Airheads in the Wind of Change
By Monty Arnold
16 Jul 2009
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Vanities stars Lauren Kennedy, Sarah Stiles and Anneliese Van Der Pol
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| photo by Joan Marcus |
Vanities, the hit Off-Broadway play about the evolution of three Texas cheerleaders, is now a musical.
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On Nov. 22, 1963, tragedy befalls a trio of teenage girls at their Texas high-school cheerleading practice. Over the PA system comes word that the president has been shot in Dallas, meaning their rah-rah routines in front of the Friday Night Lights is fur sure doomed to be doused. One saucer-eyed lass can't imagine how the president of the student body could have been shot in Dallas when she just saw him in algebra.
To say the "Big Picture" eludes these clueless cuties is like calling the Johnstown Flood a slight drizzle. And their self-absorbed, microscopic worldview continues unabated (if more accessorized) as Southern Methodist University (SMU) sorority girls.
By the time they take stock of themselves again, they're a decade deep into the real world after high school; they've individuated and grown so far apart they can't find themselves emotionally with a compass. What were they thinking or not thinking?
These are the ladies of Jack Heifner's
Vanities, who racked up one of the longest Off-Broadway runs ever 1,785 performances, from 1976 to 1980 at the Westside Theatre (then the Chelsea Theatre Center). Now, they're
baaack, singing songs by David Kirshenbaum (
Summer of '42), for a musical second-coming at Second Stage.
Unlike Virginia Slims, who've "come a long way, baby," Heifner has in 33 years come one whole block on West 43rd Street for this musical reprise but it is a block closer to Broadway, where this tuneful retread was intended to arrive (and may yet).
"I'd been approached many times about doing this as a musical," Heifner admits. "Some big-name people wanted to open it up and add men and the other girls and make it Grease or something. Only David really understood the play, wanted to keep its integrity and knew how to do it. One nice thing about a musical is you can go inside people's heads and sing their thoughts. This was always a play about shallow people, so it's interesting to hear what they're thinking. It's a difficult play for actors, and for directors, because it's 90 percent subtext what they're not talking about."
Initially, Heifner covered the ages of woman in three scenes. "I based the first scene on three women I knew in high school, and I was so naοve that I named the characters after the Kathy, Mary and Joanne I knew it was only the second play I'd ever written and then, when I went to SMU, I took those three girls and turned them into some sorority girls I knew. And the last part was totally made up." Continued...
