"Ms. Barks is clearly a talented singer and actress...she has been given no chance to banish stardust memories of the woman who created her part. Directed and choreographed as if on automatic pilot by Jerry Mitchell. Its creators have hewed suffocatingly close to the film’s story, gags, and dialogue...Mostly, Ms. Barks conducts herself like a peppy, tomboyish cutup from a sitcom. She often doesn’t seem entirely at ease, but her discomfort is nothing compared to Mr. Karl’s."
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"Mostly just a dutiful replica of the movie...Not only does this approach miss an opportunity to rethink the story’s sugar-daddy fantasy in a deeper way, it also gets stale fast; this ain’t our first time on Rodeo Drive...Adams and Vallance’s music does its job, but has a Broadway show ever had lyrics so utterly, almost senselessly generic?...The cast makes the most of what 'Pretty Woman' allows them."
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"'Pretty Woman: The Musical' has plenty of problems outside of its politics...It’s the kind of lifeless clunker that makes your heart go out to its actors...It’s more concerned with checking the boxes of all the movie’s most famous moments than it is with telling us anything new about these characters or creating any sense of surprise...The musical has added only 30 minutes to the length of the movie, and it still manages to feel draggy and overpadded."
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"Reports that the creators...were 'reshaping' the story for the #MeToo era have been greatly exaggerated...But Lawton and the film’s director, the late Garry Marshall, who co-wrote the book, have clearly taken a 'don’t mess with success' approach...Samantha Barks is agreeable as Vivian, and Andy Karl is an appealingly handsome Edward. The bright spots, though, come from the supporting cast...But it’s clear that the all-male creative team hasn’t interrogated the story."
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"Not that 'Pretty Woman' is terrible—it’s just mediocre, albeit to a mind-boggling degree...Not only are the 16 songs banal, but they’re untheatrical: Virtually all of them are here’s-how-I’m-feeling-right-this-second power ballads that stop the action of the show dead instead of pushing it forward to the final curtain...Rarely in the history of Broadway has a bigger, staler nothingburger been served up than 'Pretty Woman.'"
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"Bland MOR songs, costumes mistaking gaudy for glitzy, and a sugary lead performance add up to one very smudged, very ill-fitting glass slipper...Hits all the film’s beats, crams in a roster of generic-sounding songs written by raspy-voiced ’90s power balladeer Bryan Adams (along with Jim Vallance), and gins up unconvincing nods to empowerment without for a moment thinking them through or taking them seriously."
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"Stubbornly inconsequential, it’s a morally uplifting fairy tale of which everyone, young and old alike, can be skeptical...Director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell and team toss a decided gloss over this G-rated version of Hollywood nights, with production numbers and ensemble acting executed with exaggerated musical-comedy snap...Though the lyrics teem with cliche, the cast gives its all to sell them."
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"While the creative team strains a tad too diligently to give the female lead agency and sidestep the Cinderella story's awkward sexual politics, the show is best appreciated as a retro pleasure, guilty or not...Its chief reason to exist is as a nostalgia exercise, not a fresh entertainment in its own right. The songs are almost superfluous...Barks makes a sensational Broadway debut...Vivian probably could have done without the blunt literalness of lyrics by Adams and Vallance."
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