about the fifth key modulation you've heard in the song. Some of these modulations have almost no instrumental support, and I have to wonder how many times the singers had to practice them. (Yeah, I'm an instrumental snob who thinks singers are terrible at picking up music. And you know? There's a reason for this!)
On the subject of singing vs. acting, the Broadway cast album is not nearly as good as the MTV performance, I think mainly because of Christian Borle, who turns in a competent but not particularly inspired performance on the album. Again, I think this comes down to him being a quite good actor, whom I was rather impressed by, and not such a great singer, and on the album he's singing rather than acting (even though he ought to be doing both). The one song where he manages to pull out a better performance is "Chip on My Shoulder," in which there is more of a narrative for him to work with. Laura Bell Bundy has good acting ability in both the album and performance; I think she pulls out all the stops in both. (But as I said before, she's no Chenoweth.) One thing I will say is that both Bundy and Borle's voices are light and pleasant and go together very well, and as a result all their duets together are quite pleasing to the ear, even if not spectacular.
The London cast album is rather better in terms of energy. Now, I like Bundy rather better than Sheridan Smith (who is awesome, but through no fault of her own she has a voice that to me does not fit the character as well as Bundy), and I like Borle quite a bit better than Gaumond, but the liveliness of the live production in the London album really nails what it's about.
Musical vs. movie: The musical differs from, and is better than, the movie in that it is deeper and more compassionate. Oh, we're not talking Dante here, but Emmett, the love interest, for example, is given quite a bit more depth, backstory, reasonable strengths and weaknesses, and interaction with Elle than the characterless-hunk-o-love-interest he is in the film. (I have this problem a lot with chick lit as well -- it's nice to read about interesting women, but how can you expect me to care about their romantic problems when the guy's only features are that he is handsome and nice and good in bed?) Emmett is smart and nice and sweet and reasonably good-looking, but he's also kind of a dork (I loved that Christian Borle is noticeably, purposely less good-looking than Richard H. Blake's Warner, whereas I found the relative attractiveness of Emmett and Warner to be fairly similar in the movie), he dresses poorly, he's got a chip on his shoulder, and there's a moment where he (believably) tries to trade in his integrity for approval, and Elle has to nudge him back in the right direction. Give me a guy like this any day over hunk-o-lawyer.
The hairdresser Paulette, Elle's friend, is also fleshed out quite a bit more in the musical. I don't really like her arc that much (I find the "Ireland" songs to be actively boring), but Orfeh does blow away the part.
One of the things I loved most about the musical is its greater compassion, because compassion for characters is one of the things that really draws me. In the movie, when Warner proposes to Elle at the end, Elle scorns him and calls him a bonehead. The epilogue says that he graduates without honors, without a job, and without a girlfriend, which strikes me as mean-spirited to the point of unreality as a way of dealing with his character. In the musical, the proposal is met by a "Thank you, but no," and a very sweet song ("Find My Way") about how she has found her way because of his dumping her -- they part as friends (it looks like they're even holding hands as they walk away). I like this not just because it's nicer, but because it seems rather more mature than "Ha! You called me not serious, so I'm going to call you a bonehead!" Furthermore, Warner's fate in the musical is that he quits law school and becomes a model (and it's strongly implied that he ends up with Brooke). Which plays right back into the message of making one's own choices, and to me is a much more compassionate solution, if you will, to the character.
