Movie is a lot smarter than expected

By John Benson

The play will open in Cleveland on Tuesday.

Among the many recent Hollywood hit comedies that theatergoers might not expect to make the leap from the silver screen to Broadway musical, “Legally Blonde” would be just as surprising as, say, “Miss Congeniality,” “Meet the Fockers” or “The Break-Up.”

Yet a stage production of the 2001 Reese Witherspoon feature film “Legally Blonde” was exactly what theater producers had in mind a few years ago. This unenviable task was given to music writers and lyricists Nell Benjamin and Laurence O’Keefe, and the result was 2007 Tony Award-nominated “Legally Blonde The Musical.” The national touring production of the show makes its Cleveland debut Tuesday through Nov. 23 at the Palace Theatre.

“A lot of people wondered, ‘How are you going to make law school sing?’” said Benjamin, calling from New York City. “We wondered that too. The good thing about it is it’s a movie and a character that has a big following. People really love Elle Woods. I thought the movie was really cute, and I enjoyed myself, but it wasn’t like she was my hero.

“But there are people who do feel that way and more power to them, so we were in that tricky position of wanting to do something original. We just didn’t want to bring the movie to the stage because we’re stage people and we love musicals. We wanted something worthy of theater and not just a crass commercial.”

For those not familiar with “Legally Blonde” (there’s also a 2003 sequel “Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde”), the plot revolves around Elle Woods, who doesn’t take no for an answer. After being dumped by her Harvard Law School bound boyfriend, Woods leaves behind her trust fund life and focuses on not only getting into but graduating from the country’s most prestigious law school. She’s also hoping to get back her boyfriend.

However, the logical journey from sorority girl to law student wasn’t as easy as Benjamin and her writing partner had hoped.

“I’ve never been in a sorority, and I have a general female inferiority complex in front of sorority girls,” Benjamin said. “So I’m thinking, ‘How do I make them sympathetic?’ What we found was have them be excited about their friend as a big, happy, female community. That’s where the song ‘Omigod You Guys’ was born.”

In fact, Benjamin said that while doing research for the musical, they visited with the same sorority Witherspoon visited in preparing for her part. It was during dinner that the writer mentioned to the girls her idea about a song, which at that time had only the title “Omigod You Guys.”

Benjamin said instantly after hearing the title, the girls in unison kept repeating “Omigod You Guys, that’s a great title.” At that point she knew they were on the right track.

Benjamin admits in writing “Legally Blonde The Musical,” there was a lot of pressure to make sure the “Legally Blonde” franchise wasn’t tarnished.

“Our big joke was how wrong can we get this movie,” Benjamin laughed. “ It’s not like she goes to horse camp, not like she flies to Poland and becomes a prostitute. There are things you have to give people from the movie, so we tried to do that as best as possible.

“The other thing we were really conscious of was the central story of ‘Legally Blonde,’ which is this is a girl you take one look at and you think, ‘Oh, she’s not that smart.’ She turns out to be a little smarter than you think, and a lot of people felt about the movie ‘Legally Blonde’ the same way.

“So now they look at the movie and think ‘Legally Blonde The Musical’ isn’t going to be that smart. It won’t be that intelligent. It’ll be an attempt to make money or an attempt to move a movie to the theater, and we actually tried to make the musical and the lyrics as smart as we could. And what we’ve found is people come away from the theater thinking, ‘Wow, it was a lot smarter than I thought it was going to be.’”