In the mostly barren rehearsal room above 42nd Street, a large bed pulls the eye. What might transpire there, one wonders, as poised and beautiful men and women dance a seductive masquerade under the tutelage of a director who comprehends the symbiotic relationship of kinkiness and boots. The actors Steve Kazee and Samantha Barks move sensually through time and space and toward each other — and that bed — but not before you hear the unmistakable notes of Verdi’s “La traviata.”
If you happened to catch a Garry Marshall movie called “Pretty Woman” some 28 years ago — the one about a down-on-her-luck prostitute who attracts the attention of a bored, besuited businessman in search of an escort — you will know that the sequence is the one where he takes her to the opera. By plane. Just ’cause.
It’s the scene where she wears a figure-hugging red dress — that dress, to hardcore “Pretty Woman” fans — accessorized with a $250,000 necklace on loan from her date. The scene where she realizes that life among the one-percentary really has much to recommend it over the old Hollywood Boulevard hustle.
You might recall a young Julia Roberts’ eyes glistening in a way that would help make her career, or maybe her white-gloved hand gripping the edge of her opera box, or perhaps the impossibly boyish but emotionally unavailable Richard Gere offering up a sideways glance at his companion, which, apparently, was about all a male movie star needed to do on camera in 1990 to convey sufficient love interest to propel a movie to a worldwide gross of close to half a billion dollars. And, of course, to gain some company in that bed.
But here is what you won’t recall: the verdant notes of Verdi slowly merging with a song composed by Bryan Adams, the hugely successful Canadian rock star and songwriter whose ballads (such as “Heaven,” “Run to You” and “Here I Am”) have, for more than three decades, dominated the nighttime playlists of all the LITE-FM, WARM-FM, WISH-FM outposts in the elastic music category known as adult contemporary.
Adams (usually with compositions co-written with his longtime songwriting partner Jim Vallance) has sold more than 75 million records over a career of remarkable longevity (he still sells out arenas, especially in Britain, where he lives). His hit “(Everything I Do) I Do it For You,” written for the Kevin Costner film “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” sat atop the U.K. charts for a whopping 16 weeks in 1991. That’s longer than the initial release of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
“Darlin’ you look beautiful tonight,” Kazee sings, on this chilly February morning, partly recalling the Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova music he sang with such emotional resonance in the musical “Once,” but with his formidable voice also sounding soft-rock-vulnerable-gritty, not unlike Adams himself. “I can’t remember ever seeing anything so right.”
By now, Kazee, a kinder, gentler and inarguably sexier version of Gere, is looking right in the eyes of Barks, whose emotional fullness was very much on display in the movie version of “Les Miserables” (she played the tragic waif Eponine). Kazee, an actor known for prizing authenticity, does not traffic in Gere-like sideways glances. He’s in all the way.
“In the magic of the moment, yeah” he sings, “There’s no place I’d rather be/ I see the wonder of the world through your eyes/ To have you here beside me/ Makes me realize ev’rything is different, yeah/ Everything has changed inside of me.”
There is an a-ha! moment at the end of that last line. “Pretty Woman” movie fans will recall that nothing much changed inside of Gere’s Edward Lewis.
But that was 1990. That wouldn’t work now.
Consider, for a moment, how carefully the needle must be threaded to craft “Pretty Woman: The Musical.” The musical begins preview performances this week at the Oriental Theatre for its pre-Broadway engagement in Chicago, following in the preferred path of such past Jerry Mitchell hits and hopefuls as “Kinky Boots,” “On Your Feet!” and “Gotta Dance” (now retitled as “Half Time”). The show can’t be seen to be poking fun at prostitutes, nor can it be seen to be objectifying them, and certainly not shaming them. (The movie, inarguably, did all three of those things in service of its comedy, but then the times were different, as that $500 million gross would attest).
On the other hand, a Broadway musical that pushes too far or too crudely into the R-rated, realistic world of sex work on the urban street is courting box-office disaster with the core demographic here, which, given the age and legacy of the movie, is suburban women over 40 years old (luckily, a demographic that buys the majority of tickets to Broadway musicals). These longtime fans of the film might well want to introduce the blockbuster movie they loved in their youth to their teenage daughters. And this is, after all, supposed to be a romantic love story with sexy power ballads by Adams and Vallance, the very rare original cast recording that might get played in the bedroom. By contrast, most millennial progressives will have to get past the film’s history before they enter their debit card numbers. And no one from any demographic will be going in expecting HBO’s “The Deuce.” That is not the “Pretty Woman” franchise, and, let the record show, it is a massive franchise.
“This was the hottest script at the time,” says J.F. Lawton, the highly successful screenwriter who wrote “Pretty Woman.” “Every actress in Hollywood wanted to play that role.”
At the time he wrote the film, Lawton was living in the part of Hollywood known for its streetwalkers. “I’d walk past them every day,” he says, after coming in from 42nd Street. “I’d run into them in the doughnut shop. They used to hang out in the doughnut shop. A lot of the girls were from the Rust Belt; they had fathers who had lost their jobs after the factories closed and then would drift into alcoholism. So their daughters would head to Hollywood to try and get away from that world, and they’d end up in the doughnut shop. At the time, corporate raiders were big in the news, junk-bond guys were taking over companies. So, I thought, what if you created a story about two very different people affected by all this change.”
At the time, Disney was looking for another vehicle for director Marshall, who had just made “Beaches,” a huge hit. The initial script was gritty indeed: The weird title was “3,000,” the Roberts character of Vivian Ward was a drug addict and although she fell in love with Edward, Edward certainly did not fall in love with her. But “3,000” was retooled as a romantic comedy and retitled “Pretty Woman,” all basically at the bidding of the Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, who wanted it pitched to Disney’s Touchstone Pictures.
