"Working Girl" was a hit '80s movie starring Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver, and now it is being reimagined as a musical at La Jolla Playhouse.
Helping bring "Working Girl" to the Playhouse stage is pop-rock artist Cyndi Lauper, who rose to fame in the mid-1980s with her hit album "She’s So Unusual," which earned her a Grammy for Best New Artist in 1985. Lauper is a perfect choice for the project, not just because of her roots in '80s music but also because of her childhood love of Broadway musicals.
"When I was a kid, four or five, I was singing all my mother's Broadway albums. That was how I played," Lauper recalled. "I got to admit, I played 'The King and I' so many times that my grandmother took the record off from my little red record player. She didn't say a word — she just went upstairs with it. That was the last time I saw that record because I played and sang so much."
Lauper tackled her first movie-to-musical adaptation in 2012 with Harvey Fierstein to bring "Kinky Boots" to Broadway. Now she teams with book writer Theresa Rebeck and director Christopher Ashley to bring the story of working girl Tess to the musical stage.
The play will be Ashley's swan song at the Playhouse. After serving 18 seasons as artistic director, he will take on a new role at the Roundabout Theatre Company. Going out with a world premiere musical hits the right note.
"It feels so good," Ashley said. "I wish I could say that I had planned it carefully, but it was like the stars coming together that after 10 years of development, this show was ready at exactly this time. But I can't imagine a show I'd rather go out on."
Musicals can take a long time to reach completion. While Lauper and Ashley have been on board for a decade, author Rebeck only joined the team three years ago, and that's when Ashley said, "it really started to gel in beautiful new ways."
Unlike Lauper and Ashley, Rebeck did not grow up with Broadway musicals but rather on student matinees at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.
"I've really never worked in this space and so you do have to be invited in," Rebeck said. "When people want to break open your world and say, 'Do you want to try this?' I was grateful to be invited in. And Cyndi Lauper writing the music was really important to me. Cyndi's got a lot of lyrics that are so meaningful to me. There's a moment in one song where she has this person say, 'Big dreams come from little people,' and it just hits me every time because I think that's been true for me. I love hearing it articulated over and over and over again. And it's at the heart and soul of this, so I'm grateful to be here for sure."
The musical promises to deliver nostalgia and '80s music as well as a message that combines hope with the sobering reality that maybe we have not come as far as we would like.
"I think people should remember what it was like and compare it to what it's like now," Lauper said. "And you might find, yeah, maybe not so much has changed. But the one thing, what Theresa said, there was hope. As Harvey Milk said, 'People need hope. You got to give people hope.' So I'm excited because this, hopefully, will be inspiring and hopeful. You want to make people laugh and cry and stand up and be hopeful. I think that as long as we make a little happy pill for them, it's going to be good."
"Working Girl" will open Oct. 28 at the Playhouse's Mandell Weiss Theatre and has already been extended to Dec. 7. You can watch the Mike Nichols movie on Google Play or YouTube.
