Lauren Samuels, Ashleigh Gray and Lizzy Connolly in Vanities – The Musical at Trafalgar Studios, London. Picture: Pamela Raith
Vanities – The Musical continues at Trafalgar Studios, London until 1 October.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
Trafalgar Studios hosts a brilliant trio of women giving new life to Jack Heifner’s award-winning play Vanities. Premiering in New York in the late 1970s, the play became an international success, only avoiding the London stages because of a legal loophole. Now, it can flourish in musical theatre style as Heifner’s adaptation and David Kirshenbaum’s wonderful score has landed at our feet.
Oh boy, say we – another adaptation. But hear me out on this one, it’s worth it. Often the addition of music to a well-loved play feels like part of a machine deigned to over-milk a success. This doesn’t feel like one of those times. Kirshenbaum’s music complements the script perfectly, and supports the action and all the intention of the source material in its ironic, tongue-in-cheek twinkles, and poignancy, and Racky Plews has a firm and elegant directorial handle on the show.
We follow three girls through the various turning points in their lives. College. University. Marriage, or lack of. Separation. We watch them grow together, and then apart, and feel the American Dream make way for the complexities of navigating their lives as modern women.
You’d be forgiven for giving your heart entirely to Lizzy Connolly as Joanne, a young woman obsessed with finding the perfect man and marriage to bring security to her life. Connolly absolutely kills with her comic timing, not to mention her talent for subtly playing the pathos of an apparently superficial and unlikeable character. It is a rounded and fabuous performance.
However, it has to be said that the performances of her two peers are only dimmed by the writing.
Lauren Samuels gives a sharp and nuanced performance as the free-spirited Mary, finding motivation and movement in her journey, despite the sudden extremities of the script. As ever with Samuels, her vocals blow us away, particularly in the Act I number ‘Fly Into the Future’.
Ashleigh Gray gives an equally strong performance, but unfortunately her part just feels under-written. There’s a wonderful warmth and nurture to her inner world of order and control (not to mention a beautiful depth of colour in her voice, ‘Cute Boys With Short Haircuts’). But by Act II we are finding it hard to care about Kathy.
The problem is, that unlike her peers, her journey is always told in retrospect, so there can be no stakes for her, while her counterparts are descending into ‘Stepford’ madness and wild-girl decline before our eyes. This is (alarmingly) what we came to the theatre for, rather than a well-adjusted woman having been through a breakdown that is never manifested.
Andrew Riley’s sets are versatile and cleverly constructed for the small studio space, and along with wigs (Richard Mawbey), plastics and enough coloured lighting to make a Pink Lady blush, they instantly transport the audience into a 1950s teenage dream and beyond.
It’s very rare that you see a show this close-up, where the choice of head mics makes perfect sense, and thankfully there is some masterful enineering going on, clearly James Nicholson’s sound design is inspired.
Definitely not one to miss!
Aura Simon
www.atgtickets.com/venues/trafalgar-studios
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