Diabolical
I saw The Devil Wears Prada. It was not a highlight.
They say that the Devil has all the best tunes. They’re absolutely wrong.
What I’ve seen
Well, The Devil Wears Prada is finally open at the Dominion, where it has been in previews seemingly for months, following several weeks of tryouts in Plymouth and some time in Chicago (a very American and usually quite effective way of developing a musical, by tweaking it in response to the audience). In the event, pretty much everyone hated it, including me.
The baffling question is, how, with such promising, well-loved source material, after so much time and so much money, have they produced something so crashingly mediocre?
It kind of makes me furious. Elton John, who has done the music, and Shaina Taub (who wrote Suffs, so is evidently capable of much better than this) and Mark Sonnenblick, both on duty for lyrics, should be thoroughly embarrassed. There’s barely a hummable tune or a memorable line in the whole thing - the book, by Kate Wetherhead, is fine but not sparkling, though she’s hamstrung by the movie of course so has less room to manoeuvre.
And was the character of Andy always this charmless? Georgie Buckland is absolutely doing her best in her West End debut, there is nothing wrong with her performance at all, but the headlong charge through the story makes Andy seem pretty awful.
She starts out moaning to her saintly boyfriend about how nobody will give her a job (maybe she’s not a brilliant writer? The existence of a single worthy piece about the janitors’ union, written for your college paper, does not mean you’re ready to join the investigations team at the New York Times), is inexplicably employed by Miranda Priestly at Runway in a moment of the latter’s despair, bitches scornfully about how distasteful and ludicrous the whole fashion thing is and then, given a modicum of praise, embraces it with an alacrity that is startling. It makes you appreciate how delightful Anne Hathaway really is, that she was able to make you give a damn about this whiny little snob.
Even the creative team seems to want to apologise for her, in a way that leaves a very weird taste. There’s a repeated refrain in the show about the fact that ‘Miranda girls’ don’t tie themselves in moralistic knots, and then the second half has an entire song breathlessly justifying the fact that Andy, a grown woman, who as far as we know is on a break from her boyfriend, has uncomplicated sex with publisher (?) Christian Thompson, a grown man to whom she’s attracted, on her first, unfeasibly glamorous work trip. A whole song, shouting loudly that it’s ok! Because she’s in her 20s! That’s the time to do it! What? Who the fuck is moralising now?
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