While we're talking about compassion, and getting into feminism... I really liked what the musical did with Vivian/Vivienne. In the movie she gets points for not in the end being the bad guy (girl), but she does kind of come off as jockeying for alpha female with Elle, but eventually submitting to Elle as the alpha female. (And because, of course, Emmett intercedes, because God forbid that either chance or Vivian herself be the catalyst when characterless Love Interest Guy is there to bolster his own Love Interest credentials by doing so.) Elle/Vivian barely passes Bechtdel... I'm not sure it really counts that the one substantive conversation they have is started by Vivian making fun of Warner. In the musical, Vivienne is the one to realize, herself, without Emmett doing a thing, that she's wrong about Elle. (In a deleted scene, in fact, she's the one who tells Emmett what's going on.) And in the musical you start to realize that part of the whole deal with Vivienne is that she's just a prickly character; she "does not 'bond'," as she puts it. ("We've never known her to bond!") Which again I find awesome. Even though I am very happy with Elle staying true to her sweet, loyal nature, not everyone is sweet, and not everyone should be sweet (and thank goodness too, because otherwise I'd be in trouble), but they can still be awesome. Vivienne is fierce and ambitious and opinionated and sometimes practically mean, and she is honest and outspoken and unafraid, and she is just awesome.
Feminism: NOTE: I AM NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT THE BEND AND SNAP AT ALL. I AM JUST NOT READY TO TACKLE THAT ONE, OKAY? I mean, the basic story is great, right? Don't follow around your loser guy like a puppy; take control of your own life and be an awesome lawyer and diss the losers! That being said, I thought the musical fails like crazy at feminism compared to the movie for the first, umm, five-sixth, and then makes up for it some in the end. Something that I really didn't like about the way they re-tooled the story was how they changed the story from Elle coming to the conclusion herself she's going to work hard to excel at law school, to Emmett basically rubbing her face in it (even though, of course, she does make the realization and put in the work). I mean, I understand logistically that it makes sense to combine the musical number that gives Emmett character and the number that is Elle's study montage, so that the musical isn't ten hours long, and it certainly does a lot for Emmett's character to present him as Elle's mentor, and in practice I have no real problem with male friend-mentors (especially having been in a field, myself, where almost all my friend-mentors were male by default), but in principle I think it undercuts the whole message of her being independent, especially of guys. In "Find My Way," at the end, Elle says to Warner, "Look how far I have come without anyone holding my hand," and I was all, "Excuse me? What do you call what Emmett did, then?" (In the West End version, they change it to "Look how far I have come without having to cling to your hand," which I like much better -- she isn't clinging to Emmett like she was to Warner, but he is helping her and it's weird to pretend otherwise.)
In both the movie and the musical, the ending is about how a woman's own life can be a validation in and of itself, and isn't dependent on being or not being with a guy. The ending (minus the epilogue) doesn't even have Elle with a guy at all! Which is great! I love it! The movie kind of undercuts this by saying, in the epilogue, that Emmett is going to propose to her that night. I didn't even realize how much this bothered me until I watched the musical, where... well, she still ends up with Emmett in the epilogue (how could she not?) but she gets to propose to him, and he gets to yell (sing) "Omigod omigod!" like the sorority girls in the beginning, which is seven kinds of awesome and which does a much better job, in my opinion, of underscoring the message of leading one's own life and not living one's life for a guy or at at guy's whims.
Also, one totally shallow comment: Emmett (well, Borle) should really lose the hair gel. Ouch.
All that being said, it totally has all sorts of stereotypes in it, from fitness instructors to gay men to Europeans (what can you expect from the song "Gay or European?" which by the way is one of the most delightfully choreographed numbers in the entire show, and is HILARIOUS) to sorority girls to Harvard to lesbians to hetero men to lawyers to ... well, on and on. I personally thought they were affectionate stereotypes (although I was annoyed at Enid's character being played solely for laughs -- she could have been a lot more, like Vivienne), but your mileage may vary. And I cannot at all believe that the lawyers portrayed in the musical have any resemblance to what lawyers do in real life. But hey, I'm not a lawyer, so whatever.
I also thought about it some and realized that I think my obsession with this musical is my version of the Twilight phenomenon. By which I mean: I understand why teenage girls love Twilight, but I also know a surprising number of middle-aged women with husbands and children who love it, including level-headed women who would be the last people I'd think would enjoy vampire love. After reading it, I decided it was because it took you back to when you were giddy-crushing/falling-in-love with someone, and I guess it is, for these people, a wonderfully nostalgic time to remember. Well. Twilight didn't do it for me, at all, but apparently, even though I have nothing in common with a sorority girl who goes to law school, I love being taken back to a time where I got to be really good friends with a guy, that later turned into romantic interest (Hi, D! And, for that matter, S!) And in the context of learning one can grow in directions one never really thought about, or thought one could grow in. Huh. How about that.
