Romy & Michele: The Musical

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Not all cult films need to be musicals and attempting to put every filmed scene on stage doesn’t often make good theater. The latest one is a musicalized version of the 1997 cult film Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion which starred Mina Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow, now simply called Romy & Michele: The Musical. Robin Schiff adapts her screenplay but makes few changes. The real problem is the songs by the husband and wife team of Gwendolyn Sanford and Brandon Jay add little to the show. Ironically, the film has a famous soundtrack of songs from its era. Maybe it did not need a new score.

As directed by Kristin Hanggi, Romy & Michele fails to capture the charm of the film and feels perfunctory on stage. The musical follows the screen story quite closely with the two changes of making nerdy Toby from a woman into a gay man, and using the Sagebrush High School experience as a flashback. Romy White and Michele Weinberger are Tucson high school flakes in 1987 who are scorned by their classmates for their personal style which is both bohemian and artsy. While Romy is pursued by a science geek Sandy Frink who doesn’t interest her, Michele has a crush on football star Billy Christianson. Unfortunately, he is the boyfriend of head cheerleader and mean girl Christie Masters who travels around with her squad of Kelly, Cheryl and Lisa and humiliates them every chance she gets. Heather Mooney, another science geek, pines for Sandy who doesn’t notice her. Toby Walters, the camera geek, is ignored by all. The final straw is that Romy and Michele are humiliated at their Prom and have bad memories of the event.

Ten years later (which is where the musical starts) Romy and Michele have gotten out of Tucson and live in Los Angeles where Romy is a cashier at a Jaguar dealership and Michele is an unemployed designer. When they are notified by Toby that Sagebrush is having their ten year high school reunion, they at first decide, as they have nothing to brag about in the intervening years, they will not go. However, it occurs to them they could lie about their achievements and wow all their former classmates. They decide on saying that they invented Post-it notes, something everyone uses but no knows who invented. Michele hopes to get that dance with Billy that never happened at the Prom.

At the reunion, all the major players appear but with some changes: Christie is now married to Billy, Lisa is now a high powered fashion editor, Heather is now a successful businesswoman, and Sandy, the most successful one of all, arrives in his helicopter. Toby is still a camera geek, while Kelly and Cheryl are still living in Christie’s shadow. Of course, the lie about Post-it notes backfires but all ends happily for our two heroines before the story is over.

Schiff’s book so slavishly follows her screenplay without adding new material that there is nothing much to wait for. The lyrics by Sanford and Jay alternate between not scanning and extremely simple rhymes. None of the songs tell us anything we don’t already know. With one or two exceptions, Hanggi has directed her cast to be as much like the movie as possible, leading to pale imitations of more robust characterizations. Jason Sherwood’s unit set is augmented by Caite Hevner’s projection design, neither of which creates much atmosphere.  Tina McCartney’s costumes seem to be clones of those used in the movie. Much of the look of the period is created by Tommy Kurzman’s hair, wig and make-up design.

As Romy and Michele, Laura Bell Bundy and Kara Lindsay, respectively, are pale imitations of Sorvino and Kudrow without adding anything of their own. Jordan Kai Burnett’s Heather is now more Goth and steals all her scenes. Taking over the part played by Caryn Manheim in the film, Je’Shaun Jackson’s Toby is a stereotypical plus sized gay guy. Michael Thomas Grant’s Sandy is amusingly two people, the nerdy high school geek and the smooth business entrepreneur ten years later. Pascal Pastrana plays athlete and later alcoholic Billy as a comic character who seems to be mocking himself. As mean girl Christie, Lauren Zakrin is a two-dimensional version of a type we have seen a great deal of in recent years.

Romy & Michele: The Musical has the disadvantage of attempting to outdo a film that did not need to be musicalized. Offering little new but only creating the screenplay on stage is neither novel nor engaging. The premise to the story is clever but we have seen it before: the unpopular high school types who turn out to be the cleverest ones of all. If only the actors had been allowed to run with their characters and not worry about recreating their film counterparts, this might have been a much more successful romp.

Romy & Michele (through November 30, 2025)

Stage 42, 422 W. 42nd Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212-239-6200 or visit http://www.romyandmichelethemusical.com

Running time: two hours and 15 minutes including one intermission