Review: La Jolla Playhouse’s ‘Working Girl’ has pop and pep, but needs pruning
On Saturday, ’80s pop star Cyndi Lauper was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and on Sunday, her ’80s pop-style musical “Working Girl” opened at La Jolla Playhouse.
Based on the 1988 film about Tess, a bright young secretary from Staten Island who dreams of becoming a Manhattan dealmaker, the “Working Girl” musical has an undeniably catchy lineup of 18 peppy new pop/ska songs by Lauper, with additional music and lyrics by Rob Hyman and Sammy James Jr.
But some of these songs and several scenes written by bookwriter Theresa Rebeck fail to advance the plot, so the story drags in spots, repeats itself and takes unnecessary tangents.
Rebeck adapted her script from Kevin Wade’s original screenplay and she gives the story a fresh feminine perspective.
She does admirable work beefing up the female characters in the story, highlighting the “Wolf of Wall Street”-style machismo that existed in the ’80s workplace and showing the very real balancing act women face between jobs and motherhood. Rebeck also graciously excluded some of the film’s cringiest moments and lines, like Tess saying she has a “head for business and a bod for sin,” her valium-induced blackout and her bizarre style of vacuuming in high heels and little else.
But the musical spends too much time in unnecessary cutaways to Europe where Tess’s underhanded boss Katherine is recuperating from a skiing accident, and too little time on the romance that’s at the heart of the film between Tess and Jack, a mild-mannered mergers and acquisitions worker at a different firm.
Joanna “JoJo” Levesque stars in the musical as Tess. She’s sincere and endearing and she has a unique vocal range, register and slight grit that sounds remarkably similar to Cyndi Lauper’s voice in the ’80s. As a result, her voice fits Lauper’s score like a glove. As Jack, Anoop Desai is a charismatic actor with an excellent singing voice. And as Tess’s dishonest boss, Katharine, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer is both fierce and laugh-out-loud funny.
Ashley Blanchet has a nice turn as the self-sacrificing Cyn, Tess’s best friend since childhood, and Joey Taranto amuses as Tess’s working-class boyfriend Mick, who doesn’t support her Manhattan “pipe dream” and, in Rebeck’s adaptation, is a Jon Bon Jovi-style hair band lead singer.
The 2-1/2-hour musical starts a little slow, then kicks noticeably into gear about 20 minutes in with one of the show’s best songs, “When the Penny Drops,” where Tess comes up with her genius idea for a high-stakes merger (which Katharine will claim as her own).
That leads directly into director Christopher Ashley’s most amusingly and imaginatively crafted scenes. As Tess sings plaintively about being one of the “Little People” in Manhattan, the smug Katherine croons from a Swiss ski slope about her disdain for little people before she crashes and cartoonlishly cartwheels through the air into a hospital bed.
“Working Girl” is the final directorial project for Christopher Ashley before he steps down at year-end after 18 years as La Jolla Playhouse’s artistic director. Early next year he’ll move to New York to become artistic director of the prestigious and much larger Roundabout Theatre Company. As a longtime fan of Ashley’s work, I will miss the visual dazzle, humor, warmth, subtlety and heart he brings to every project he directs, including “Working Girl.”
Some of the other good songs in the show’s superior first act are the Tess-Jack tango-style duet “Can’t Trust Nobody” and the Tess-Cyn friendship duet “Fit Together.” Jack’s second-act boom-box song “Dream in Royalty,” shows off Desai’s singing and dancing skills but it doesn’t deepen the story or his character so it feels unnecessary.
Sarah O’Gleby’s choreography pays homage to the dance styles of the ’80s, and she also finds creative ways to keep the cast, chairs and office desks in a constant state of motion. The scenic design by AMP featuring Erica Jiaying Zhang showcases Hana S. Kim’s projection design, which includes telescoping city, river and mountain-scapes and hyper-saturated ’80s TV graphics, music videos, Wall Street tickers and computer screens.
Costume designer Linda Cho gloriously celebrates women’s ’80s-era’s fashion, including big shoulder pads, pencil skirt suits, bold colors, chunky jewelry and high-heeled pumps (keep an eye out for Katharine’s hilariously heeled leg cast). But the gold-sequined dresses purloined from Katharine’s closet during the secretaries’ “Notice the Women” fashion number look flimsy and ill-fitting.
Amanda Zieve designed lighting, Gareth Owen designed sound. Stephen Oremus, Brian Usifer and Scott Wasserman did orchestrations and Julie McBride is conductor and musical director.
“Working Girl” ends with the clap-along anthem “Picture It,” which had the opening-night audience up on their feet Sunday. It’s definitely a tuneful musical, thanks to Lauper’s songwriting finesse. But it needs tightening and focus, with more songs that better illuminate the characters’ motivations and push the story forward.
‘Working Girl’
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays. 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 1 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Through Dec. 14
Where: La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, La Jolla
Tickets: $30-$139
Categories
Recent Posts
GET MORE INFORMATION