(Also. Um. Er. Would any of you be willing to, um, beta? I KNOW. Shut up.)
I finally sat down and listened to all the songs, and was intrigued enough to watch the whole thing on a youtube copy of the MTV airing of the musical with Laura Bell Bundy and Christian Borle and... um... really liked it. I'd go so far as to say I'm a little obsessed, if you couldn't tell from the plethora of rankings at the beginning... It's, well, like the movie: pink and fashionable sorority girl Elle (Bundy) isn't taken seriously by her boyfriend Warner, so she follows him to Harvard Law School to win him back... and then it turns out to be a riff on finding one's own place and voice in the world on one's own terms, and not letting a guy dictate one's terms.
The musical's big strength, I think (which it mostly shares with the movie), is that it never really takes itself seriously. (Indeed, "Seriously," one of the early songs, is also one of the best ones for how it very much pokes fun at the generic love ballad.) I mean, let's face it, this is a musical where the heroine gets into Harvard Law by doing a dance number accompanied by a huge poster of her and her ex-boyfriend, after which the old stodgy professors on the admissions committee join in the dance number. Yeah. It's a delicate structure of bouncy absurdities that, if it ever tried to take itself seriously, would fall down catastrophically, but it doesn't. (There are frequent parts where the characters are taken seriously, which is all to the good -- it wouldn't have any emotional depth otherwise -- but never where the musical takes itself as a musical seriously.)
And it has a lot of energy. The bouncing highly-choreographed manic energy of both the songs and the performers is the other great strength, and that energy is used to propel the plot forward (almost all the songs, except for "Ireland" and "Bend and Snap," have a great deal of plot forward momentum. Guess which are my least favorite songs?).
This energy and humor (not least, the contrast between the dark sober Harvard law students and the bright peppy sorority parts) covers some mediocrity in the songs and the performers -- the songs are catchy and cute and never descend to the angsty nonsense of a Wildhorn musical, but they also never make it to impressive, and the performers are pretty much uniformly quite good actors, great dancers (though I have no experience with dance and so my opinion here is worth exactly squat) and adequate singers. (I would... give a lot to see Kristin Chenoweth in the title role, but then again, she wouldn't have much interesting singing to do and a lot of voice-breaking singing, so I can't really see why she'd want to.)
(I also wonder a bit if one of the reasons I'm obsessed is that it's the first show, more or less, that I've seen since I did a very little bit of choreography in grad school, so I now have a very little bit of context to put this kind of thing in. And -- although presumably I would think this about any musical I saw -- I am now very impressed at how much choreography is required for this thing. Also, I thought the ballad in particular was brilliantly choreographed, with the revolving door and the actors singing through the door. I also am completely and totally impressed by the dancing chops you'd have to have to be in this musical. In fact, now that I think about it more, I suspect part of the charm is the insane choreography -- you would have to be in really good shape, not to mention good at changing clothes, to be in this musical.)
Musically, I don't find it particularly interesting in general. There's one nod to relative complexity in "The Harvard Variations," which unsurprisingly is one of my technical favorites (though I must admit I like the Bundy/Borle songs the best, as they just work off of each other so well), but let's just say this isn't about musical complexity. There seem to be quite a lot of key modulations, which is apparently their way of adding interest, but it gets almost laughable when you realize it's about the fifth key modulation you've heard in the song. Some of these modulations have almost no instrumental support, and I have to wonder how many times the singers had to practice them. (Yeah, I'm an instrumental snob who thinks singers are terrible at picking up music. And you know? There's a reason for this!)
