A mirror put to 'Vanities'

Into the estrogen-amped summer of 2008 -- Hillary Rodham Clinton, Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Palin -- breezes "Vanities," the bright but undeclared new musical now at Pasadena Playhouse. Scheduled to open on Broadway in 2009, the show is based on Jack Heifner's long-running 1976 dramedy about a trio of white girls from Texas and features a book by Heifner and music and lyrics by David Kirshenbaum ("Summer of '42").

"Vanities" is less of a story than a series of jump cuts: In four scenes, each set in a different year, we follow hyper-conformist Kathy (Anneliese van der Pol), rebellious Mary (Lauren Kennedy) and an adrift Joanne (Sarah Stiles) through changes in men, ambitions and hemlines. We see them as high school cheerleaders (1963), then approaching college graduation (1968), as restless urbanites (1974) and, finally, as mature women (1990).

Heifner's original off-Broadway play appeared in 1976, the same year as "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf," and the two pieces share a certain zeitgeist. Like Ntozake Shange's choreopoem, "Vanities" was among the first downtown shows to put modern women's fractured lives center stage.

But if "Colored Girls" paints a ferocious portrait of struggle, Heifner's sketch works as an implicit critique of the values his privileged characters blithely accept. "Vanities" was feminism seen through a compact mirror -- infinite choice handed to girls who only want to be chosen by men and sororities.

The musical takes what was most distinctive about the play -- its offhand quality, as though Heifner were listening to women instead of putting words in their mouths -- and adds production scale and song to heighten certain moments. It's tricky to add the inherent "I Want" qualities of a musical to a story about people who don't actually know what they want. Sondheim has done it, so has Michael John LaChiusa, but it's a challenging setup.

What "Vanities" has going for it is Heifner's original conceit: Being a woman can feel like a lifetime performance -- certainly in Texas -- so it's only in front of the mirror, before the makeup and the outfits go on, that a woman has the space to reflect.

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Zipping through decades

The show opens with three tall vanities on a bare stage, home bases for three young women sporting '60s bouffant hair and short slips. As the play goes on, Anna Louizos' elegant set will take us from small-town Texas to Manhattan and back with a few smooth moves. As the story crosses nearly three decades, its time travel is signaled by the zip of a go-go boot or the twist of an up-do.