Chasing Shopworn Dreams in ‘Pretty Woman: The Musical’

NEW YORK — No one should have had to step into that red dress again. I’m talking about the long, strapless number that Julia Roberts wore in the 1990 film “Pretty Woman,” in a moment of pure, movie-magic apotheosis.

Let me refresh your memory of that occasion before I proceed to the less pleasant topic of “Pretty Woman: The Musical,” which opened Thursday night at the Nederlander Theater without Roberts in the title role. In the movie, Roberts’ character, a prostitute named Vivian Ward, is going to her first opera (all too appropriately, “La Traviata”) with her date and client, Edward Lewis, a very rich and emotionally frozen businessman played by Richard Gere.

She materializes with coltish grace and freshness in said dress, and the smitten Gere presents her with a small box, containing an obscenely expensive necklace. He playfully snaps it open and closed, and Roberts erupts into a spontaneous shout of laughter that totally and improbably dispels the creepy transactional haze of the scene. For many of us who saw “Pretty Woman” when it first opened, that was the precise instant when we realized that we had been watching a young actress turn into a singular, full-fledged movie star of a stripe we thought had ceased to exist. And I at least decided that I was going to sit through the rest of this unsavory movie, after all.

A facsimile of that red dress — and of many of the other outfits worn by Roberts, including her skimpy hooker clothes — show up in “Pretty Woman: The Musical,” which lowers the already ground-scraping bar for literal-minded adaptations of film to stage. And once again Edward starts to hand Vivian the jewelry box and then abruptly opens and closes it.

This time, Vivian (Samantha Barks) giggles halfheartedly, as if she were a little embarrassed. Edward (Andy Karl), too, seems slightly sheepish. Well, why wouldn’t they feel that way?

Let me make it clear that I mean no disrespect to Barks when I say that she is not Julia Roberts. Best known for playing the waifish Eponine in the movie musical “Les Misérables,” Barks is clearly a talented singer and actress. But being used as a paper doll for Gregg Barnes’ “I Love Julia” costumes, while speaking verbatim Roberts’ lines from the film, she has been given no chance to banish stardust memories of the woman who created her part.

Directed and choreographed as if on automatic pilot by Jerry Mitchell, “Pretty Woman: The Musical” has a book by the original film’s director, Garry Marshall (who died in 2016), and screenwriter, J.F. Lawton, with songs by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance. Its creators have hewed suffocatingly close to the film’s story, gags and dialogue.

And what an uncomfortable story it is. A seemingly soulless Wall Street takeover king picks up a young hooker on Hollywood Boulevard and pays her $3,000 to be his companion, on social occasions as well as in the hotel suite, for a week.

He introduces her to fine dining, fancy clothes, discreet makeup and the opera, while she transforms him from a cold fish into a free spirit. The New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote that the film “manages to be giddy, lighthearted escapism much of the time,” but she also noted a classically 1980s spirit of materialistic “covetousness and an underlying misogyny.”

Yet even committed feminists I know have a soft spot for “Pretty Woman,” and I suspect the principal, if not the sole, reason is Roberts. In her early 20s and previously a supporting actress of electric presence, Roberts unsheathed her full, unsullied radiance here, and it cast a cosmetic glow on everything around her.

The biggest problem for the musical adapters thus becomes selling an essentially tawdry tale minus Roberts’ lewdness-proof, megawatt charm. Instead of retailoring Vivian to Barks’ specific talents, the creative team has chosen to play up the narrative’s twinkly fairy-tale aspects, which can be summed up in the lyric, “If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?”

Oops, that’s “Happy Talk,” from “South Pacific.” The words in “Pretty Woman,” to quote from the opening number, are “Hopes and dreams are what this town is made of/Give it a shot, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”

This prescription is delivered by a character called (I swear) Happy Man (Eric Anderson), who also morphs into the kindly concierge at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Edward takes Vivian on their first, uh, date. Anderson is likable, flexible and hardworking, which is not quite enough to keep us from wincing every time Happy Man starts to sing about dreams again.

He doesn’t have to convince Vivian, who has dreams from the outset, though she’s not quite sure what they are. Others require more persuasion, including the money-minded Edward and Vivian’s roommate, Kit (the inimitable Orfeh, the cast’s loudest member), a fellow hooker who finally remembers she always wanted to be a cop. The score’s many, country-tinged power ballads bring to mind B-sides of Top 40 hits from the 1980s, the era in which Adams became a rock star. And they are often delivered with a straight-to-the-audience, note-holding “American Idol” earnestness. (In her big numbers, Barks brings to mind Carrie Underwood giving her all on that show.)

Whether the setting is luxurious Beverly Hills or seedy downtown Hollywood, David Rockwell’s set has a kind of “Sesame Street” friendliness, and Kenneth Posner and Phillip Rosenberg’s lighting saturates everything in Disney shades of orange and fuchsia. This is true even for the show’s sex (or foreplay) scenes, which find Vivian in a series of cleavage-enhancing bras and slips.

Mostly, Barks conducts herself like a peppy, tomboyish cutup from a sitcom. She often doesn’t seem entirely at ease, but her discomfort is nothing compared to Karl’s. This fine musical performer, a knockout in the recent “Groundhog Day,” often looks as if he would rather be anywhere but here, especially when he has to sing internal monologues about how free Vivian makes Edward feel.

“Pretty Woman: The Musical” is already doing big box office, proving that on Broadway you can’t go broke overestimating the popular appeal of clones. But it’s worth noting that at the performance I attended, the number that received the biggest applause wasn’t one of those wistful soliloquies about feelin’ free, or even a high-spirited number about following your dreams.

No, the loudest clapping came when Allison Blackwell, the soprano performing Violetta in “La Traviata,” sang her character’s farewell declaration of love. Something like real passion had finally entered the building.

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Production Notes

“Pretty Woman: The Musical”

Tickets: At the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; 877-250-2929, prettywomanthemusical.com.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.

Credits: Book by Garry Marshall and J.F. Lawton; music and lyrics by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance; directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell; music supervision, arrangements and orchestrations by Will Van Dyke; sets by David Rockwell; costumes by Gregg Barnes; lighting by Kenneth Posner and Philip S. Rosenberg; sound by John Shivers; hair by Josh Marquette; makeup by Fiona Mifsud; fight director, J. Allen Suddeth; production stage manager, Thomas Recktenwald. Presented by Paula Wagner, Nice Productions, LPO, New Regency Productions, Caiola Productions & Co., James L. Nederlander, Roy Furman, Hunter Arnold, Graham Burke, Edward Walson, deRoy Kierstead, Michael Cassel Group, Stage Entertainment, Ambassador Theater Group, John Gore Organization and executive producers Wendy Orshan and Jeffrey M. Wilson.

Cast: Samantha Barks, Andy Karl, Eric Anderson, Jason Danieley, Ezra Knight, Allison Blackwell, Tommy Bracco, Brian Calì, Robby Clater, Jessica Crouch, Nico DeJesus, Anna Eilinsfeld, Matt Farcher, Lauren Lim Jackson, Renée Marino Ellyn Marie Marsh, Jillian Mueller, Jake Odmark, Jennifer Sanchez, Matthew Stocke, Alex Michael Stoll, Alan Wiggins, Jesse Wildman Foster, Darius Wright and Orfeh.