Vanities - Original Cast Recording
Here comes off-Broadway doing its thing to keep off-Broadway just what it is: a minimalist experience. Three women grow up together in a small Texas town in the 1960s. As cheerleaders and the most popular girls in high school they face an uncertain future as gal-pals because their actual interests vary greatly, something they admit reluctantly. Two acts and thirty years later, the women are a reunited trio having experienced very different lives and discover that time has not truly erased their friendship.
It was a good play by Jack Heifner; it ran for over 1300 performances back in 1976-1979 and featured good actresses like Kathy Bates, Jane Galloway and Patricia Richardson. From time to time over the years plans for a musical, plans for a revival have been touted and now, in 2009, those plans have been realized by this new musical -- Vanities, A New Musical -- with a score by David Kirshenbaum, an "eclectic pop score," as Theatremania called it. This is his second major score (Summer of ’42 with a book by Broadway’s Hunter Foster is his other show).
The new musical, which started its current life in Palo Alto, California at TheatreWorks features three talented actress/singers: Lauren Kennedy as Mary who finds independence from her childhood elusive; Sarah Stiles as Joanne for whom marriage holds all the answers; Anneliese van der Pol as Kathy who devotes herself to the idealism of her girlhood. All three have excellent skills, lovely voices and interpretive graces. The big problem is they are all rather alike in too many ways and their songs reflect that (one sports a twangy accent). In fact, with too few solos to establish the girls, the women become near-clones with only a moment or two in which to differentiate themselves.
Some of those moments are the best things on the record. After five numbers which sound so much alike I cannot distinguish them after three hearings, Joanne, or rather Stiles, commands attention with Fly Into the Future, a rip-off of Defying Gravity from tWicked. It is well done, however, and the similarities between the two songs are almost permissible in the fine rendition Stiles gives the song.
With the next piece on the recording, Cute Boys with Short Haircuts, the show begins to move into its own special realm. Sung by Kathy, or van der Pol, with a delicate cynicism, this is definitely the hit song from the show. In it she displays the turn into a perilous adulthood with a bit of joy and a bit of sorrow and the song is something we can all understand, appreciate and ultimately regret.
There is the usual fall-back standard, The Same Old Music, which pokes fun at itself while making its excellent toe-tapping points. Mary’s solo expression, Friendship Isn’t What It Used to Be, comes too late to really establish her but it is a good song and is sung nicely by Kennedy.
There is something facile about Vanities. I think perhaps there always was except for the presence of Kathy Bates who brought something different to her role. In the musical there is the music and the talents of the women singing the songs to offset any uncomfortable feelings about the easy, expected and predictable plot. With eight musicians conducted by Bryan Perri to back up the ladies the sound is just what you want from that old-fashioned off-Broadway show. At the end of the day, however, you have to wonder if the time for this sort of evening hasn’t been over for a very long time already.
Vanities; A New Musical, music and lyrics by David Kirshenbaum, book by Jack Heifner. CD. Ghostlight Records.
