‘Freaky Friday’ causes Cleveland Play House and Playhouse Square to swap souls
By Bob Abelman
In 2011, the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning Tom Kitt (“Next to Normal”) collaborated with Tony Award- and Grammy Award-winning Lin-Manuel Miranda (“In the Heights) to write the score and lyrics for “Bring it On.”
“Bring It On” loosely was based on a 2000 nonmusical film – a silly teen comedy with a formulaic storyline and cardboard cutout characters – that spawned sequels so bad they went direct-to-video. Kitt and Miranda’s exceptional’ talents were able to raise the musical version’s IQ a few points, but the mediocre film became a mediocre stage production.
And now Kitt is at it again, either out of White Knight Syndrome that drives him to rescue lesser works from their fates or as an opportunity to capitalize on the lucrative teen and pre-teen markets. Or both.
This time he convinced his “Next to Normal” colleague Brian Yorkey to write the lyrics for another fluffy screen-to-stage teen comedy based on the 1976 Disney film and 2003-remake, “Freaky Friday.”
The show, branded “Disney’s Freaky Friday,” was adapted and updated by Bridget Carpenter (“Friday Night Lights,” “Parenthood”) with music by Kitt and Yorkey. It features a warring control-freak mother and rebellious teenage daughter who accidently trade souls for a day courtesy of a pair of magical hourglasses.
The musical borrows heavily from Disney Channel tropes by offering highly improbable conflicts with highly predictable solutions, an ensemble of unidimensional adults and instantly recognizable archetypical teens – the mean girl, the cool guy and the insecure best friends – as well as an all-too-obvious show-ending moral about learning to love and appreciate one another.
First performed at the Signature Theatre in Arlington in 2016, “Disney’s Freaky Friday” is now a co-production between the Cleveland Play House, the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego (where it was staged prior to the current CPH run) and the Alley Theatre in Houston (where it will be going after the CPH run).
Unlike other CPH co-productions, this show comes pre-packaged from the Disney factory with much of the original cast, including the wonderful Heidi Blickenstaff and Emma Hunton as mother Katherine and daughter Ellie. Also included is the entire creative team of Broadway professionals, including director Christopher Ashley (“Rocky Horror Show” and “Memphis”) and choreographer Sergio Trujillo (“Jersey Boys” and “On Your Feet!”).
As a result, the show more closely resembles the high-gloss national tours found in the Palace Theatre next door than the homegrown artisan productions typically found in CPH’s Allen Theatre.
The upside is that everyone – from the leads to the ensemble (including the mean girl played by Jessie Hooker, the cool guy played by Chris Ramirez, and the insecure best friends played by Sumi Yu and Jennafer Newberry) – has Broadway and/or national tour credits, so everything pops with top-tier talent and professionalism.
While the many songs are stand-alone affairs that don’t serve to move along the storyline, enough of them are stellar – particularly “Parents Lie,” “Bring My (Baby) Brother Home” and “No More Fear” – and serve to remind us that the guys who wrote “Next to Normal” are in the room.
Although the show has all the inanity of the original work, everyone on stage embraces and has fun with it. And because the show already ran for several weeks at the Signature Theatre and La Jolla Playhouse, this production is as tight, polished and brazenly confident as a tour.
The downside is that the show has all the inanity of the original work and even though the cast has fun with it, the one-trick gimmick of a grown woman and a teenage girl swapping souls gets old in a hurry. So does the excess of vocal calisthenics in the delivery of nearly every song, which caters to the teens in the audience.
Beowulf Boritt’s scenic design is simplified and prefabricated, just like a touring show, so it can be easily dismantled and reconfigured on the CPH, La Jolla Playhouse and Alley Theatre stages. But this show’s design is simplified to a fault, relying on Howell Binkley’s superb lighting design and four four-sided pillars that rotate to establish the play’s locations. One side displays household appliances so we know we are in the house, and so on.
Behind the pillars is a permanent backdrop depicting a silhouette of homes in a typical Chicago neighborhood, which becomes askew when Katherine and Ellie’s souls are swapped and returns to normal when they do. A turntable has been inserted into the stage and there is the sense that it is used not so much to facilitate the storytelling as to give us rotating people to look at given the lack of more interesting production values.
The bottom line is that, like “Bring it On” before it, “Disney’s Freaky Friday” is so grounded in its source material that it can’t quite shed the weight. Despite Tom Kitt’s best efforts, there will be no rescuing this work. CV
On Stage
WHAT: “Disney’s Freaky Friday”
WHERE: Allen Theatre, 1407 Euclid Ave., Cleveland
WHEN: Through May 20
TICKETS & INFO: $25 – $110, call 216-241-6000 or go to clevelandplayhouse.com
Bob Abelman covers theater and cultural arts for the Cleveland Jewish News. Follow Bob at Facebook.com/BobAbelman.3.
Originally published in the Cleveland Jewish News on April 27, 2017.
Lead image: From left, David Jennings (Mike), Heidi Blickenstaff (Katherine), Jake Heston Miller (Fletcher), and Emma Hunton (Ellie). Photo | Jim Carmody
