This musical adaptation of Ridley Scott’s beloved 1991 feminist road movie isn’t bad – it just lacks several of the alchemical elements that make the film great.
asserted
film → lack → elements
The sense of hardening, angry sisterhood between two ordinary women in the face of male exploitation and violence comes over strongly.
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sense → harden → exploitation
As it should, since Callie Khouri, who won an Oscar for the screenplay, has penned the script.
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who → win → script
But theatre can’t do literal scale or scope like film and one misses the wide-open vistas of Arkansas, New Mexico and Arizona.
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one → do → Arkansas
Ditto the sense of propulsive forward motion as Louise’s ’66 Thunderbird throatily devours the blacktop (represented here by a pair of weedy parallel lights zooming across the back wall).
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Thunderbird → ditto → wall
The bars, motels and convenience stores T&L frequent here get rolled into a generic slice of Americana: pool table, payphone, cowboy hats.
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T&L → frequent → Americana
In the leads Amy Lennox and Rachel Tucker sing their guts out and make a likeable and believable pair of gal pals, but they don’t have the star wattage and chemistry of Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in the original.
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they → sing → original
(Realistically, who does?)
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who → do → ?
Also, without Davis’s mix of quicksilver zest and sudden vulnerability it quickly becomes clear quite how annoying Thelma is.
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Thelma → become → zest
Most significantly, the country-rock score by Canadian powerhouse Neko Case, though distinctive and often beautiful, is more about mood than narrative, and her rich images often descend into word salad.
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images → descend → salad
The roguish drifter JD (Jordan Luke Gage in the role that made Brad Pitt) sings to Thelma: “I bet your mouth tastes like fireworks and caramel.”
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mouth → make → fireworks
And you think, hang on, that would taste *awful*.
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that → think → *
Anyway, Trip Cullman’s methodical production begins with women from the ensemble telling us we’re about to witness “the story of two little girls… [who] wouldn’t grow up to be anything”.
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who → begin → girls
I suppose there is a slim chance that someone might go and see this show without knowing how the story ends, but there is an awful lot of foreshadowing here.
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story → suppose → foreshadowing
“I wanna live before I die,” is a recurring refrain in Case’s score.
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I → live → score
As in the movie, Thelma is a waitress with a feckless drummer boyfriend, Louise a housewife married to her controlling and sexually unfulfilling childhood sweetheart Darryl.
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Louise → marry → sweetheart
Their planned weekend cabin trip goes awry when Louise shoots a roughneck who tries to rape the drunk Thelma in a parking lot.
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who → plan → lot
Convinced they’ll get hard justice from the patriarchy, not least by a dark moment in Louise’s past, the two spiral into criminality.
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two → get → criminality
Despite the attempts of detective Hal Slocumb (Trevor Dion Nicholas) to bring them in safely, their doomy prognostication about their futures becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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prognostication → bring → futures
The choreography by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Shcraiber, dominated by line dancing routines, repeatedly shows men mauling women.
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men → dominate → women
Slocumb’s wife reminds him that he has two daughters and is “the only black detective on the force”, in case he’s forgotten how brutal white men can be.
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men → remind → case
Lennox’s delicate Thelma starts off in a frilly denim dress, swimsuit and red slingbacks.
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Thelma → start → dress
After she’s been diddled, in more ways than one, by JD she is reborn in jeans, boots and singlet, with a sheen of sweat across her bare arms and breastbone, angrily toting a .38 alongside her new-found sexual confidence, like an avenging Sarah Connor.
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she → diddle → Connor
The feistiness of Rachel Tucker’s Louise is largely expressed through the tough way she smokes cigarettes.
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she → express → cigarettes
The breezy humour in the film is coarsened here through the doofus-ing of supporting male characters.
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humour → coarsen → characters
Both Lennox and Tucker sing with subtlety and power – Louise’s wrenching solo about what happened to her in Texas is a transcendent moment, which finds an answer in Thelma’s sweetly bolstering Make It Up To You.
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which → sing → You
And all together, this is, you know… fine.
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you → know → ?
But beyond a wish to further commercially exploit a piece of existing intellectual property, the translation of a work of art – particularly a treasured, iconic one – from one format to another needs to have an animating principle.
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translation → exploit → principle
Did Thelma and Louise need to become a musical?
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Thelma → need → ?
The Aporia
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