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Are you longing to see a witty, complex Broadway musical about a lovely but rough-edged young woman from the streets who is swept up by a wealthy but distant older man, tutored in the ways of high society, swathed in expensive clothing and then left to wonder how she could return to the life she once led?
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Also currently on Broadway is Pretty Woman , a tawdry s gloss on the same Pygmalion myth, adapted from the hit rom-com about a prostitute who is Julia Roberts and who is hired for a week of sex and shopping with a handsome corporate raider who is Richard Gere.
Pretty Woman has a patina of fairy-tale romance, but its true love is conspicuous consumerism; in the Act I finale, our heroine, Vivian Samantha Barks , enjoys the kind of joyful self-actualization that can only come from a spending spree. Lawton , the show makes a few grudging tweaks to its source to accommodate modern sensibilitiesβVivian no longer gets punched in the faceβbut otherwise cleaves closely to the original script, reproducing nearly every well-known line in roughly the same order.
The cast makes the most of what Pretty Woman allows them. But although it is capably staged, the show has no reason to exist beyond, one assumes, a desire to make money by pimping out a familiar property. Broadway can do better than the same old tricks. Nederlander Theatre Broadway.
