InsaneJournal

Legally Blonde: The Musical
Every time Legally Blonde comes out with something new, I'm extremely wary of it. When the movie first came out I refused to see it because it looked like some of the crappiest crap Hollywood had released at the time. It wasn't until my mom rented it on DVD that I discovered how amazing and, surprisingly, how feminist it is. What looked like Pink (yes, the capital is needed) fluffiness was actually hiding a very empowering story of a woman who vowed to make something of herself when everyone was telling her it was impossible.

Okay, I'll admit I should have been more wary of the sequel to the movie (considering it came out before Elle was supposed to have graduated). It was all right, but not nearly as awesome as the first.

And then comes along Legally Blonde...the musical. I heard about it and was drawn to it like a train wreck. How on earth do you turn the movie into a good musical? Well, I heard the number So Much Better, as I'm singing it in a show I'm currently doing, and was instantly hooked. It's catchy, it's upbeat, it perfectly embodies everything that the movie was.

And then this weekend I saw it on MTV.

As far as musicals go, it's better than a lot of them. The music is almost uniformly catchy, though sometimes you get the feeling that they put in a song just because they needed to fill time (Ireland? Really?). However, it takes out 98% of the feminist elements of the film :-(


I don't think I realized it until I saw this part taken away, but part of the beauty of Legally Blonde is that while Elle travels to Harvard to chase a man she ends up being surrounded by competent women who help her through. Paulette offers her the girly-friendship she had back in her sorority, while her amazing professor encourages her to get back in the game after Callahan shatters her confidence, and even Vivienne comes around and bonds with Elle as they swap stories about Warner. Elle may have been focused at first on getting her man, but the men in the story end up taking a back seat.

Soooooooooooooooooooooo not the case in the musical :-(

The bad ass female professor is CUT ENTIRELY, Vivenne is a bitch until the very end (and even then wants Elle to come back under the guise of "serious lawyer" in dark blue), and the Greek Chorus...oy. When I first heard of them (back when I was looking up lyrics for "So Much Better") I had to laugh. What a great pun, right? But instead these girls have nothing but bad advice for Elle: their opening song encourages some really terrible advice for a wife-to-be and then they want Elle to skank it up in order to get Warner back. It's sad that essentially Paulette, a character purely meant for comedy, is the smartest woman Elle seems to know at Harvard, because even Enid is now just one big walking lesbian joke (I, certainly, was not amused).

Instead Emmett gets a bigger role, which, ostensibly, is fine. It wouldn't be a musical without a romance at the heart of it (blech), and at times he did seem to be an afterthought in the movie (you never really saw a romance develop between them). But what the hell, telling Elle that she "needed" a chip on her shoulder in order to survive, and having to be the one to get Elle to settle down and work. In the movie Elle wasn't exactly working her ass off for a noble purpose (initially she just wanted to show Warner "just how serious Elle Woods can be"), but it's certainly more self-directed than having a cute guy make you miss Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks to study.

I really wanted to like the musical, and a lot of it I did. But the fact that it was almost completely stripped of its feminist beginnings (apparently the one nod to its feminist roots: Elle proposes at the end instead of vice versa, as presented in the movie) makes me much less happy. I think I'm glad that I got to see it on MTV rather than shelling out the cash to see it live.