Chick Flick the Musical – Westside Theatre/Upstairs, New York

Carla Duren, Lindsay Nicole Chambers, Sharon Catherine Brown and Megan Sikora in Chick Flick the Musical at the Westside Theatre/Upstairs, New York. Picture: Maria Baranova

Chick Flick the Musical continues at the Westside Theatre/Upstairs, New York until 16 March 2019.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

If you’re into chick flicks, deeply and fanatically into chick flicks – that genre of movie patently designed to appeal to female audiences and often bathed in a romantic glow – Chick Flick the Musical may well be a show for you.

The new Off-Broadway musical comedy has book, music and lyrics all by Suzy Conn, a former corporate career gal turned play- and song-writer. It tells of four close lady friends in their thirties and forties who gather at one of the quartet’s swanky apartment for an evening of movie-watching and wine-guzzling.

The banter is littered with quotes from chick flicks and includes a game in which the gal who guesses what film a quote comes from gets to take a sip of wine. However, the game hardly limits the imbibing. They hardly ever get around to any actual movie-watching, as the evening turns into a confessional in which each of the characters reveals a life crisis (fitted out, of course, with song and dance – this is, after all, a musical).

The hostess for the evening is the affluent Karen (Sharon Catherine Brown), a one-time would-be writer (Dorothy Parker is her idol) whose marriage, with an inattentive husband and rebellious teenage daughter, has become numbing and her career as a freelance book editor has become overwhelming. Dawn (Megan Sikora) is an actress who feels her career has reached its expiration date; she beefs up her earnings by selling a line of cosmetics. Meg (Carla Duren) runs a successful pastry business but is cursed with an habitually unfaithful live-in boyfriend.

Last but not least, there’s Sheila, a greeting card designer whose compulsion for internet dating leads to one disaster after another. At the performance attended, she was played by Jillian Louis, standing by for the regular performer Lindsay Nicole Chambers.

Louis fitted in seamlessly with her estimable castmates, handling with ease the high-wattage, sometimes frantic, staging of director David Ruttura and choreography of Sarah O’Gleby. It probably helped that Louis is also the company’s dance captain. She brought a distinctive comic flair to the role.

The proceedings are marked by a lot of commotion, gut-spilling and a barrage of scattershot jokey lines. Sheila’s favourite bar is called ‘Tequila Mockingbird’.

Finally, the ladies realise they don’t to have to look to the movies for solace and aid. They can find it in each other. Here’s to the power of feminine friendship, and the script supplies a happy ending for each of the gals. Whether they’re imagined or real remains ambiguous, and the feel-good conclusion, with the women suddenly appearing in red-carpet glamour gowns (costumes by Suzy Benzinger) is fun but more than a bit synthetic.

The score, which has the ladies tell of their days, thoughts and favourite movies in musical terms, is serviceable, sometimes more than that, but also a bit monotonous, with the preponderance of percussive pop beats in the arrangements and orchestrations by music supervisors Frank Galgano and Matt Castle. The latter also conducts and plays keyboard with the five-person orchestra sequestered behind the set but revealed at the end.

Songs include a bevy of determinedly up-tempo numbers, with choreography to match, such as ‘Iced Seduction,’ in which Dawn gives a beauty treatment to the gloomy Meg, and ‘WWMD’ standing for ‘What Would Meryl Do,’ as the ladies express their admiration for Meryl Streep, seen as the queen of chick flicks. A couple of ballads – ‘It’s Over,’ tenderly sung by Duren, and ‘Love Will Find Me,’ with heartfelt belting by Louis – provide the show’s most affecting moments.

The production has been handsomely mounted. The walls of Jason Sherwood’s set design are covered with replicas of posters for a multitude of movies, with the phrase ‘chick flick’ substituted for the actual titles. They light up at various times accenting the musical numbers, as do the frequently changing colours washing the set in Jeff Croiter’s high-tech lighting.

All the razzle-dazzle, though, doesn’t obscure the work of the four performers who impress with their tireless energy and talent, even though the material they have to work with could be more compelling, at least for those of us who are not chick flick zealots.

And now, for those of you who are chick flick zealots, comes the sad news. Only four days after its press opening, the show abruptly announced it was closing, playing its final performance on 16 March. It will have chalked up 11 previews and 12 performances.

Presumably, the target audience was busy elsewhere, probably watching a chick flick.

Ron Cohen