By Steven Suskin
08 Feb 2010

VANITIES [Ghostlight 8-4437]
Vanities, Jack Heifner's long-running 1976 Off-Broadway comedy, told of three Texas cheerleaders who get together over the years, demonstrating that life ain't always what you expect it to be. (The opening scene, preparing for a high school prep rally, takes place on November 22, 1963; hmmm.) Vanities began life at Playwrights Horizons was a major, mass-produceable hit; but this was a long time ago, so long that one of those bright and perky teenagers was played by Kathy Bates. Thirty years later, much of what seemed novel back then seems old-fashioned and cliched. It's hard to tell how a revival of Vanities would fare; last season's musical adaptation, though, was unable to negotiate the pitfalls.

Vanities, the musical, led a somewhat checkered life. A 2006 production at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto led to an August 2008 production at the Pasadena Playhouse. This in turn resulted in a February 2009 booking at Broadway's Lyceum, which was ultimately canceled due to the poor economy. The scale of the production was cut back down to Off-Broadway size, with a July 2009 production at Second Stage. Vanities revealed itself as pleasant but mild, not quite the sort of thing you want in a modern-day musical, and closed within the month. Mr. Heifner provided the book; Judith Ivey, better known in these parts as a fine performer, directed; and Lauren Kennedy, Sarah Stiles and Anneliese van der Pol played the girls in front of the vanities. A CD of this Vanities has come along, presumably in the hopes of encouraging a stock and amateur life.

A play set in three distinct and recent eras more or less dictates a score touching on a bit of this, a bit of that, and a bit of the other. This seems to have tied the hands of composer-lyricist David Kirshenbaum. There is some nice writing here and there — "Cute Boys with Short Haircuts" especially so — but we keep hearing flavorful but counterproductive vestiges of the '60s and '70s. Mr. Kirshenbaum was working with some of the same strictures in his first major musical, Summer of '42; the two scores, combined, lead me to believe that he is a talented composer. Now, let's hear what he sounds like when he is not forced to recreate the swing era, the Bacharach era, or the like.

(Steven Suskin is author of the forthcoming updated and expanded Fourth Edition of "Show Tunes" as well as "The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations," "Second Act Trouble," and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He can be reached at Ssuskin@aol.com.)