Schedule	Buy Tickets
Ongoing	Wed-Sat, 8pm; Wed, Sat-Sun, 2pm; Sun, 7pm

Profile

Legally Blonde, now glowing pink at the Palace, offers some good news and bad news about what these adaptations are doing to Broadway. As in the film, Elle Woods leaves her sunny sorority life in California to chase a boy who’s gone to Harvard Law, where “the girls have different noses,” in the words of her horrified father. Librettist Heather Hach sticks closer to the screenplay than adapters of other shows have, so the songs by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin mainly expand scenes you remember from the movie, and offer fresh reasons to like them: As Elle prepares for her big date, the Delta Nus belt “Omigod, You Guys!”; the sexuality of a witness in the show’s big trial is pinned down in “Gay or European?” Though the show hasn’t been tidied up as relentlessly as its predecessors, the move from Hollywood to Broadway costs the material some of its endearing weirdness just the same. That may be the most pernicious side effect of this genre. Laura Bell Bundy can sing, dance, land a joke, and look good doing it, all of which makes her a fine Elle. It’s not her fault that her every smile doesn’t summon memories of Tracy Flick, the steely student-council campaigner that Reese Witherspoon played in Election before starring in Legally Blonde. The fleeting glimpses of a Flickish manic drive just below Elle’s silly Malibu surface are what I liked best in the film. It’s the kind of freaky detail that no amount of cheery blandness can replace. — Jeremy McCarter

Related Stories

New York Magazine Reviews

• Jeremy McCarter's Full Review (5/14/07)