Dolly Parton doesn't appear onstage in "9 to 5: The Musical," based on the popular 1980 film in which the famous Tennessee songbird starred with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin and sang the signature anthem. She appears over the stage.
As "9 to 5″ opens and closes, Parton’s famous mug is beamed onto the face of a clock-shaped video screen. Thus, the vivacious composer who wrote the show's music and lyrics gets a brief digital cameo as the breezy narrator of the tale of three frustrated women who take revenge on their “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” of a boss.
And then there’s that other Dolly. Here, hometown girl Diana DeGarmo, the Season 3 “American Idol” runner-up, dons a blond wig and squeezes into the tight costumes of Texas bombshell Doralee Rhodes, the character created by Parton in the film. In this national tour of the 2009 Broadway effort, directed by Jeff Calhoun and presented by Theater of the Stars at the Fox Theatre through Sunday, the Snellville native dishes out plenty of delightful twang and charm, evincing a Dolly caricature that suckles the audience by virtue of her bubbly persona and big heart.
DeGarmo is in good company, surrounded by an ensemble of seasoned Broadway players, including Dee Hoty (in the Tomlin role of steely widow Violet Newstead), Mamie Parris (in Fonda's part of mousy divorcee Judy Bernly) and Joseph Mahowald as oily office dictator Franklin Hart Jr. Looking like a hybrid of Diane Keaton and Miss Jane Hathaway, Kristine Zbornik gets in a few good laughs as Roz Keith, the severely bobbed secretary who is head over platforms for Hart.
Though the musical has some soaring heartfelt moments (“I Just Might,” “Shine Like the Sun”) and captures the lonely pangs of single women everywhere, this Broadway clunker does little to advance the lightweight material of the original. Calhoun’s dances are often cluttered and muddled, Susan Stroman at a discount, and the pot-smoking sequence in which the women fantasize about how they’d like to torment Hart is terribly inert. (The book, by the way, is by Patricia Resnick.)
William Ivey Long’s costumes recall the polyester heyday of the ’70s. While the men sport mullets and feathered cuts, the three principals are coiffed to resemble Fonda, Tomlin and Parton. Set designer Kenneth Foy flies in lots of scenery to approximate the cavernous blandeur of office towers and the seedy opulence of Hart’s inner sanctum, at work and at home.
As a comic caper and lowbrow feminist manifesto, the film treatment of “9 to 5” has a place in the annals of cheesy late ’70s/early ’80s pop culture -- alongside the likes of Donna Summer, Barbra Streisand and other iconic faces who decorate this production's scrim. But as a Broadway musical, it feels as tired and dated as the enormous electric typewriters and tanklike Xerox machines that are constantly being wheeled in and out of the spectacle. Even the magical appearance of the effervescent Dolly can’t save it.
Theater review
“9 to 5: The Musical”
Grade: C
8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday; 2 p.m. Saturday; 1:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday. Through Sunday. $25-$70. Theater of the Stars, Fox Theatre, 660 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 1-800-982-2787, www.ticketmaster.com .
Bottom line: Destined for File 13.
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