"Do no damage," Hippocrates advised his fellow doctors. The same could be said, in a theatrical context, for Vanities, the wildly popular 1976 comedy that ran for 1,785 performances Off-Broadway and has now been turned into a musical.
In development for the past two years, Vanities A New Musical checked into the Pasadena Playhouse for a six-week pre-Broadway run.
Fans of the original play can rest easy. Although Kirshenbaum's songs won't make anyone forget Sondheim, they do the job in a competent (and occasionally exciting way), and with playwright Heifner still involved as librettist, Vanities manages to keep its bite and sparkle.
As most theater fans know, Vanities follows the lives of three Texan female friends over a three-decade period (60s to 90s). We trace the zig-zagging fortunes of Mary (Lauren Kennedy), Joanne (Elizabeth Brackenbury, subbing for an injured Sarah Stiles), and Kathy (Anneliese van der Pol) as they cope with high school, adolescent sex, pom poms and bouffant hairdos in the first part of the show; college, Kappa Kappa Gamma, "cute boys with short haircuts" and vague worries about the future (and, oh yes, occasionally about Vietnam) in part two.
Part three finds them at a 1974 reunion in New York, with such adult concerns as kids, divorce, infidelity and fading looks plaguing -- and changing -- them. In a 1990 coda, they meet back in Texas at a funeral at which they must not only face up to their own mortality but to the challenge of repairing their much-battered friendship. The road from girlhood to womanhood is deftly, if somewhat superficially, charted by Heifner & Kirshenbaum (aided by director Judith Ivey and musical staging by Dan Knechtges), but thanks to slick production values and splendid performances by the three leads, the Vanities story should once again tickle large numbers of people in New York.
