‘Vanities’ is a mild musical entertainment celebrating female friendship

A mild ‘Vanities’ celebrates female friendship

NEW YORK — There doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason to turn “Vanities,” Jack Heifner’s sturdy little comedy of female friendship, into a musical.

Tracing the lives of three Texas women from their high school cheerleading days into middle age, the musical, which opened Thursday at off-Broadway’s Second Stage Theatre, makes for mild entertainment. It’s sweet-tempered and unsurprising but enlivened by a trio of tireless performers, Lauren Kennedy, Sarah Stiles and Anneliese van der Pol, who make the most of the added musical material.

Heifner has adapted his own play, which had a lengthy, three-year New York run in the late 1970s. He’s no dummy — most of the best lines occur when the characters don’t sing. Not that composer David Kirshenbaum’s score is bad. There are some nice riffs on girl-group music of the early ’60s and an homage to some of the more mellow sounds of a decade later.

Yet the songs primarily mark time, done in by lyrics that often settle for greeting-card sentimentality. You wait for the plot to kick back in and get these girls to grow up and face life.

There’s Mary, the group’s free spirit, particularly rambunctious when she cuts loose from college and takes off on a two-year journey to Europe. And that’s before she becomes the owner of an erotic art gallery in New York. Kennedy brings a worldly, hard-edged sensibility to the woman’s defiance.

Stiles plays squeaky, funny Joanne, the most conventional — and most audience-pleasing — of the three. The woman longs to be the perfect wife and mother. But blind devotion comes with a price, one that Joanne ends up paying. If the character is a bit too cartoonish to be true, Stiles manages to invest the role with a great deal of warmth, not to mention a country twang that is impossible to resist.

The most enigmatic member of this trio is Kathy, sensible and irritatingly well-organized. Yet after being ditched by her longtime boyfriend, she can’t get her life back on track. Well, at least not until the evening’s required uplifting finale. Van der Pol has a lovely voice, and she supplies a charming vulnerability.

Director Judith Ivey and Dan Knechtges, who’s credited with musical staging, smoothly move the show along over an intermissionless 100 minutes.

For a small show, “Vanities” has elaborate, colorful settings designed by Anna Louizos. Most prominent are the wooden clothes cabinets that swirl into place when the three ladies change hairstyles and costumes. The actresses don’t break stride as they slip into clothes (the work of designer Joseph G. Aulisi) that change them from teenagers to young adults to mature women. It’s the evening’s most striking transformation.