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. The sense of hardening, angry sisterhood between two ordinary women in the face of male exploitation and violence comes over strongly. As it should, since Callie Khouri, who won an Oscar for the screenplay, has penned the 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. 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). The bars, motels and convenience stores T&L frequent here get rolled into a generic slice of Americana: pool table, payphone, cowboy hats.
