Legally Blonde: When Choreography becomes Jurisprudence

Theatre Calgary is staging the musical Legally Blonde at the Martha Cohen theatre from the 20th of May to the 15th of June. The theatrical depiction takes us through Elle Woods’ journey from being a fashion merchandise graduate to a law student, predicating her new legal career on being able to win back the respect and love of her Warner Huntington. His premise for him leaving her is that he is looking for someone more “serious”, someone who can help him forge connections in the world of law and politics. Elle, in a desperate attempt to win him back by gaining admission into Harvard law school, finds herself thrust headfirst into a legal culture (in this dramatization) that thrives on predatory competitiveness and hyper individualism. In a world of calculated gains, she is told by her mentor, professor Callahan, that warmth is a liability. As persuasive as this is, Elle does not succumb to it, she maintains her integrity and empathy, all the while winning the respect of her peers and falling in love with a teaching assistant (Emmett Forrest) who champions her insight and intellect. On the surface of it, this musical may seem like a superficial exploration of basic human themes. It is after all a popcorn musical that eschews the dark or liminal energy that animates serious theatre pieces but dismissing it on these grounds would be a mistake, a serious mistake. It would miss the irony of the play and the subversive way it critiques the culture it operates within. Elle’s bugbear is to be thought of as ‘stupid’ or ‘shallow, her interest in fashion and her sartorial choices – particularly her choice of loud colors – make her the butt of snide jokes and triggers elitist responses from her peers. As far as themes go, this play is rich, if one does not fall into the trap that Elle’s peers do, mistaking aesthetic flourishes for intellectual deficiency. In the vein of the feminist Martha Nussbaum, dramatic exhibitions no matter how seemingly simple can elicit complex ethical questions. Nussbaum argued that good drama and literature are genres of ethical philosophy.  Mainstream reviews around the staging of this play have described it as ‘silly’ and ‘fluffy’, I strongly disagree with this analysis because it entirely dismisses the critical framework that is embedded within the play.    

Elle’s elitist peers see the world through a set of social rules that act as exclusivist heuristic rules, in one fell swoop they categorize her as dumb or unambitious, exhibiting a form of regressive thinking that far outweighs any of Elle’s defects. Anyone with an interest in legal reasoning will have their favorite jurists; this play reminded me of the American Jurist Ronald Dworkin and his emphatic assertion that morality is the foundation of law. All the rules in the world cannot give life to the powerful and manifold texture of our social collective, such a public sphere must be sustained by the empathetic incisiveness of human interpretation; there is no rule book large enough to encapsulate our social complexity. This is, according to Dworkin, the role of moral reasoning, to understand the principles that rules and laws are predicated on, and to determine whether they are fair and equitable. After all, what is the utility of a rule if it does not speak to our collective integrity, if it does not uphold our fundamental rights and values? I do not remember if this case was mentioned in the play (there are a few mentioned) but the limitations of a rule-centric worldview are seen in the historical case of Riggs v Palmer, in short: can a family member legally receive an inheritance from someone they have murdered? Interestingly enough, one of the judges stated that yes, they could. The law is the law, there are punishments for murder, but none of them (at the time) extended to the court denying an individual their inheritance. Though this is true, at the time there was no written law that denied an individual this right. We know instinctively that there is something fundamentally wrong with this assertion, that the law cannot operate in isolation from ethics. Like Elle's peers, the dissenting judge in this case perceived the law as something, static, based only in 'what is written', never looking at the law outside of its formal expression. The majority of the court ruled against the perpetrator receiving an inheritance, applying a principles-based approach to prevent an unjust outcome. Legal interpretation, as Dworkin and Elle show us, is not an algorithmic process, relentlessly applying consistent logical and codified standards to complex human contexts, but is one that will always require moral integrity.

The elitism and intellectual snobbery of Elle’s peers, at the level of social judgement, is an example of rule-centric reasoning. They apply rigid social codes like they are legal rules or statutes, only able to interpret someone through the socialized categories that these codes have established. They are legal formalists because they are only able to look at the surface of things and cannot detect the complex pulsation of human life and ethics beneath it. Unlike Elle, they cannot interpret the law through human context and as a result cannot invite understanding through empathy. This is precisely what other reviews around this play miss, that it is in fact a veiled and trenchant critique of the law, subtly masked in choreography and hyper-femininity. This mask should not be thought of as something incidental to the deeper structure of the play, it is a deliberate aesthetic strategy. In many ways, it mirrors the complex and biased spaces that women have had to historically navigate, learning how to say what must be said even when it cannot be said outright.

