I saw the show during the Philly engagement. It's absolutely terrible, and it would be more successful if they just threw out any pretense of putting on a musical and just did a Whitney Houston tribute concert. That's what the audience wants anyway--I attended on press night, and the audience didn't give a crap about anything happening on stage that wasn't a production number. Not that the show gives them much to care about. Cox's singing is sensational, but she's not an actress at all. Her work in the book scenes was pretty pathetic. Jasmin Richardson is indeed a find as Nikki and I bet she kills it when she goes on as Rachel. I'd like to see her talents represented in a better show.
It's a shame that people aren't smart enough to look at the fine print when they're buying tickets, because Cox has been sitting out Saturday matinees and Sunday evenings over the course of the entire tour. Her absences during the Philly engagement were announced weeks in advance. It's a shame that a lot of people cancelled their tickets, because Richardson is probably giving a better overall performance.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
