Legally Blonde, now glowing pink at the Palace, offers some good news and bad news about what these adaptations are doing to Broadway. Librettist Heather Hach sticks closer to the screenplay than adapters of other shows have, so the songs by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin mainly expand scenes you remember from the movie, and offer fresh reasons to like them: As Elle prepares for her big date, the Delta Nus belt “Omigod, You Guys!” the sexuality of a witness in the show’s big trial is pinned down in “Gay or European?” As in the film, Elle Woods leaves her sunny sorority life in California to chase a boy who’s gone to Harvard Law, where “the girls have different noses,” in the words of her horrified father. Yet for all that’s genuinely likable here, especially the sharp lyrics and Christian Borle’s funny, underplayed turn as the elbow-patched Easterner who woos Elle, the show doesn’t inspire much love. It produces the same so-so feeling I’ve gotten, in different degrees, from all the recent movie-to-musical adaptations. Sometimes one part of a show will ignite, like Marc Shaiman’s fiendishly catchy melodies for Hairspray, but rarely do these productions display anything more than a brisk, flavorless competence. Here, director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell does a crisp, professional job whirling David Rockwell’s scenery into place without using blackouts. But that same crisp professionalism makes his work with the dancers seem uninspired. Though the show hasn’t been tidied up as relentlessly as its predecessors, the move from Hollywood to Broadway costs the material some of its endearing weirdness just the same. That may be the most pernicious side effect of this genre. Laura Bell Bundy can sing, dance, land a joke, and look good doing it, all of which makes her a fine Elle. It’s not her fault that her every smile doesn’t summon memories of Tracy Flick, the steely student-council campaigner that Reese Witherspoon played in Election before starring in Legally Blonde. The fleeting glimpses of a Flickish manic drive just below Elle’s silly Malibu surface are what I liked best in the film. It’s the kind of freaky detail that no amount of cheery blandness can replace. L oveMusik, by contrast, has freaky details galore. At the Biltmore, Michael Cerveris transforms himself from menacing, murderous Sweeney Todd to play the doughy, neurasthenic Kurt Weill. Donna Murphy, though she has a much lovelier voice than Lotte Lenya, channels his wife: Listen as she caresses a note then cuts glass with it. Outwardly, this highest-of-highbrow jukebox musicals about their tumultuous life has almost nothing in common with the week’s other big new musical, yet before long it ends up in a stylistic corset not unlike Legally Blonde’s. Harold Prince long ago proved he can direct any kind of musical, from Lloyd Webber to Sondheim. So I wish his work here reflected that this is a Kurt Weill show. The composer of The Threepenny Opera, one of the most theatrically adventurous musicals ever written, deserves better than to be treated like any old pop tunesmith being subjected to a stage biopic: A song runs boringly into a scene, then back into another song. It doesn’t help that librettist Alfred Uhry seems to find Weill and Lenya’s serial affairs inexhaustibly fascinating, or that the show commits a serious art crime in underutilizing Murphy.
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