Joseph Howard's movie script was a more subtle exchange of ideas, that there was a need for both the religious and the secular, each revitalizing the other. The singer learned about self-sacrifice and gained respect for the moral strong and fervently faithful sisters and the nuns became more in touch with the current culture. Alan Menken's music has a steady, driving beat although Glenn Slater's lyrics don't particularly inspire.
The book by Cheri Steinkellner and Bill Steinkellner provide us with nun archtypes. There's the tough cookie older nun, Sister Mary Lazarus (Audrie Neenan) and and the overweight, happy nun (Amy K. Murray). We also have the indecisive ingenue Sister Mary Robert (Beth Malone) who declares in her solo "Life I Never Led" that "I won't go on playing dead." This hardly shows respect for a chosen way of life. This isn't The Sound of Music. Here the nuns saw the Virgin Mary in cereal, wanted to look slim and trim in black or were afraid to be part of the real world ("How I got the Calling").
Likewise, in this musical, the conflict is between the oppressive Mother Superior (Elizabeth Ward Land) and the hip Cartier who helps everyone express themselves. Somehow, we are to believe that every girl really needs a pair of purple platform boots, even though disco is dead and they look like something a pole dancer would be wearing. Some of the comedy is at the incongruity of religious sisters getting into rock-n-roll. This is a musical production that goes for flash, the black and the white and the obvious laughs.
Garry Lennon has fun with Shank's wardrobe, which couldn't be brighter or more flamboyant. White has more costume changes than Lewis and he's quite the peacock. For a musical supposedly about nuns, it's ironic that the best musical numbers belong to the men. As the high school geek that Cartier remembers as "Sweaty Eddie," Jennings' "I could Be that Guy" has a wistfulness of a hero that hasn't overcome his nerdy image and its very subtleness seems incongruous with the two-dimensional feel of the show and hints at how much better this show could be.
Shank's three henchman (Melvin Abston, Danny Stiles and Dan Domenech) shine in their number "Lady in the Long Black Dress" although how many gangs have a white guy, a black guy and a Latino? Is that a nod to Tarantino (a black boss with a black and an Italian henchman) or multi-culturalism or an attempt to hit all the demographics? Was Philadelphia in some kind of a time warp that you could have 1970s-type music with a little rap?
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