Of course, the ethical nature of these rights and values will always remain contested, this is the price we pay for existing in a social sphere with human beings that have distinct conceptions of what the world should look like, but that very contestation is what ultimately makes moral reasoning invaluable. It is an ongoing effort to ensure that law does not only exist as a system of control and compliance, but that it reflects the moral inquiries of the body politic. Elle’s use of empathy to understand the needs of her peers and her client is what distinguishes her from the procedural formalism of her peers, they may not know it at the outset, but she is a jurist, precisely because she operates from a position of applying principles-based reasoning to the world around her. Extending this jurisprudential theme to the question of feminism also elicits interesting inquiry, especially when seen in the context of Elle being sexually propositioned by her mentor, professor Callahan. Feminist jurists make the powerful claim that any notion of rights or equity has to be grounded in the actual experiences of people advocating for them, in the case of women it is not enough to apply principles-based thinking if we are not willing to structurally address their existential and social concerns. Addressing these issues meaningfully cannot be predicated on the linear based logic of rule-centric paradigms, and this is what a distorted model of principles-based thinking would look like. Example, should there be a standard model, applicable to both men and women when it comes to having time off after the birth of a child? At one level, it seems fair to apply a consistent standard to both, but it is worth examining whether this obviates the existential lopsidedness that come from women disproportionately bearing the physical, emotional, and social weight of childbirth and early caregiving. In other words, a principles-based thinking that operates in a state of abstraction from gendered and embodied reality is in fact not principle based at all, it is just as culpable as the rule-centric worldview that it seemingly seeks to operate against. Besides the tacit juristic themes in the play, there are also questions about how human suffering can be constructively processed.

There are many plays out there that throw us into the deepest abyss of human misery and suffering, they show us the dark underbelly of grief and loss. That sort of work is important and exhibits to us how utterly destructive human emotion can be, even something as uplifting as love can turn into a devastating collection of neurotic machinations, sapping its subjects of the very qualities it seeks to infuse them with. Unrequited desires always sit on the threshold between aspiration and annihilation, it can push us to grow or chase something greater, or, it can hurtle us into dark spaces that are replete with all sorts of death-drives and voracious compulsions. Elle chooses the former - and in a culture that now abounds with modern narratives that fetishize what Erich Fromm (German Psychoanalyst) termed the necrophiliac social impulse - seeking control over connection, emptying others of their needs to nourish one's own - her choice to grow is, both, refreshing and liberating. As alluring as the characters of Hamlet and Lady Macbeth are, they are radioactive - corrosive to the people around them- and the last sort of people we would ever want to have in our lives. By contrast, the vital sanity of Elle, Pauline and Emmett doesn't seek vengeance or melodrama in their suffering; their steadiness is nothing less than radical.

There is something very important about the emotional maturity and poise that Elle exhibits, she may not possess the dark magnetism and tortured aura of Dostoevsky’s character Rodion Raskolnikov (also a law student), but possesses quiet and firm conviction, and she does it in a way that suggests deep grounding in accepting who she is and who she wants to become. The pull and push between both of these forces can drive many intelligent people into the ground, eliciting behaviors that range from self-sabotage to outright inter-personal devastation. In the case of Raskolnikov, he finds his redemption, but it comes after a great deal of crime and eventual punishment.

Elle does not use her intelligence as a blunt weapon for the convoluted justification of immoral behavior, it always remains grounded in ethical purpose. She is also exemplary in that she does not shun her femininity to adapt to legal culture, and I would argue that this is the basis of her ethical integrity and is certainly a clarion call, at the historical junction that we are at, to feminize the law. I have mentioned it in one of my other reviews, but a theorist of great import here is Carol Gilligan. To her, women are grounded to social reality through their bodies and unlike men do not hold up its contradictions in a state of abstraction from important ethical questions. Men, at times, will theorize justice from a distance (there are benefits to this, but also many disadvantages) but women will feel it at the site of the wound. This acute sense of the woundedness that the law should seek to address is what I mean by feminizing the law. There is a silent strength to Elle, underneath the charm and the glitter, there is real substance, she is someone who engages with the suffering of life without giving in to its catastrophic seductions. I can see why Legally Blonde has resonated with so many people, we do not always want someone who brings tragic destructiveness to our lives, characters who dilate their suffering and ambition to insufferable heights. Sometimes, we want people like Elle, people who can be a lighthouse in a wild sea and can exude indefatigable optimism.

