Pretty Woman: The Musical is booking until January 2021 Sadly, it melts away but, even so, the nascent love story between Giulio and Mr Thompson feels, for a time, like there’s another, more daring musical fighting to get out of this one. Hotel staff in Hi-de-Hi style blazers congregate in these same-sex dance numbers and bring camp, glinting mischief to the musical. Some of the witty dance numbers stand out, especially those featuring an underplayed substory between a dancing bellboy, Giulio, played bewitchingly by Alex Charles, and Harms’s dancing hotel manager, Mr Thompson. We wait for Roy Orbison’s signature song, which comes at the end and is the best musical moment of the night. Rachael Wooding as Vivian’s fellow sex worker, Kit, is especially impressive alongside Bob Harms in his double role as the hotel manager and a figure called Happy Man. The score by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance often veers into the bland but there are some strong voices and a few winning songs. Pygmalionesque … Vivian and Edward after her transformation. Later, she sings: “It’s me who’s in control … I say who, I say when, I say how much.” However saccharine the story’s ending, Vivian at least wins Edward on her own terms. She quotes George Bernard Shaw in a nod to the Pygmalion myth that resonates through the film. Vivian is emphatically the brighter of the couple. But there are ways in which it updates itself, however unsatisfying that is. The book by JF Lawton, who wrote the original screenplay, and Garry Marshall, the film’s director, sounds as if they are striving for the same magic to be created on stage through workmanlike imitation. Danny Mac appears to be channelling Richard Gere, not only in his look but also in the woodenness of his performance. Atkinson looks like she has dressed up as Roberts in black thigh boots and blond wig. Jerry Mitchell’s production has an ersatz feel, as if revelling in its nostalgia sex workers lining Hollywood Boulevard are in retro leather miniskirts and jean jackets. “He will want to see you with your buttons undone,” a character sings, in another bilious moment. Discomforting lines emerge in songs: “I’ll be a hooker in a raincoat,” she says to Edward when he makes her look respectable on entering his upmarket hotel. Her romance with Danny Mac, as Edward, feels undercharged and, if anything, suggests the transactional relationship between an emotionally distant rich man and a sex worker. Photograph: Helen MaybanksĪimie Atkinson plays Vivian as wholesome but slightly harder-faced than Julia Roberts and does not have the latter’s all-eclipsing ebullience. Dressing up as Julia Roberts … Aimie Atkinson as Vivian.
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