CHICAGO — The reason Lauren Weisberger’s satirical memoir “The Devil Wears Prada” became famous was not just because of the juicy schadenfreude-y movie with Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway. It’s because Weisberger was self-aware enough to see that the thirst for power included herself.
On the one hand, she took out her knives and dissected the terrifying tastemaker Miranda, a stand-in for Anna Wintour, a bourgeois feminist survivor with veiled vulnerability. On the other, she knew that the very act of writing the memoir meant that her alter-ego Andy was no different from Miranda, even though she shrouded her hunger for the spotlight in virtue signaling and that obnoxiously righteous, Brooklyn-style cocktail of stubble-faced chefs. Weisberger knew that ambitious 20-somethings desperate for glam media jobs will ice their elders quicker than they can say “I am holding space for you.” She implicated herself and reaped her just rewards.
So, of course, did Streep and Hathaway, immensely skilled players both. But the main problem with the bland and hesitant new musical version of “The Devil Wears Prada,” which features a book by Kate Wetherhead and a score by Elton John and that opened Sunday night in a Chicago tryout under the direction of Anna D. Shapiro, is that it has not yet found the guts to follow that same track, notwithstanding the huge satirical opportunity. More specifically, Weisberger’s sexy, self-aware satire has been given a moralistic tack, which Miranda would hate even more than cerulean sweaters.
