Hey, clothes don't make the musical

THEATER REVIEW /// ‘The Cher Show’Cher show mainly about the costumes

By The Acorn Staff | on December 15, 2023

By Cary [email protected]

When “Jersey Boys” came out in 2005, it ushered in a litany of jukebox musicals based on the careers of pop music icons. Some, like “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” succeeded, but most have not, relegated to the black hole of failed Broadway musicals.

“The Cher Show” falls into the latter category, a pallid, poorly written vehicle that couldn’t even come up with a memorable title for itself. The national tour recently completed a mercifully short three-day run Dec. 8-10 at the Kavli Theatre in Thousand Oaks.

Instead of presenting Cher as a testimonial for female resilience amid a world of dominating male opportunists, the production leaps from one episode in Cher’s musical career to the next, using trite dialogue, thinly drawn characters and adding no insight outside of what you might find in a supermarket tabloid.

“The Cher Show” copies another failed musical bio with an equally unimaginative title—“ Summer: The Donna Summer Musical”—by utilizing three actresses to represent three eras in Cher’s career: “Babe,” the teen background singer who becomes songwriter Sonny Bono’s singing partner during the 1960s; “Lady,” the glamorous, Bob Mackie-gowned star who is transformed into a sardonic icon on television’s “The Sonny and Cher Show” in the 1970s; and “Star,” as Cher becomes a diva, wins an Oscar and is turned into a caricature of herself through Mackie’s increasingly daring and outrageous costumes.

None of the three actresses who portray the various incarnations of Cher do more than exaggerate her vocal mannerisms, but the one who comes off best is Ella Perez as Babe, who exhibits a magnetism and sleek physicality that should allow her to break out in shows where she is not restricted to pretense. Catherine Ariale has some good moments as “Lady,” especially in the scenes concerning the “Sonny and Cher Show,” while Morgan Scott’s “Star” serves as the story’s narrator and has to don the more cumbersome Mackie creations.

In “The Cher Show,” Mackie himself becomes a character, played by Tyler Pirrung. Other men in Cher’s life are represented, too, including eccentric music producer Phil Spector (Kevin Michael Buckley), movie director Robert Altman (also played by Pirrung) and rock god Gregg Allman (Mike Bindeman), but these characters are broadly drawn and are of little substance.

Lorenzo Pugliese drew unintentional laughs when he made his first appearance as the 5-foot-5-inch Sonny Bono, a songwriter in Phil Spector’s hit-making machine of the early 1960s, but Pugliese grew into the part, despite having to speak clichéd lines like, “We’re gonna be like the British Invasion, only in reverse!”

“The Cher Show” missed an opportunity to make a statement about Cher’s ability to overcome the domination of men in her life by not dwelling on any other relationship other than her marriage to Bono. A major mistake writers make in creating biographically-based musicals is taking on too much of an artist’s history in a short two-hour show.

There is plenty of material in Cher’s personal and working relationship with Bono worthy of being fully developed in a musical but Rick Elice’s clunky book doesn’t permit it, and Bono disappears for much of the show’s second act. (If Elice had focused solely on Sonny and Cher’s relationship, he could have called the show “My Cher Lady” and done better with it.)

As with other jukebox musicals, the songs are given short shrift and few get more than cursory treatment. Some, like Bono’s “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” and “You Better Sit Down Kids,” are clumsily turned into autobiographical narratives.

Ultimately, “The Cher Show” is all about the multitude of costume changes the three Chers and the rest of the cast have to undergo and little else. As one character says in the script, “It’s all about the clothes.”