This is the popular Broadway musical version of the famous film that was based on the American novel that nobody had heard of.
It appears a pattern has formed. Legally Blonde arrives in London hardish on the heels of Sister Act, another musical version of a Hollywood comedy.
The moral of that show, with its gangster moll heroine who ends up doing God’s work better than the nuns who hide her, was not to judge a book by its cover. Before that, the lesson delivered by the previous New York import, Hairspray, and its anti-racist and anti-fascist messages was… not to judge a book by its cover.
Meanwhile, Legally Blonde also has something to say about allowing our opinions to be formed by our prejudices. And in case you miss the point, Blonde’s frivolous but intelligent heroine Elle Woods actually says it out loud when she declares: “It’s wrong to judge a book by its cover.”
Never mind that there are millions of people in this world who have judged millions of books by their covers and never regretted it once. For a show about hidden intelligence, it is a pretty stupid moral.
This heralds Sheridan Smith’s arrival as a West end star
The version here also teaches us that American college girl cheerleaders — the gentile equivalent of the Jewish American Princess; in fact one of the cheerleaders here is both — who here make up the chorus, are not all pink stilettos and pompoms, you know. Oh no. Most of them are stupid too. Apart from Elle, of course.
For this London production American director Jerry Mitchell has drilled his mainly British principal cast into delivering some excellent performances. None is better than comedy actor Sheridan Smith. In the recent Chocolate Factory production of Little Shop of Horrors, Smith — best known for her TV turns in the sitcom Two Pints of Lager — showed real promise for playing American leads. Here, as Elle, the sorority girl who decides to follow her ex-boyfriend to Harvard Law School in order to win him back, she fulfils that promise brilliantly.
Compared to Reese Witherspoon in the movie version, Smith may be lower on the sexiness scale, but her Elle more than compensates with a wit and charisma and a big voice that belies a little frame. It is not only one of the stand-out performances in London, it heralds Smith’s arrival as a West End star. With the opening number Omigod — a refrain that needs to be squealed, not sung, and in girly, high-octave Americanese — Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin’s score perfectly establishes the air-head world of cheerleaders and bubbly blondes such as Elle.
Yet Smith wastes no time in establishing Elle’s (accidental, judging by her parents) intelligence, with little pauses in which she smiles inwardly at the silly things other people say. It is a clever way of establishing intelligence in a character.
Smith is well supported with some terrific performances. Boy band heart-throb Duncan James, as the clever ex Elle chases to the Ivy League, is so smooth you could ski down him. Jill Halfpenny does excellent work as the tart-with-a-heart hairdresser Paulette, whose fantasy Irish date finally arrives in the form of a hunk delivery man (Chris Ellis-Stanton). Peter Davison is solid if uninspired as Callahan, the ruthless attorney and law lecturer.
But like its predecessors, this show flies on those moments of musical theatre ecstasy, when song and dance (to Mitchell’s choreography) come together in an irresistible rush of synchronicity. The moment comes with the number Whipped into Shape, led by Aoife Mulholland who plays Elle’s first court-case client, a frighteningly fit fitness instructor who is charged with murdering her husband.
But even better is There! Right There! which hilariously attempts to establish whether a prosecution witness, who claims to be the lover of a female defendant, is gay or straight. “Is he gay or is he European?” it asks. It is a song that does for gay people what Spamalot’s You Won’t Succeed On Broadway (without a Jew) does for Jews.
Of all the movie-to-musical adaptations, Spamalot, for me, remains the best of them. Legally Blonde comes close but then the Monty Python show did not presume to regale its audience with little morals.
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