'Vanities' the musical is a friendship revisited
Jack Heifner's story of three women coming of age in the 1960s and '70s gets another look, a fourth scene and some fresh perspective at the Pasadena Playhouse.
WHEN "Vanities" opened off-Broadway in 1976, no one thought of it as feminist theater. But in its day, the play was groundbreaking.
Jack Heifner's story about three Texas cheerleaders and how they grew apart was one of the first long-running, widely produced plays of the 1970s to feature an all-female cast. "It was very controversial at the time," says the playwright, sitting in the library of the Pasadena Playhouse, during a break from rehearsals for the musical version of his best-known work. "It's hard for people to believe that now, how upsetting the play was."
The feminist motto "The personal is political" was nowhere near the hearts and minds of the "Vanities" gals. Neither were world events. "Vanities" begins on the day of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963, but Mary, Joanne and Kathy could not care less. "Most people at the time were writing about how horrible war was, about Vietnam," says Heifner, "and I wrote a play about three people who didn't give a damn."
"Vanities: A New Musical" by Heifner based on his play, with lyrics and music by David Kirshenbaum, opens Friday at the Pasadena Playhouse. The production is directed by Judith Ivey.
Plans have been announced to take the show to Broadway. Producers are eyeing a winter or spring opening at a to-be-determined Shubert theater.
Should everything fall into place and a bankable cast be secured, they're hoping that what Heifner describes as "the right play at the right time" for 1976 will become the right musical for 2009. It remains to be seen whether the piece will make the leap with the facility of a teenage pompom girl.
The feminist theater movement emerged in the early 1970s, spurred and inspired by the then-burgeoning women's movement. In 1972, Rosalyn Drexler, Maria Irene Fornes, Julie Bovasso, Megan Terry, Rochelle Owens and Adrienne Kennedy formed the Women's Theater Council, a group dedicated to developing and producing the work of female theater artists. Around the same time, a number of influential feminist theater companies was founded: At the Foot of the Mountain, It's Alright to Be a Woman Theatre, Omaha Magic Theatre, Spiderwoman Theatre and others.
"Vanities" tells the story of three young Texas women, beginning when they are high school cheerleaders, then college sorority sisters, and later as grown women who no longer have much in common. Although the play was not part of the feminist theater movement, it served a theme of the movement: showing women an image of themselves onstage.