On the subject of singing vs. acting, the Broadway cast album is not nearly as good as the MTV performance, I think mainly because of Christian Borle, who turns in a competent but not particularly inspired performance on the album. Again, I think this comes down to him being a quite good actor, whom I was rather impressed by, and not such a great singer, and on the album he's singing rather than acting (even though he ought to be doing both). The one song where he manages to pull out a better performance is "Chip on My Shoulder," in which there is more of a narrative for him to work with. Laura Bell Bundy has good acting ability in both the album and performance; I think she pulls out all the stops in both. (But as I said before, she's no Chenoweth.) One thing I will say is that both Bundy and Borle's voices are light and pleasant and go together very well, and as a result all their duets together are quite pleasing to the ear, even if not spectacular.
The London cast album is rather better in terms of energy. Now, I like Bundy rather better than Sheridan Smith (who is awesome, but through no fault of her own she has a voice that to me does not fit the character as well as Bundy), and I like Borle quite a bit better than Gaumond, but the liveliness of the live production in the London album really nails what it's about.
Musical vs. movie: The musical differs from, and is better than, the movie in that it is deeper and more compassionate. Oh, we're not talking Dante here, but Emmett, the love interest, for example, is given quite a bit more depth, backstory, reasonable strengths and weaknesses, and interaction with Elle than the characterless-hunk-o-love-interest he is in the film. (I have this problem a lot with chick lit as well -- it's nice to read about interesting women, but how can you expect me to care about their romantic problems when the guy's only features are that he is handsome and nice and good in bed?) Emmett is smart and nice and sweet and reasonably good-looking, but he's also kind of a dork (I loved that Christian Borle is noticeably, purposely less good-looking than Richard H. Blake's Warner, whereas I found the relative attractiveness of Emmett and Warner to be fairly similar in the movie), he dresses poorly, he's got a chip on his shoulder, and there's a moment where he (believably) tries to trade in his integrity for approval, and Elle has to nudge him back in the right direction. Give me a guy like this any day over hunk-o-lawyer.
The hairdresser Paulette, Elle's friend, is also fleshed out quite a bit more in the musical. I don't really like her arc that much (I find the "Ireland" songs to be actively boring), but Orfeh does blow away the part.
One of the things I loved most about the musical is its greater compassion, because compassion for characters is one of the things that really draws me. In the movie, when Warner proposes to Elle at the end, Elle scorns him and calls him a bonehead. The epilogue says that he graduates without honors, without a job, and without a girlfriend, which strikes me as mean-spirited to the point of unreality as a way of dealing with his character. In the musical, the proposal is met by a "Thank you, but no," and a very sweet song ("Find My Way") about how she has found her way because of his dumping her -- they part as friends (it looks like they're even holding hands as they walk away). I like this not just because it's nicer, but because it seems rather more mature than "Ha! You called me not serious, so I'm going to call you a bonehead!" Furthermore, Warner's fate in the musical is that he quits law school and becomes a model (and it's strongly implied that he ends up with Brooke). Which plays right back into the message of making one's own choices, and to me is a much more compassionate solution, if you will, to the character.
While we're talking about compassion, and getting into feminism... I really liked what the musical did with Vivian/Vivienne. In the movie she gets points for not in the end being the bad guy (girl), but she does kind of come off as jockeying for alpha female with Elle, but eventually submitting to Elle as the alpha female. (And because, of course, Emmett intercedes, because God forbid that either chance or Vivian herself be the catalyst when characterless Love Interest Guy is there to bolster his own Love Interest credentials by doing so.) Elle/Vivian barely passes Bechtdel... I'm not sure it really counts that the one substantive conversation they have is started by Vivian making fun of Warner. In the musical, Vivienne is the one to realize, herself, without Emmett doing a thing, that she's wrong about Elle. (In a deleted scene, in fact, she's the one who tells Emmett what's going on.) And in the musical you start to realize that part of the whole deal with Vivienne is that she's just a prickly character; she "does not 'bond'," as she puts it. ("We've never known her to bond!") Which again I find awesome. Even though I am very happy with Elle staying true to her sweet, loyal nature, not everyone is sweet, and not everyone should be sweet (and thank goodness too, because otherwise I'd be in trouble), but they can still be awesome. Vivienne is fierce and ambitious and opinionated and sometimes practically mean, and she is honest and outspoken and unafraid, and she is just awesome.
