MUSICAL REVIEW: 9 TO 5
30JUN/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

TORONTO - Let’s see now — there’s the title (plus the catchy little title song) and a brief but memorable, albeit totally celluloid, appearance by everybody’s favourite country gal, Dolly Parton. Beyond that, there’s precious little in the touring stage version of 9 TO 5, currently featured on the Dancap playbill at the Toronto Centre for the Arts, to make you think of the hit 1980 movie that spawned it — never mind overshadow it.

The story is still there — a delicious little fantasy about three women who give their chauvinistic boss a healthy dose of comeuppance — but frankly, without the assistance of the late Colin Higgins who co-authored the movie’s screenplay, writer Patricia Resnick seems to be largely at sea in bringing her work to the stage. Instead of giving us something fresh and exciting, she is content in the main to rely on movie memories rather than her own ability as a storyteller to carry the tale.

And sadly, she gets scant help from Parton who wrote the music and lyrics for this stage version — a score that certainly capitalizes on the success of the title song she wrote for the movie but rarely equals it. While there’s a certain sweetness to Let Love Grow and a crowd-pleasing I Will Survive quality to Get Out and Stay Out, Parton only really hits her stride in Backwoods Barbie — and that, frankly, is not enough to make a soundtrack memorable, even with Dolly dropping by in a recorded pro- and epilogue to take up the slack.

Not that the three actresses cast as the hapless heroines of the tale — Dee Hoty as the widowed Violet, Mamie Parris as the divorced Judy and Diana DeGarmo as the pneumatically gifted Doralee — don’t give it their best shot. Hoty, in fact, proves to be a real trouper by bringing added value to her character, as does Parris, who in the end is simply undone by tragic underwriting. Even DeGarmo has some wonderful moments, although one can’t help but wish she’d content herself with simply channeling Parton instead of attempting to channel Parton channeling Shirley Temple. Together, they manage to bring a level of credibility to a problematic work and if, in the end, they don’t successfully manage to overshadow memories of Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Parton respectively, they at least manage to avoid unflattering comparisons.

But with lacklustre direction from Jeff Calhoun (sharing a credit for unimaginative choreography with Lisa Stevens), not to mention uninspired set design from Kenneth Foy, they face an uphill battle, as do the most seasoned of the supporting cast. While Wayne Schroder earns a bit of slack for stepping into the role of the creepy arch-villianous Franklin Hart Jr. to replace Joseph Mahowald, he simply can’t overcome his youth, adding a completely unnecessary aura of creepiness to an already distasteful role. And frankly, under Calhoun’s direction, Kristine Zbornik suffers much the same fate in the role of the romantically ill-fated office manager, Roz Keith, turning her character into more of an object of pity than of derision.

While Hoty, Parris and DeGarmo do their darnedest to make us root for the good guys, they are undone by a production where the bad guys seem more to be pitied than punished. So sadly, in the end, there seems to be very little difference between a sentence of 9 TO 5 and one of 15 to life — except that with a bit of luck, you might get out of the latter a little sooner with time off for good behaviour.