Sarah on theater

Oh, I think this may be a bit underrated. The skeleton is there. Uncomfortable though it may be for millennials to confront our mortality, whether we like it or not, retro is here to claim the late nineties/early aughts. Romy and Michele the movie is something of a cult classic, especially in the queer community—a paean to female friendship & a tidy bit of fashion iconography. And so it doesn’t seem like a leap to adapt the thing as a “campy fun” sort of show. I think it’s sort of an interesting question how you can will this into existence from an existing property. Death Becomes Her has been successful, as was Mean Girls, but multiple iterations of Clueless have totally struck out. There are an awful lot of “woo”-bait moments in here that suggest to me the right way to see this is with a raucous, ideally drunk crowd of young women and queer folk.

There’s no mistaking it for high art, but the tepid critical reception this has received feels to me like a show being strangled by the wrong audience, and that’s a kiss-of-death in an expensive venue. Maybe it’s a function of being at a late-run Sunday matinee, but I looked around the room and felt like maybe the crowd here was older, full of straight couples—maybe more drawn by an “I was there” sort of nostalgia? At any rate, perhaps a bit harder to impress. And the sheer fundamentals of the show, I admit, are not exceptional in every respect. It’d be cheap to rag on the vapidity of characters Romy & Michele, so I won’t 😊—but if you want to scrutinize it, certainly you might have gripes with the far-fetched decisionmaking by most characters, the dearth of pathos, and a score that can veer into fluffy territory. A lot of moments just don’t land. Too many morally solipsistic characters. They’re running elaborate animations on the screen behind—certain elements of which have visibly been generated by AI.

So the crowd is giving zero energy. The drain is being circled. But I had a big, stupid smile on my face anyways, and I was laughing with them far more than at them. For as many potential avenues of criticism as there may be, that’s sort of the bottom line, and it’s not a dysfunctional show. The leads, Laura Bell Bundy & Kara Lindsay, give it a lot of gusto, and they’re in good voice. We all know this is bombing, so why can’t we have some fun with it? It’s a tongue-in-cheek sort of fun-dumb that felt like a worthwhile afternoon, even though I was predisposed against it by its somewhat poor reputation. I’m not going to tell you that this is a must-see undiscovered gem, but, what the hey, three stars from me.