| . | 05/10/2009
9 to 5
By: Eugene Paul
Megan Hilty, Allison Janney, and Stephanie J. Block
Photo by Joan Marcus)
There are several respectable names attached to Broadway’s new musical, 9 to 5, but there’s no getting around it: this is Dolly Parton’s show with all her visible virtues and all her feckless faults, with the virtues triumphant from the first downbeat of her Grammy winning song, “9 to 5”, that frames the show. The opening number is simply a stunner. Director magician Joe Mantello pulls out his whole bag of tricks – including some new ones – and electrifyingly weaves Andy Blankenbuehler’s classiest choreography with first glimpses of Peggy Eisenhauer’s vital to the show imaging in Scott Pask’s cheeky clever sets along with William Ivey Long’s smartest costumes enhancing a dashing delight of a dancing company getting ready to go to work. Marvelous. And we haven’t even got to the story line! Which story you know and love because you saw our Dolly, composer, lyricist, singing star, movie star, put it all up front in her very first movie. There’s ample proof Ms Parton’s got us pegged. If you’ve ever leafed through the lyrics of her twenty numero uno country music hits you know she knows where you live. And it ain’t in your head.
Patricia Resnick’s book for the musical follows the movie she wrote, supplying us in wildly comic terms the social imperative: women are not being treated as equals in the business world and damned well ought to be or else comes rebellion. The show, of course, is set in the seventies. We don’t have such ancient problems any more, thank heavens, but everybody working in the show, and not just the characters in the story, seems to think we do, which adds a zest to the proceedings we would sorely have missed if our current complacency were uppermost. Well, it’s not. So when Violet (Allison Janney) and Judy (Stephanie Block) and Doralee (Megan Hilty) are treated like chattel and sex objects by their boss, Franklin (Marc Kudisch), they try shooting him,, tying him up and eventually resort to kidnapping him because the lying, sexist, bigot deserves it. Hard part is doing it so nobody notices he’s gone. They take over running the company. In his name, of course. Even musicals have moments of stark realism. All this is accomplished with whirling sets, dream sequences and dances to hell and gone. You never saw such agitated activity but director Mantello winkles it purposefully and stitches the assemblage into the fabric of the rickety plot. He knows the difference between action and just plain activity. He’s an action man. And Dolly writes songs for every inch of it, including show stoppers. Gotta have show stoppers especially when you have clever, clever effects sliding, twitching, zooming into place the way Mantello ingeniously contrives.
He takes advantage of the imaging techniques Peter Nigrini and Peggy Eisenhauer provide brilliantly, turning Roz’s (Kathy Fitzgerald) show stopper toilet spying sequence into a riotous extravaganza with a magic mirror and pink, swinging doors. And dames, dames, dames. He directs leering, lubricious, hilariously obscene Franklin into the most blatantly vulgar, outrageous pantings for Doralee’s delicious body, a body that is pure Dolly Parton homage.
If you can’t have the real thing this ain’t bad. He casts dancers who look like real people, who wear clothes that look like real clothes and still move like poetry. He sets sociopolitical tone in bawdy, ridiculous ribaldry and gets his leads to deliver many a lame line as if it were Oscar Wilde. I definitely admired Allison Janney who sings, praise be, in a real voice, without the Broadway screech cultivated by so many musical comedy practitioners. I admired Megan Hilty’s positive composure as a Dolly Parton figure in more ways than two and I loved Marc Kudisch’s dirty, dirty, dirty not so old man as well as his voice, the only real one displayed in the show. His awfulness makes the plot wheels go round. It ain’t culture but it’s a blast.
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Marriott Marquis Theater, 1535 Broadway. Tickets: $66.50 - $126.50. Tue 7 pm, Wed-Sat 8 pm. Mats, Wed, Sat 2 pm, Sun 3 pm. 212-307-4100, ticketmaster.com
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