Like all archetypes though, she has her limitations. She is a product of the first world; global south feminists may see this depiction as a very bourgeois and western-centric depiction of the feminist struggle. A friend of mine who went to see this production said that true inclusion, on stage, would have had a character who wore a hijab (veil for hair that Muslim women wear) as well. Femininity as she explained to me is riotous in its diversity and is certainly not monolithic, for example - there are hijab-wearing women who play in death metal bands and are ballet artists. She felt that there may be a need to start incorporating those cultural expressions on the stage as well. Other feedback I heard was that Elle's relentless optimism is a thoroughly masculine emotion, one that skips over the emotional profundity of the feminine experience, and that it is not tethered to the sway of contradictions that constitute the feminine experience. Seen through this critique, the play operates as a socio-political trope, a feel good accessory (like one of Elle's designer bags) that that co-opts feminism and primes women for professional enclaves that are based on hyper-optimistic and utilitarian forms of social reasoning. These are powerful critiques and I have encouraged my friend to put that down in blog form (I will send a link if she decides to post something on it) because it is very insightful. That being said, I do not think that this insight undercuts the ethical force of Elle’s story, but what it does show us is that feminist imagination, like legal reasoning, will need to continually adapt itself to the complex world it operates in.

There are no easy answers here, nor should there be. The theatre is not always designed to give us easy answers, there is always an ambiguous remainder, the feeling that we have left the theatre with more questions than answers. This is usually a good thing.   

To the play – I was very skeptical of going to see this production, I’ll admit, I have had a rough stretch seeing some professional productions in the last six months and was on the cusp of throwing in the towel and making it a point of only paying to see amateur productions. Prior to seeing this play, I bought tickets to a few professional productions but ended up passing them at the last minute, preferring the comfort of routine instead of sitting through performances that I have increasingly come to expect as sterile and unimaginative. I freely own and accept this bias, because this is the foundational bias of a paying member of the audience. The audience are not paid to issue words of soft comfort and empty applause to a production house, nor are they expected to walk the tightrope of diplomacy. If the product is stale, they will bail.

That being said I am glad I went to see this play, it is a powerhouse of a production. Taking a play that is brimming with musical ebullience and infusing it with something of deeper significance is a deep testament to the hard work of the director and the production team. Synthesizing popular entertainment with gravitas is notoriously difficult, it requires a great deal of thematic mapping and contemplation. This can be done in many ways, through textual deconstruction of the script or through the somatic deconstruction of dance and song. The excellence of this play lies in how it uses the body as a site for radical deconstruction, eschewing from over coding the play with theoretical abstractions and using the human body as a medium for the exploration of vulnerability and resistance, rendering movement as the language of critique. The direction and the choreography were excellent, infusing delicate nuance into over-the-top musical numbers. The play takes a while to hit the fourth gear, after the first 30 minutes I expected for the performance to quickly plateau, but I was wrong, so very wrong. The true brilliance of this production is that it builds the right energy and momentum during the first half of the play, and then like an avalanche hits you with quick scene changes and increasingly radiant vocal and acting performances.

