Legally Blonde (Peformance)
Although the capsule statement of April’s reading goal is “read a play every day” the actual goal is more similar to “spend 75 minutes every day reading plays,” so if there’s an especially long play it may take multiple days to finish. This is what happened today, and hopefully the play will be finished by tomorrow.
I did have the opportunity, however, to see a show last night which I walked away from with enough thoughts to fill a small blog post.
Watching Legally Blonde at TUTS last night (I believe a touring production) left me wanting and confused, but thinking that it is better to go in hard for a joke than accept a watered-down one. Let’s dive in!
My Background with the Show
About a decade ago I did lights, construction, and props for a school production, and due to a sudden illness I was also the stage manager for the performances (but not the rehearsals.) Because of this I’ve thought a lot about the show and am familiar enough with the script to know where they made changes.
I’ve seen the MTV recording of the Broadway original cast several times, but this is the first time I’ve seen the production live without working on it.
As a Designer
Watching this filled me with a tremendous feeling of theater-as-commodity. Culture has exalted idea of “Theater as ART”. Sometimes this is portrayed positively, sometimes it’s mocked, but the constant feeling is that the people building a theatrical production are doing so for ~artistic rather than for mere entertainment, or worse, commercially.
I dig entertainment, one of Pronoia’s core goals is to entertain people, to buoy them up at the end of a long day/week/life. However, there was a cheapness to this production that looked to me more like cutting corners to keep costs down that hit me on the messier side of my values (both artistic and economical.)
There were enough moments of spectacle to distract from the general lack of production otherwise: the lights were perfunctory, the set largely non-existent, and the projection was a lot of stock videos and effects.
When things worked, they really worked, but from moment-to-moment it felt like the designers said “yes, this will be fine” and moved on to the next task at hand. That’s not something I want my sets to feel like, even when I don’t have the money to do what I want with them.
When my lighting teacher wanted to put a three second light fade into a show he always recorded it as 2.9 seconds. He did this because 3 seconds was the default fade time for a cue, and he wanted a clear indication that he considered this particular lighting change, and decided to make it three seconds instead of letting the console allow him to make easy choices. Watching Legally Blonde made me recommit to making design choices feel “chosen” rather than feel default.
As a Writer
This section is the big reason I wanted to write this post: the writing changes made in Legally Blonde were an interesting, but ultimately uneven mix, of updating the script and watering down (but not removing) material that could be thought to be insensitive.
The musical first premiered around 2007: the year the first smartphone came out. Obviously technology has changed in a major way. In the script for the opening song the girls of Delta Nu are writing Elle a greeting card celebrating her supposed coming engagement. In this production they are texting her well wishes, while the texts appear above our heads in projection. Other instances of technology and culture updates are sprinkled through the show, to varying success (including a memorable change to Whipped Into Shape which moves Brooke’s fitness empire from direct-to-video sales to Tik Tok influencer). It’s a good reminder that theater scripts are living documents that can (and likely should) change over time.
As Big Fish book writer John August said “I’ve realized I’ll be writing Big Fish on and off until I die”.
Where things went wrong, in my opinion, was some joke changes. Among the sins the original musical may have committed: an insensitive party theme, stereotypical roles for non-white people, an intense lesbian caricature, a culturally appropriative college student, a non-PC talking mentor, general degradation of lower-class people, a song stereotyping foreigners and questioning sexuality, and corporate-shilling. There’s likely more stuff that I’m not quite remembering.
Some of these original choices (like the general portrayal of Enid Hoopes) I think have always been less than ideal, and some (a party theme being “Jamaican Me Crazy”) are essentially harmless. The problem is that the bigger issues are intrinsic to the story and can’t be removed.
The writers (or producers or whomever decided on these changes) decided to remove most of the non-offensive or hardly problematic lines, leaving holes where there used to be jokes but aren’t anymore, but didn’t do much of anything to the broader problems, making things even stranger (in my opinion).
There’s a moment early in the show where future-villain Prof. Callahan wants to throw off a female-character, and point out how her emotions are a detriment in the law profession. His original line is “You lesbians think you’re so tough” his line in this version is “You women think you’re so tough.” I’ve never thought this moment worked well, Enid’s reaction is strange, the point is poorly made, etc. But I do think the original line is better than the new one. It’s more specific, it plays more to what Enid thinks of herself, and it’s frankly more shocking, and so is more believable as something that would throw her off. Now the moment just sticks out more than it used to.
The show is full of moments like that. It’s like a bad cutting of Shakespeare, leaving artifacts and places where there used to be something and now it’s just filler.
What this tells me is that in the future if I’m going to make a joke that might offend, I shouldn’t go for the weaker version of it: it’ll still offend, but now it might be strong enough to justify itself.
