Laura Bell Bundy and Kara Lindsay are beautiful and very funny losers in the musical adaptation of “Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion,” the 1997 film that starred Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow. Those two talented movie stars are also beautiful and very funny with their droll wait-a-beat delivery of screenwriter Robin Schiff’s many quips and one-liners. But losers? Whether they’re wearing Madonna rip-offs or Boss business suits, Sorvino’s Romy White and Kudrow’s Michele Weinberger would be each other’s biggest competition for being crowned queen of both the homecoming and the prom in high school.
Bundy and Lindsay may wear their showy costumes (by Tina McCartney) as well as Sorvino and Kudlow do theirs in the movie, but what’s going on under those bleach blond wigs on stage is far lower, crasser and goofier in the new musical “Romy & Michele,” which opened Tuesday at Off Broadway’s Stage 42.
Schiff hasn’t so much adapted her screenplay to the stage as lifted it with nearly every joke intact. Romy and Michele still get into a major fight about who’s Mary and who’s Rhoda. More intriguing is how Bundy and Lindsay don’t recall those two movie characters but rather Lucy and Ethel as played by Nicole Kidman and Nina Arianda in “Being the Ricardos.” That’s quite a high comic bar to jump over, but this duo does it with ease while wearing very high heels. Director Kristin Hanggi gets equally quality, as well as athletic, performances from her entire ensemble.
It’s a shame Schiff didn’t give these talented singing comedians a few more original lines. Book writer Marco Pennette completely rejuvenated “Death Becomes Her” for that stage musical by barely repeating a line from David Koepp and Martin Donovan’s original screenplay.
Schiff has made only a few jiggers: The stage musical begins with Romy and Michele delivering some very gay-friendly jokes. Schiff knows her audience. Perhaps too well. She has also taken the yearbook nerd Toby (played by Camryn Manheim in the movie) and turned him into closeted gay man, played with sweet pixilated charm by Je’Shaun Jackson. Toby’s isolation from his classmates in school and at the reunion is the only time Hanggi’s direction takes a misstep. “Romy & Michele” is a musical about the triumph of losers, but never should we give any of these cartoon characters a first or even second serious thought about their hurt feelings. This kind of LGBTQ+ pandering in the musical theater goes back to Jo in “Jagged Little Pill” and May in “& Juliet.”
Much less patronizing and a lot more fun is Lauren Zakrin’s pure bitch Christie and Michael Thomas Grant’s marvelous 11th-hour transformation from fellow nerd Sandy to billionaire Sandy with the roustabout “I Don’t Have You.”
When Schiff’s book disappoints by simply regurgitating her screenplay, the original score by Gwendolyn Sanford and Brandon Jay provides the necessary fresh energy. It’s nothing more than bubblegum, but like Hubba Bubba, the songs come in a wide variety of flavors and colors.
