Legally Blonde - Original Broadway Cast Recording

Legally Blonde is yet another musical based on a movie—one with Reese Witherspoon that I accordingly avoided. It has music and lyrics by the husband-and-wife team of Laurence O'Keefe and Nell Benjamin, and a book by Heather Hach. The movie, in turn, was based on a novel, so we have enough transit for things to get lost in it.

You may recall that this is a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which blonde Elle Woods is not only president of her UCLA sorority and full-fledged fashionista, but also proves brainy enough to get into Harvard Law School after her boyfriend, Warner, drops her to go there and find a socially suitable, severely dressed snooty brunette classmate for girlfriend.

At HLS, which she enters with her Chihuahua, Bruiser, and one summer's preparation, Elle dazzles both her arrogant professor and her mostly stodgy fellow students, notably decent Emmett, from a humble background, who alone befriends her. Warner, too, is impressed, as is Elle's likable beautician, Paulette, unlucky with men.

You should pretty much manage to guess the rest, though you might not elucubrate that Elle will also turn into a supersleuth and save a woman wrongly accused of murder, or that the girls from Delta Nu will somehow turn into a Greek chorus, sustaining Elle and nudging her on.

All this would be more palatable if O'Keefe's music could ever get more than a step or two away from recitative. As it is, we get a kind of neo-Pirandellian Fifteen Songs in Search of a Tune. Benjamin's lyrics are slightly better, especially if you groove on stuff like Ireland-besotted Paulette's "The Irish fear nothing and no one!/ They keep fighting till ev'ryone's dead!/ I'm not sure where this metaphor's goin'…/I just felt like it had to be said." (And if you can find a metaphor in those lines.)

Benjamin, like the composer, is in love with repetition, epitomized by the first song being "Omigod You Guys" and the show's last word being "Omigod"—though, for variety's sake, it is, during some of its countless reiterations, spelled "O my God!"

[IMG:L]There is just one song that transcends banality, the courtroom number "There! Right There!" in which a trial's outcome partly depends on whether a supernattily dressed fellow is "gay or merely European." Even there, though, the visual outdoes the aural.

Much credit must go to the direction and choreography of Jerry Mitchell, which, unfortunately, don't translate to disc, any more than the considerable histrionic aptitude of Elle's Chihuahua and Paulette's hound of uncertain breed.

Performances are mostly good, though the somewhat baby-voiced Elle of Laura Bell Bundy has the unfair advantage of not being Reese Witherspoon, and the good Orfeh, as Paulette, gets two of the cheesiest numbers. One is "Ireland," a speciously contrived excuse for parodying Riverdance-style Irish dancing; the other, "Bend and Snap," in which a woman's sexual attraction is located in her derriere as she bends and snaps into verticality in front of a man.

The biggest appeal of Legally Blonde is presumably to young girls, but even they will get less satisfaction from the disc than from the show.