By: Jen Paulson
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For anyone who’s felt down and wanted to give up: Hey, did that girl from Flashdance stop flash-dancing because she had welding to do and shit?
The touring company of The Wedding Singer rolled through town for a weeklong stint in Minneapolis this past week. By the time this review is published, the cast and crew will be gearing up for their last night at the Orpheum. I admit that when I heard The Wedding Singer had been adapted into a musical for the stage, I thought it was a ridiculous idea. Why I disregarded this fact and went anyway is a mistake I will have to live with, probably through several years of therapy. Anyway, moving on.
The story has changed a bit from the movie. There is no rapping piano teacher, and Robbie’s family has been consolidated into one person, a grandmother character, in whose basement he lives. Sammy, Robbie’s limo-driving friend is turned into a bassist in the wedding band, Simply Wed. The Billy Idol incident on the airplane is removed, replaced with a Las Vegas storyline in which Idol becomes one of many celebrity impersonators in the show’s finale. The two original songs from the Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore vehicle, “Somebody Kill Me” and “Grow Old With You,” remain.
Truth be told, most people wouldn’t go to this show to relive the glory of the movie through showtunes. Anyone who did would end up incredibly disappointed. When I attended on opening night, the place was packed with people who needed their fix of musical theater in the form of a popular touring Broadway show passing through our fair city. And for those people, I believe it delivered with its 80’s nostalgic, over-present pop culture references that weren’t always cohesive with the show’s setting of 1985.
Erin Elizabeth Coors, cast as the kind-hearted, romantic Julia had a slightly more enjoyable vocal than original cast lead, Laura Benanti. On the other side of that coin, Merritt David Janes as Robbie Hart was competent in his role but lacked in the personality department, and was seemingly no Stephen Lynch, who seemed to keep the sarcastic optimist-turned-cynic of Sandler’s film version of Robbie more intact on Broadway. (Yes, I listened to the soundtrack on Rhapsody… it was research, I tell you! Research.) Performances by Sarah Peak as Julia’s Madonna-wannabe waitress friend, Holly, Justin Jutras as Robbie’s best friend, Sammy, and of course, the always scene-stealing keyboardist George, played by John Jacob Lee, were the standouts in the production.
Between the flashes of the light from the disco ball during a majority of the songs going right into my eyes and inciting a huge headache, and the flat-out ridiculousness of songs like the ballad “Come out of the Dumpster,” I think I have made it pretty clear that this show really wasn’t up my alley. But to give the show deserved credit, the performers made it clear that this was supposed to be a fun, humorous, enjoyable experience, not to be taken too seriously. And even my own pop-culture love was sated with the very end of “Saturday Night in the City,” when Holly does a full on water/chair scene from Flashdance before intermission. The cheese was intentional, and I was able to sit back and watch it for what it was, musical theater meant to entertain, not to over analyze because it was once a wickedly funny movie.
Back in 1991, John Waters made a fantastic, campy film called Hairspray which was made into a big, successful Broadway musical. After that success, it was regurgitated again into a movie musical, starring Vinnie Barbarino himself as mama Edna Turnblad, in a stomach-churning casting decision. Let’s hope for our sake that this does not happen with The Wedding Singer: The Musical.
Location Info:
Orpheum Theatre
Artist Info: Broadway Across America
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