Does the world need a stage musical version of Pretty Woman? This was the subject of heated intergenerational debate in our household ahead of the South African premier of Pretty Woman: The Musical.
My daughter, who had recently seen the film for the first time, would allow this sacrilege if it was a jukebox musical based on the soundtrack. My mother-in-law said only Julia Roberts could ever play warm and witty prostitute Vivian Ward and only Richard Gere could play lonely businessman Edward Lewis. My wife suggested there was always place for new takes on much-loved stories.
Of course, the discussion was moot because the world has had a musical version of Pretty Woman since 2018 — a success on Broadway and the West End, with replica productions in half a dozen countries. Audiences have lapped it up, critics have panned it: a familiar scenario.
As with Dirty Dancing before it, converting Pretty Woman from screen to stage involved the same writers who had created the movie. But whereas Eleanor Bergstein went the jukebox route and used the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, for Pretty Woman Garry Marshall and JF Lawton commissioned Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance to compose new songs matching the film’s early-1990s setting.
There are rock and pop, but also bits of tango, jazz and even some opera thrown in. There are songs of yearning (Anywhere But Here), songs of learning (I Can’t Go Back), big ensemble numbers (Don’t Forget To Dance, Never Give Up On A Dream), angsty love songs (Long Way Home) and celebratory love songs (Together Forever). Actually, Pretty Woman is at risk of being a tick-box, plug-and-play musical: listenable, enjoyable, forgettable.
Happily it is redeemed by a few key interventions. One is that, while it serves up a sincere nostalgic tribute to the movie and its unlikely love story, a self-ironising streak runs throughout the show — facilitated by the “Happy Man” character from the film turned into a shape-shifting narrator. Played expertly here by Tiaan Rautenbach. Played expertly here by Tiaan Rautenbach, he guides us from the rough streets of Los Angeles to the hotels and restaurants of Beverly Hills, encouraging us to dream but gently mocking our collective urge to break out into a Roy Orbison song.
There are some other fine performances by Thuto Lesedi Gaasenwe as Vivian’s friend and sex worker Kit de Luca, with notable cameos by Bo Molefe as enabling hotel bellhop Giulio and Stuart Brown and Bella Smith as the operatic pair from La Traviata. The ensemble is strong and energetic.
However, this production is made by Leah Mari as Vivian. I would go to a theatre to watch Mari read out the proverbial phone book to the tune of Happy Birthday. This week she received the Naledi Award for Best Female Lead in a Musical Theatre Production for her role as Eliza Doolittle in last year’s My Fair Lady, which followed her acclaimed performance as Maria in The Sound of Music.
One might joke that Mari’s range allows her to play anything from a nun to a prostitute, but the fact is that Vivian, Maria and Eliza are not that different as musical theatre heroines — bold and shy, confident and vulnerable. Pretty Woman and My Fair Lady have much in common, down to the “showing off” scene at a horsey high-society gathering, and their unconventional romances are not unproblematic. As Alex Soloski pointed out in an early review, Pretty Woman: The Musical fails to update the film’s gender politics, adopting “a take-it-or-leave-it approach to female agency”.
Gere’s wounded billionaire (as much in need of saving as Henry Higgins, and initially as much of a bully) has more of an arc than Roberts’ character, though her circumstances change. Mutatis mutandis for the musical version, according to Soloski. The balance swings the other way in this production, partly because Christopher Jaftha’s Edward leans a little too much into a gravelly Bryan Adams persona, but primarily because Mari’s Vivian is so triumphant that the details don’t seem to matter.
- ‘Pretty Woman: The Musical’ is at Artscape until April 19 and at Montecasino’s Teatro from April 24 until May 24.
This article was first published in Business Day.