Still, even after all of that, Edward was almost played by Al Pacino.
“You could imagine what kind of film it would have been then,” Lawton says, dryly.
But once Gere was cast, he and Roberts developed the kind of chemistry that started a 1990s resurgence of the rom-com.
“Once we saw that,” Lawton says, “it would have been dishonest to make any other kind of movie.”
And “Pretty Woman,” thanks to Marshall’s prowess in the editing room, would become one of the most globally successful romantic comedies of all time.
But the times have changed. In the years since 1990, any story of a privileged rich guy scooping up some poor unfortunate from a lousy situation and buying her an expensive necklace risks a backlash for subscribing to what’s often called a “savior” narrative. If Vivian is not seen to be fully self-actualizing and in charge of her own destiny, as well as her own sexuality, there might well be hell to pay. And when you think about it, given that “Pretty Woman” is basically a show about two people, there only is one way to make that work in a world increasing hostile to the “Pygmalion” myth: Edward will have to need Vivian as much as — ideally far more than — Vivian needs Edward.
Mitchell, clearly, has grasped all this from the start, and he has brought Lawton along with him. “I was always perplexed why the movie was such a big hit, and I know that a lot of these Broadway adaptations of movies don’t work,” Lawton says, “so, initially, I was content to say, go with God, Jerry, and do a musical that I do not see myself writing. But I liked the idea of the script evolving with the times. We’re not a revival, we’re an original adaptation of the source material. This is a fairy tale of sorts, an allegory of self-empowerment for women. Vivian was a free spirit in the film — but we now have run with that and extended and enhanced it. She asserts her own autonomy.”
Paula Wagner, longtime professional partner of Tom Cruise, former agent at the Creative Artists Agency and now an increasingly busy Broadway producer, has been listening to all this conversation intently. She gets to the nub of what is being attempted here.
“She has to find her voice and her sense of self-worth. He has to find his soul. These two unlikely people connect,” Wagner says. “ ‘Pretty Woman’ has been crying out to be a musical right from the start. ”
“I have two nieces, aged 11 and 13,” Mitchell says, during a lunch break, “and they will be coming to see the show in Chicago. I’ve always thought the character of Vivian was a strong female role model, someone who could be offered the car keys, the apartment, everything and still say no. Someone who wanted to learn things about herself. Someone who dreams of a better place for herself. But I think we can do a much better job with Edward than the film did, because in a musical, songwriters can write a closeup.”
What Mitchell means is that in the world of film-to-musical adaptation, whenever the movie director lingered long on a closeup, usually indicating an intensity of feeling, that’s a cue to write a song for that moment.
As long as you have actual songwriters, of course. In early iterations of the project, some kind of greatest-hits-of-the-1990s score was discussed. Understandably so, perhaps, in that the movie itself suggests that soundtrack.
But at this point in his career, Mitchell does not attach himself easily or readily to jukebox shows. And so when Wagner suggested Adams and Vallance pen a totally original score, he went for the idea. At the time, Mitchell was in London working on “Kinky Boots.” Between his arena tour sell-outs, Adams rode his bike over to the West End theater and the two went out for pizza. By the end of the meeting, Adams had agreed to write three songs on spec. They were not on spec for long. And meanwhile, Marshall and Lawton were working on the new script under Mitchell’s close eye.
The process was put back when Marshall died at age 81 in 2016. But it has continued under the same credits, and with the blessing, Wagner says, of Marshall’s estate.
Clearly, the score to “Pretty Woman: The Musical” will be closer to the Adams/Vallance catalog than, say, the kind of music you might hear in “Dear Evan Hansen.”
“My wish for ‘Pretty Women,’ ” Vallance says, “would be that people will leave the theater and already be able to sing some of the choruses.” Vallance has, of course, written many such sticky choruses. (Aside from his work with Adams, he had a quiet hand in most of Aerosmith’s biggest hits, to cite just one example of his prowess.) In an interview, he seems a little bemused at how some theatrical composers eschew populism — respectful but, as one who has lived and died by how high singles charted, bemused nonetheless. “All of the best songs in the world ever have memorable choruses,” he says. “They all have memorable lines. We have 23 songs. There are very tender moments. There are some rock songs. We’ve tried to serve the story, but we have also tried to make the songs memorable.”
Adams and Vallance both say that the spots where their 20-odd songs will appear in the show have been selected by Mitchell, who, it is acknowledged by everyone here, is rather more than the director of the show. He’s the guiding light, the person who has how the show should be built in his head.
“Both the gift and the challenge we faced is that the story is ironclad,” Adams says. “There is no wiggle room. Jerry would be right on us whenever he felt we were not serving the story. You might say that he here solved the songwriter’s mystery of what to write about. He says he wants the song to be you, but he also gives you a parameter.”
Mitchell did much the same, of course, with another Broadway neophyte but brilliant hitmaker, Cyndi Lauper, and that worked out very well for “Kinky Boots,” which followed a similar developmental path through Chicago, and even rehearsed in the same New York building. In Mitchell’s recent years of popular success, this former dancer and choreographer has become something of a rock star-whisperer, a player-coach, a keeper of a show’s road map.
Much of the score to “Pretty Women” was, in fact, written inside the Public Hotel in Chicago. Mitchell was here working on “Gotta Dance” and Adams quietly flew in from London during a break in his touring schedule. The three men would plan; Mitchell would go rehearse a different show; and Adams and Vallance would write. Fast. As is their wont.
As the show goes into final rehearsals and previews in Chicago, Adams and Vallance are in town, both clearly enjoying the classic Broadway songwriter job of standing ready to compose a new song.
If Mitchell says he needs that to happen.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
