Vanities, A New Musical
Pasadena Playhouse Pasadena, Calif.
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Had Elle Woods from Legally Blonde “grown up in 1960s Texas, she’d fit right into the ensemble of Vanities,” said Bob Verini in Variety. In this musical adaptation of Jack Heifner’s 1976 play, Heifner and composer/librettist David Kirshenbaum infuse a “girl-power vibe” into a work originally characterized by “dark undertones” of existential angst. The show follows three childhood best friends—“the bossy conformist Kathy, the rebellious Mary, and the prim Joanne”—across four decades of failed relationships and thwarted ambitions. Actresses Anneliese van der Pol, Sarah Stiles, and Lauren Kennedy handle both character development and song and dance. Yet the musical’s individual elements, like the women at the end of the play, “aren’t quite speaking to each other.”
Most musicals turn on characters working forcefully to get what they want, said Charlotte Stoudt in the Los Angeles Times. The characters in Vanities “don’t actually know what they want.” Certain musical numbers succeed. The opener—“Who Am I Today?”—frames the central question beautifully. But “you’re never quite convinced that Kirshenbaum has absorbed the original play and emerged with a fully imagined musical response.” Heifner’s dated script also suffers from a “superficiality that feels out of line with the characters’ intelligence and the dilemmas they’re put in.” In a post–Sex and the City culture, the bar for female badinage has been set fairly high.