Review: Girls' Night by touring company
by Hannah Bisewski
A booming, exuberant voice blasts a too-casual introduction, announcing what will be a romping performance and warning that more than a few theatre conventions will be broken over the course of the evening. Flashing lights in gaudy colors frame an elevated platform with a lone microphone, suggesting we’re in for a selection of glitzy show tunes. Given that all this is set in the Long Center’s cavernous Michael and Susan Dell Hall, one wonders how Girls’ Night will deliver the intimacy and interaction that the opening announcement promises.
Enter Sharon, a ghost, the mother of Candy Rose, whose engagement is the reason (or excuse) for the reunion at a karaoke bar of Sharon’s childhood posse. It’s girls’ night out – and then some.
The departed Sharon introduces in turn each of her four friends: high-strung Anita, party animal Carol, trophy wife Liza and tiresome Kate. The four meet up around a table at the karaoke bar. They exchange updates on their lives and it doesn’t take long for the cattiness to emerge. We hear a slew of deep, dark, and often shameless secrets, past and present, from the most intimate parts of their lives, their marriages and their children, past and present. All this, of course, is spliced together with disco hits from across the last few decades, including dynamic renditions of It’s Raining Men, I Will Survive, and Lady Marmalade.
Sharon’s ghostly presence can’t help but tag along on her friends’ night out. Energetic, bordering on hyperactive, Sharon spends most of her stage time expressing her own puerile opinions directly to the audience, sometimes engaging the more eager, involved spectators. Sometimes Sharon’s monologues are poignant; after all, her story is tragic. She gave birth to Candy Rose at the age of seventeen and died in a moped accident not two years later. Brief flashbacks in vignette-style provide additional depth to each character, for each has experienced and concealed her own tragedy.
The story has its bumps and rough patches. Sometimes the transition from personal tragedies such as unwanted pregnancies to the glitter of the musical numbers was jarring. In tandem with these revelations, the intensity of the dance party atmosphere builds and hits a crest in the finale’s We are Family, where the elegant Dell Hall essentially becomes a dance floor. The production does achieve the goal announced in that opening announcement: those in the audience -- almost entirely women -- are on their feet, singing their hearts out along with the women on stage.
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Girls' Night
by Louise Roche
touring company