Feminism: NOTE: I AM NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT THE BEND AND SNAP AT ALL. I AM JUST NOT READY TO TACKLE THAT ONE, OKAY? I mean, the basic story is great, right? Don't follow around your loser guy like a puppy; take control of your own life and be an awesome lawyer and diss the losers! That being said, I thought the musical fails like crazy at feminism compared to the movie for the first, umm, five-sixth, and then makes up for it some in the end. Something that I really didn't like about the way they re-tooled the story was how they changed the story from Elle coming to the conclusion herself she's going to work hard to excel at law school, to Emmett basically rubbing her face in it (even though, of course, she does make the realization and put in the work). I mean, I understand logistically that it makes sense to combine the musical number that gives Emmett character and the number that is Elle's study montage, so that the musical isn't ten hours long, and it certainly does a lot for Emmett's character to present him as Elle's mentor, and in practice I have no real problem with male friend-mentors (especially having been in a field, myself, where almost all my friend-mentors were male by default), but in principle I think it undercuts the whole message of her being independent, especially of guys. In "Find My Way," at the end, Elle says to Warner, "Look how far I have come without anyone holding my hand," and I was all, "Excuse me? What do you call what Emmett did, then?" (In the West End version, they change it to "Look how far I have come without having to cling to your hand," which I like much better -- she isn't clinging to Emmett like she was to Warner, but he is helping her and it's weird to pretend otherwise.)
In both the movie and the musical, the ending is about how a woman's own life can be a validation in and of itself, and isn't dependent on being or not being with a guy. The ending (minus the epilogue) doesn't even have Elle with a guy at all! Which is great! I love it! The movie kind of undercuts this by saying, in the epilogue, that Emmett is going to propose to her that night. I didn't even realize how much this bothered me until I watched the musical, where... well, she still ends up with Emmett in the epilogue (how could she not?) but she gets to propose to him, and he gets to yell (sing) "Omigod omigod!" like the sorority girls in the beginning, which is seven kinds of awesome and which does a much better job, in my opinion, of underscoring the message of leading one's own life and not living one's life for a guy or at at guy's whims.
Also, one totally shallow comment: Emmett (well, Borle) should really lose the hair gel. Ouch.
All that being said, it totally has all sorts of stereotypes in it, from fitness instructors to gay men to Europeans (what can you expect from the song "Gay or European?" which by the way is one of the most delightfully choreographed numbers in the entire show, and is HILARIOUS) to sorority girls to Harvard to lesbians to hetero men to lawyers to ... well, on and on. I personally thought they were affectionate stereotypes (although I was annoyed at Enid's character being played solely for laughs -- she could have been a lot more, like Vivienne), but your mileage may vary. And I cannot at all believe that the lawyers portrayed in the musical have any resemblance to what lawyers do in real life. But hey, I'm not a lawyer, so whatever.
I also thought about it some and realized that I think my obsession with this musical is my version of the Twilight phenomenon. By which I mean: I understand why teenage girls love Twilight, but I also know a surprising number of middle-aged women with husbands and children who love it, including level-headed women who would be the last people I'd think would enjoy vampire love. After reading it, I decided it was because it took you back to when you were giddy-crushing/falling-in-love with someone, and I guess it is, for these people, a wonderfully nostalgic time to remember. Well. Twilight didn't do it for me, at all, but apparently, even though I have nothing in common with a sorority girl who goes to law school, I love being taken back to a time where I got to be really good friends with a guy, that later turned into romantic interest (Hi, D! And, for that matter, S!) And in the context of learning one can grow in directions one never really thought about, or thought one could grow in. Huh. How about that.
(Also. Um. Er. Would any of you be willing to, um, beta? I KNOW. Shut up.)