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.
In the leads Amy Lennox and Rachel Tucker sing their guts out and make a likeable and believable pair of gal pals, but they don’t have the star wattage and chemistry of Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in the original. (Realistically, who does?) Also, without Davis’s mix of quicksilver zest and sudden vulnerability it quickly becomes clear quite how annoying Thelma is.
Most significantly, the country-rock score by Canadian powerhouse Neko Case, though distinctive and often beautiful, is more about mood than narrative, and her rich images often descend into word salad. The roguish drifter JD (Jordan Luke Gage in the role that made Brad Pitt) sings to Thelma: “I bet your mouth tastes like fireworks and caramel.” And you think, hang on, that would taste *awful*.
Anyway, Trip Cullman’s methodical production begins with women from the ensemble telling us we’re about to witness “the story of two little girls… [who] wouldn’t grow up to be anything”. I suppose there is a slim chance that someone might go and see this show without knowing how the story ends, but there is an awful lot of foreshadowing here. “I wanna live before I die,” is a recurring refrain in Case’s score.
As in the movie, Thelma is a waitress with a feckless drummer boyfriend, Louise a housewife married to her controlling and sexually unfulfilling childhood sweetheart Darryl. Their planned weekend cabin trip goes awry when Louise shoots a roughneck who tries to rape the drunk Thelma in a parking lot.
Convinced they’ll get hard justice from the patriarchy, not least by a dark moment in Louise’s past, the two spiral into criminality. Despite the attempts of detective Hal Slocumb (Trevor Dion Nicholas) to bring them in safely, their doomy prognostication about their futures becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This show isn’t subtle. The choreography by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Shcraiber, dominated by line dancing routines, repeatedly shows men mauling women. Slocumb’s wife reminds him that he has two daughters and is “the only black detective on the force”, in case he’s forgotten how brutal white men can be.
Lennox’s delicate Thelma starts off in a frilly denim dress, swimsuit and red slingbacks. After she’s been diddled, in more ways than one, by JD she is reborn in jeans, boots and singlet, with a sheen of sweat across her bare arms and breastbone, angrily toting a .38 alongside her new-found sexual confidence, like an avenging Sarah Connor.
The feistiness of Rachel Tucker’s Louise is largely expressed through the tough way she smokes cigarettes. The breezy humour in the film is coarsened here through the doofus-ing of supporting male characters.
Both Lennox and Tucker sing with subtlety and power – Louise’s wrenching solo about what happened to her in Texas is a transcendent moment, which finds an answer in Thelma’s sweetly bolstering Make It Up To You. The band, above the stage, is tight.
And all together, this is, you know… fine. But beyond a wish to further commercially exploit a piece of existing intellectual property, the translation of a work of art – particularly a treasured, iconic one – from one format to another needs to have an animating principle. Did Thelma and Louise need to become a musical? No.
To 24 Oct, youngvic.org.