The performative talent in this play is outstanding. Kelsey Verzotti as Elle was brilliant, constantly hitting higher performative registers as the play progressed. The play is over 2 hours long, but there is a lot of existential ground for it to cover. Kelsey takes us through Elle’s arc with conviction and presence. It is nothing less than magical for an audience to see an actor truly own their performance, to inhabit it with vivacity, restraint and a sense of lived dynamism. Kelsey does all of this and more, she takes us through the drama of her character without over-dramatizing it. Elle is bold and expressive in some ways, but she is also very understated and nuanced in other ways, and Kelsey captures this contradiction with professional and breath-taking finesse. Daniel Fong as Emmett was charming, playing the character with a wounded and vulnerable spirit but measured by excellent restraint, always giving us the impression that his character would not let his historical circumstances obstruct him from finding authenticity and love. The emotional synergy between Kelsey and Daniel was remarkable, their rendition of ‘Chip on your shoulder’ managed to pierce my polemical armor. I will admit, some reluctant tears were drawn on by the vulnerability they brought to that number, it is a performance I will remember for a while. Sarah Horsman as Brooke brought high octane energy and voltage to the stage, playing the character with precision. Kaden Brett as Warner Huntington played with efficiency, acting as an effective masculine foil to Emmett. John Ullyatt was very good as Professor Calahan, playing the character with the professional abruptness and candor of a legal professional, never giving into the temptation to over-playing him as a man who openly preys on vulnerability and weakness. It is of course true that the character does prey on vulnerability, but the threat is always more dangerous when it is indiscernible, this is usually how predators operate. This nuance is very important and vital, even in an over-the-top musical like this. This small yet highly critical detail evidences the depth of preparation in this production. Patricia Zentilli, playing Paulette, was effervescent and endearing, playing the character with maternal yet youthful energy. This is a truly beautiful character, because Paulette has seen some of life, and some of it has been dark, but she is able to rise above it and create a life of meaning for herself. One where she holds the space for, both, her own suffering and empathy for others. The character is an archetypal exhibition of how it is always possible to hold both, and how personal suffering does not need to result in diminished empathy, and in fact can galvanize a heightened awareness of its importance. Patricia turns Paulette into something memorable and palpable, a character that will resonate with you after you leave the theatre. It was an exceptional and sterling performance. Elle’s friends, also playing a Greek chorus that acted as a psychological echo chamber, played with manic but lovable energy, throwing everything they have into keeping the stage alive with purpose and energy. Having Elle’s friends act as a Greek chorus shows us that our friends never just define themselves through their material presence in our lives, but that they are also spectral. It is true that we are constantly holding cognitive auditions with the people we love, even if they are not there. Their absence, just as much as their presence, defines who we are. This is a poignant reminder of the trust that friendships are predicated on, that friendship is a shared psycho-social space through which we rehearse our doubts and our hopes, it is through our friends that we find the anchorage to be who it is we need to be. Friendship is a serious and beautiful undertaking, and one that the Greek chorus in this production has given me a deeper education on. Chelsea Woodward as Vivianne and Gunho Kwak as the UPS guy were excellent. The former efficiently depicts a character that transitions from stern apathy to empathy, and the latter brings comic excellence to the stage.

The quick moving and transient set design and changes were excellent, giving us enough detail to orient ourselves to Elle’s psycho-social world but also acting as a motif in exhibiting the rapid internal changes that she is experiencing. There is a harmonization of Elle’s inner and outer world with the set changes, a sort of kinetic scenography, it is fantastic work by Beyata Hackborn and the assistant stage managers. The musical numbers were exhilarating, beautifully orchestrated and very well coordinated, someone has better give Rachel Cameron, Joshua Reid and the musicians an award for their work in this play. It was top shelf stuff. The lighting design, Renee Brodee, was very good, pluming the stage with vibrant and warm colors, making it a point to reflect the existential optimism of the play with hues that reflect Elle’s positive temperament.  

The direction was fantastic, accepting the play for what it is but also allowing it to breathe with raw emotion and performative vulnerability.  Stephanie Graham brings this play alive through the visceral release of powerful somatic energy, the performers are alive and present because they are grounded in their bodies, they carry them with pride and acceptance. There is no self-consciousness, there is a radical abandon to movement, and this is why the performances are convincing. There is no disconnect between the body and the mind. There is something to be said for having people who are aware of movement, choreographers, taking up directorial roles, they are able to tap into the instinctive intelligence of the body, an intelligence that feels before it thinks. Maybe this is a paradigm shift that is needed, beyond just musicals, having choreographers venture into more directorial roles might release more performative potential than the classic dramaturgical approach that puts a premium on text over embodiment.      

The director stated in her notes that our world has taken on a dark visage, to this I think we would all agree, and there is no doubt that we are in the midst of a world saturated with uncertainty and complexity. The questions before us are new in some ways, but in other ways they are not. Our species has always found itself in historical moments that ‘didn’t make sense’. As important as the social and political questions of our age are, the psycho-social temperaments that we approach these questions through also matter, they matter quite deeply. Like Europe in the late 18th century, we are at a fork in the road. Will we adopt a form of social Wertherism, a term derived from Goethe’s book The Sorrows of Young Werther, a despairing wistfulness where wounded sensitivity collapses into profound disillusionment and despondent resignation. Or, like Elle, will we adopt a radical optimism, an ethical orientation that refuses to relinquish joy to the cynical and moribund pressures of our age. Will we dissolve, like Young Werther in Goethe’s book, under the weight of melancholic alienation or will we, like Elle, participate in the world until it makes sense - until we all feel heard?  

The Jury is out

Final Rating – 8/10