First Look at PRETTY WOMAN — Page 3

I only vaguely remember the film, and don't particularly care about the musical, but is it really that dated a story? Whatever you think of sex work, or of Vivian's attitude towards it, IIRC by the end of the film she's confident enough to stand by wanting a sexual relationship to operate on her own terms, not on the default terms of the man she likes, even if it means losing him. (Some might argue that she's always that way, but what she wants changes, reasonably, during the course of the film.) And (spoiler) the guys ends up respecting that and choosing to be with her on her terms. Maybe the ending is unrealistic, but having a 'too happy' ending for the female lead isn't anti-feminist as such. If the film came out today, there would be a backlash by horrible Red Piller men on the internet ranting "so now females think they can literally whore themselves out and still keep us on a string ugh".

I had no interest in this whatsoever, but this discussion sort of created some for me. The story is unrealistic as heck, but I guess the premise (in the end if not at the start when it was originally envisioned as a cautionary tale against drug use which sounds much more boring and preachy) is supposed to bring the fairy tale trope into the then modern 1990s to give it an interesting twist.

I understand people think this film and subject matter is problematic to musicalize and I am also skeptical of the changes by this team because I don't know if they really understand sex-worker positive feminism and how to make a story like this palatable to today's audiences, but let's be real, people would rather see Pretty Woman the Musical that's close to the movie than a musical version of Ken Russell's Whore.

This is what I'm thinking that they're going to do: they're probably going to wisen up and try to age up Barks and make Kazee look younger (Gere just read super old to me when I first saw the movie as a young child and Kazee doesn't have that problem here). They're probably going to make Barks proud to be a sex worker and mention something in passing about the dangers of the profession but not delve too much into it thinking that little bit will appease the critics (it won't). The the sexual assault scene in the movie would probably be played for laughs with Samantha Barks beating him up with the moves she learned in women's self-defense class or something. I imagined most of the movie's fans ignored the whole corporate takeover storyline and fast-forwarded to the balcony scene, so the musical, like all musicalizations of movies, will turn that into a big character turnaround with a huge number to accompany it because honestly, what other interesting thing did Kazee's character go through in the movie? It was only the chemistry between Gere and Roberts and Roberts' charisma that made those characters remotely interesting.

Updated On: 2/27/18 at 10:36 AM

Bottom line, this is produced solely to profit from the popularity of the film.

It's not like someone had a daring and highly relevant artistic vision for this. The real prostitution comes from money hungry producers hoping go make it big out of nostalgia.

If they did their research, they would know that it is the small indie films turn musicals that usually become hits. From Sister Act to Rocky; From Footlose to 9 to 5 and I can go on and on - audiences aren't that stupid and these adaptations become major flops.

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