When it comes to lines to get you out of unpleasant things, the 1997 movie “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion” had a doozy: “Would you excuse me?” says Romy, as played by Mira Sorvino. “I cut my foot before, and my shoe is filling up with blood.”
No such spontaneous verbosity is needed to hightail it with what’s left of your dignity out of Stage 42 where the aforementioned cult classic has been ill-advisedly turned into a weirdly anemic stage musical.
This clunker of a tuner, which stars no less than Laura Bell Bundy of “Legally Blonde” fame and Kara Lindsay of “Newsies,” re-creates precisely none of the charm, and certainly not the anarchic silliness, of its source material.
And so this new Off-Broadway attraction, first seen in Seattle in 2017, is about as much fun as, well, watching “Pretty Woman” 36 times, R & M’s favorite activity. Or going to a high school reunion where all of your former classmates are better looking, have superior jobs, hotter partners and look far better preserved than you.
“Romy & Michele The Musical,” like we needed one, really is that bad — yet not bad enough to work on a campy level, either.
If you never saw the film, it is a caper movie that revolves around the titular heroines, played by Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow, whose life consists of sitting around their shared L.A. apartment, watching Julia Roberts, eating potato chips and basically doing nothing. This suits the lively ladies perfectly well until an invitation arrives from their native Arizona for that all-American torture chamber known as the 10-year high school reunion.
But we’re losers, they go. How embarrassing. What shall we do?
The answer they concoct is to show up at the Tucson reunion with successful if fictitious identities as successful business women: more specifically, as the inventors of Post-It notes. as if young L.A. party girls dreamed of coming up with a pressure-sensitive adhesive attached to a colorful piece of paper.
Of course the ruse doesn’t last, and the heroines learn it is Better to Be Themselves, as musicals invariably preach. Add in a rivalry with a goth girl named Heather (Jordan Kai Burnett, who comes up the one decent performance in the show), a fling or two with a handsome guy named Sandy (Michael Thomas Grant) and you pretty much had enough to get people to an actual movie theater in prestreaming, pre-Instagram 1997.
Getting people to drop three figures on tickets to Stage 42 might prove more of a challenge.
What went wrong here? The score from Gwendolyn Sanford and Brandon Jay needed an explicit flavor of the late-1990s jukebox, be that Jewel, Radiohead or the Backstreet Boys, but the music just feels like generic Broadway pop, with nary a sincere song in the show. The bigger problem though is that Bundy and Lindsay cannot buy a big laugh, mostly because they are trapped trying to re-create the chemistry forged by Sorvino and Kudrow, who are entirely different kinds of performers who were inventing (and improvising) these characters in real time.
Not only does the script stay too close to the movie, it just doesn’t give its stars enough room to find their own thing. Lessons could have been gleaned from “Death Becomes Her,” another caper-movie transfer but one that does not fall into this trap.
Frankly, the cheesy, all-digital set doesn’t help, either, especially its tendency to attempt visual jokes that are far too on the nose actually to land. Visually speaking, Kristin Hanggi‘s production is Valley Girl chaos; one marvels at how the director who created “Rock of Ages,” a supreme satirical theater-scape, could have helmed a show that always feels like a hat upon a hat, a derivative chapeau trading on a famous and thoroughly successful musical that acted as a catharsis for anyone who hates reunions, which is most of us.
But for that to work in the musical theater, you have to build empathy, which never happens here, and utilize the comic potential of the musical form to let loose, express deeper feelings and have fun. The 10-person cast, which also features DeMarius R. Copes in a thankless role, does its best but just can’t get much going in the way either of choreographic set-pieces or droll cameos. In the end, Robin Schiff’s book is like a sinkhole, ready to suck down everyone’s creativity and originality. A rough reunion all around.
