When Toronto’s Nightwood Theatre selected the Broadway musical Legally Blonde to be its 2017 Lawyer Show production, several veterans of the cast expressed doubt—if not outright alarm—over the choice. After all, Nightwood is Canada’s premiere women’s theatre company, highly respected for its focus on women in theatre, and the annual Lawyer Show (now in its eighth year) has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for that cause. For the first six years, Nightwood staged Shakespeare comedies to great success; last year, it ventured into musical theatre, with a first-rate production of Guys and Dolls. All the Lawyer Show productions, by the way, are cast entirely with lawyers: singing, dancing, acting, belting, comedic, dramatic, brilliantly-talented lawyers.
So what was the objection to Legally Blonde? I myself, a veteran of the first five productions, had my doubts. I’d seen the movie with Reese Witherspoon, but not the Broadway adaptation. I remember being pleasantly surprised by the film, which I saw on its release in 2001, with my then reasonably-new boyfriend. The boyfriend had, in fact, gone to Harvard Law, and was not happy about being dragged off to see this ridiculous movie, which I wanted to see only because there was nothing else to see, and it was our “movie night.” We ended up grudgingly admitting that it was a pretty good movie. Not exactly Citizen Kane, but not embarrassing.
About the Broadway adaptation, however, I knew nothing. The concerns expressed by a couple of my castmates from previous shows were not soothed when I listened for the first time to the opening number, Oh My God You Guys! I mean, really. “Oh my God, you guys?” Really? I felt a little better, though, after I watched the video of the number, and saw just how heavily the writers’ and performers’ tongues were thrust into their cheeks. In that routine, which is a showstopper, the sorority girls (all of them gorgeous in the traditional sense, except for the de rigueur Nerdy Girl, who is made not-gorgeous by the addition of a woolly hat and a chewing gum habit) dance around celebrating the heroine’s upcoming engagement. The young women are all vapid; the lyrics border on disturbing (“Daughter of Delta Nu, soon to be fiancée! Now that a man’s found you, your life begins today!”) But it is very tongue-in-cheek; it is supposed to be shockingly dumb. However, if you were looking to be outraged/indignant, there’s a lot there to work with. This is feminist theatre?
Oh, yeah, baby. It is. It most definitely is. That shocking—but I gotta admit, hypnotizingly engaging opening number—does exactly what comedic theatre is designed to do: it sets up a situation that simply cannot hold, and which needs to be dismantled (in a funny and if possible sympathetic way, of course). This isn’t Russian realist theatre; this is Broadway musical comedy, and it has its methods and its tropes. The crew of giggling, vacuous, but somehow-appealing young women might call each other “slut,” but they also proceed to support heroine Elle when she—idiotically, of course; what would a Broadway comedy be without a protagonist whose goal is idiotic?—decides to “stalk some guy to an Ivy League school.” Yes, this Fashion Merchandising major actually applies to get into Harvard Law. She gives up socializing, shopping, everything her life was built on, to study for the LSAT (that she considers this a hardship is cut down to size later in the show when a fellow student points out that he worked two jobs and went to Harvard Law, so cry me a river, Elle). But she does get in, after enlisting the help of the gum-chewing nerd (of course). And also, of course: it goes horribly wrong. She doesn’t fit in; she makes a complete fool of herself. She starts to flunk out. But then…
And there’s the rub: the “but then.” What heroine Elle Woods goes through is—although comedic—not only relevant and pro-women, but often truly moving. I’ve now seen this show multiple times, on Youtube (I use it as my treadmill music when I’m working out, at least partly so I can learn those damn songs before we start rehearsals next month), and there are parts of this show that choke me up almost every time. The first occurs when Elle helps her hairdresser get her pet dog back from her bullying ex-boyfriend, who had refused to let her take the dog with her when she left him. Elle comes up with a legal argument and faces the boyfriend down. Disgusted, he hands over the dog. The friend is overjoyed, and Elle has a revelation where she says, “Wait! Was that law?” as she realizes that she is going into a world where she can “help the underdog” (okay, lame joke, but it is a comedy). When she says that—is that law?—and she realizes she’s going to have the power to advocate, to help, to represent, to protect…well, it’s moving. Lawyers, time and again, are depicted much as the play’s antagonist Professor Callaghan is shown: aggressive sharks who go for “blood in the water.” My experience as a lawyer was that it was all about helping people—all of it. We weren’t always appreciated—in fact, we were often resented—but those all-nighters and those sleepless nights were about helping someone who had a serious, complicated problem. Is that law? Yes. That’s what it was for me, anyway.
The second moment is pretty personal. I didn’t go to law school until I was 40. I had dropped out of high school after finishing my Grade 12, and started my undergrad part time at night school (eventually switching to full-time studies in my 30’s). I knew I was “bright,” as the saying goes, but I had zero self-confidence, and started studies at Oz basically just to prove I couldn’t do it. Only by flunking out of law school could I finally abandon the goal of being a lawyer (one I’d had since Grade 9), which seemed like a pretty big thing—far too big for someone like me. After all, I was just a legal secretary, and that was good enough for a “bright girl” who liked to read, but certainly wasn’t going to cut any mustard at law school.
Well, I can tell you: in Legally Blonde, when Elle achieves academically, and finds out that she has, in fact, made the list for a prized internship, I could absolutely cry with recognition. I actually did cry, the first time I heard the song, and Elle shouts out: is that MY name up on that list? does someone know that I exist! She sings the lines, of course, while dancing, and most of the song is very funny (especially when she tells the man she’d pursued that getting her name on the list was much better than sex with him). But oh my god oh my god you guys! It’s exactly how I felt when I got into Oz, and when, in second year, I earned not one but two prizes for academic achievement. There it was. My name. On that list. Sing it, Elle.
There’s lots to criticize about the play. They get the law and procedure wrong a lot (who goes to trial for murder in two weeks flat? And then there’s the whole client-confidentiality thing—oh, please!) There’s also one regrettable and dated racist shtick (Nightwood will no doubt cut that verse from the number). Yes, there are stereotypes, but Broadway paints in broad strokes, and the stereotypes are largely exploded. Nobody is cardboard, and even the gormless man whom Elle pursued to Harvard receives fair treatment. Certainly it’s too white; certainly it’s oversexed. But it’s a bopping, hopping, creative comedic musical. Even for those of us who don’t particularly care for bopping, hopping, comedic musicals, it’s worth seeing, just to watch Elle’s story unfold. The play forcefully declares that women must support each other; it exposes the career-killing horror of sexual harassment; it encourages women to see themselves as capable and powerful advocates.
I decided to audition for the Lawyer Show this year not knowing anything about Legally Blonde, and concerned that the choice wasn’t necessarily pro-women enough. Now, with the words and music pretty much drilled into my head, I’m more excited about this production than I’ve been about any of the Shakespeare shows. Legally Blonde strikes a chord with me. I’m fifty-eight years old. I come from the days when it was not a common thing for women to go to law school. In my early days as a legal secretary—in the late 1970s and early 1980s—a “lady lawyer” was a rare creature indeed. That’s what we called them: “lady lawyers.” Not just “lawyers.” “Lady lawyers.”
It’s just a Broadway comedy, full of flaws and stupidity and shtick and fun. But it says a great deal about women in law. Hats off to Nightwood for seeing that, and for choosing it for its 2017 production. Oh my god, you guys—don’t miss it.