Despite familiar soundtrack, ‘Bodyguard’ is hard to fall for
The musical adaptation of “The Bodyguard” relies so heavily on Whitney Houston’s songs that its creators seemed to have forgotten how to tell a story.
The touring stage adaptation of the 1992 film — whose soundtrack is the best-selling of all time — is devoid of romance and personality, and the scenes between the two protagonists, pop star Rachel Marron and her bodyguard, Frank Farmer, fall flat.
There are semblances of yearning and even bloody thrills somewhere inside this production. But you don’t really feel much until the very end, when that final key change happens in “I Will Always Love You” and both the stage and our expectations begin to rise.
The confetti shoots out, the lights flash way too brightly in our eyes and the music, high in the upper registers, seems to say that we should all be feeling something other than empty.
The payoff of hearing Whitney Houston’s music live comes too little, too late. Why, one wonders, will she always love him? This man could have been a robot. The story about a singer and the bodyguard, hired to protect her from a stalker, falling in love isn’t very convincing. Nor are the creepy moments when the stalker brandishes his blade — the
gun-pointing, gunshots and low-fi film projection distract and sometimes disturb an audience here mainly to soak in a good pop ballad.
This is, alas, a show that wants to be a jukebox musical, a thriller and a romance all at once but ends up inconsistent and often awkward.
On Tuesday night, Houston native Jasmin Richardson played the leading role, not Deborah Cox (the Canadian-born R&B singer told Instagram followers she was sick and had to bow out for the night). Richardson normally plays Marron’s sister Nicki, and on opening night in Houston she took some time to find her voice in the starring role.
Her renditions of “I Will Always Love You” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” were energetic and on-key. As the show came to a close, a teary Richardson was legitimately moved by the warm hometown reception. You could hear those emotions in her singing.
The earlier part of the night was a colder affair. I could imagine a
performance featuring Cox being an act of tug of war, with Cox’s talent and the production’s flimsiness struggling against each other. But on a night without a star, “The Bodyguard” has little to offer beyond the familiarity of its story and songs.
The setup has a lot of potential. There’s a creepy killer on the loose, and the pop star he’s obsessed with and the bodyguard she hires to protect her are supposed to fall for each other. Too bad the show doesn’t give them any reason beyond a few lines of hackneyed dialogue.
“The Bodyguard” could have worked. There are musical versions of films like “American Psycho,” “Groundhog Day” and “Catch Me If You Can.” But it takes a lot of imagination to whip up a new entity that is both respectful of and distinct from its origins.
The best moments of “The Bodyguard” come from Karen Bruce’s choreography. There was unadulterated joy in Douglas Baldeo’s (who plays Rachel’s son Fletcher) dance moves, and the hunky backup dancers almost made the show as fun as “Magic Mike.”
As for the Whitney Houston diehards, those last 10 minutes just might be worth the ticket price. But they have a long, loveless production to suffer through.