Pretty Woman the movie is beloved. Does it work as a musical?

MUSICAL THEATREPretty Woman: The Musical ★★★Regent Theatre, until September 13 Pretty Woman was always going to be hot property as far as movie-to-musical adaptations are concerned. Its gender and class politics might be icky – perhaps inevitable when you rework Cinderella into a yuppie fantasy that hinges on the so-called “hooker with a heart of gold” trope – but the 1990 film with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere remains one of the most bankable Hollywood romcoms of all time. The cha-ching is only fitting.

Although the story does make weak gestures towards pretending otherwise, money is the real love language of Pretty Woman. Its cultural influence relies at least as much on celebrating conspicuous consumption – the Rodeo Drive shopping scenes, the fabulous frocks and fast cars, and the opulent banquets with too many forks – as it does on the romantic chemistry of the leads. For fans of the movie, this musical adaptation has its finger pressed firmly on the nostalgia button in a way that should put bums on seats.

Almost all the iconic looks and scenes are resurrected, and short of bringing Roy Orbison back to life, you couldn’t ask for better music. Songs from Canadian songwriting duo Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance range from a base of ’80s-style soft rock ballads, with strong melodies and a romantic charge. While the score isn’t always doing enough dramatic work, it does unleash vocal pyrotechnics, and occasionally a rock concert vibe that compensates for some of the looser stage business.

Chemistry is integral to making the fairytale fly, and Samantha Jade and Ben Hall are both charismatic and well-matched vocally. They create intimacy, and even a few tasteful erotic scenes that don’t look silly, even if they’re a bit hamstrung in replicating the dynamic from the film. Jade gives a pocket-rocket performance of the Julia Roberts role; Hall cops most of the show’s cringe moments, suddenly bursting into song in the Richard Gere part – an uneven performance, though, to be fair, Jade’s extroverted naif is easier to reconcile with the artifice of musical theatre than an introverted male lead.

The supporting cast includes a larger-than-life comic contribution from Michelle Brasier as Vivian’s wisecracking bestie Kit, and a versatile one from Tim Omaji as a homeless man and a classy hotel manager. Douglas Hansell has the unenviable task of playing a nasty corporate lawyer – a character responsible for a troubling late plot point involving attempted sexual assault. It’s a reminder that gender politics have changed since Pretty Woman first appeared, though that isn’t, in the end, the show’s chief stumbling block.

That comes from various aspects of the craft not being in service to one another, from the sense of a show that doesn’t wield musical and dramatic art to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Pretty Woman has entertaining sequences, some memorable music, and fans of the movie should enjoy the nostalgia hit. Yet it does feel overstretched as a full-length musical – and could have been trimmed into a play with songs or performed as a staged concert without losing much.

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead THEATREMasterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity ★★★Theatre Works, until August 1 Art and war collide in Heather McDonald’s Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. It’s a volatile three-hander with absurdist echoes (and the only play I know of, apart from Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, that calls for a rhino onstage), set within a bombed-out museum in a world that’s been at war for 100 years. The ruined cultural institution has been transformed into an ad hoc prison, where art restorer Layla (Jane Montgomery-Griffiths) is held by a soldier, Mitra (Kate Cole), and attended to by an unobtrusive nurse, Nadia (Laila Thaker).

In a grim irony, the nurse isn’t there to ensure caregiving, but to render torture invisible. In fact, she may not be a nurse at all, though that thread will be revealed only after the desperate clash between soldier and prisoner reaches flashpoint. Mitra, you see, has been tasked by her superiors with extracting Layla’s aid to restore famous paintings.

Layla refuses point-blank to assist: her help would only be used as propaganda for the enemy. When frustration spirals into rage, and a sudden act of violence, the three women find themselves in a vicious struggle in which the value of art, and even human survival, is called into question. Director Nadia Tass made her name in Australian cinema with films such as Malcolm and The Big Steal.

She’s also an accomplished theatre director, and here corrals a strong cast in a work that veers between traumatised conflict, absurd humour, flashes of shared humanity, and more philosophical terrain. Montgomery-Griffiths and Cole are a little typecast. The former has a history of playing strong, academic women up against it (notably her tour de force as a dying literature professor in Wit); the latter pulled off n