The Cher Show (NYC) NYC Reviews and Tickets

"Except for the dozens of eye-popping outfits Mr. Mackie gorgeously recreates for the occasion, it’s all gesture, no craft: dramatically threadbare and surprisingly unrevealing...You can’t distinguish scenes meant to borrow comedy-hour elements from those meant to be taken at face value... It wastes so much time hammering its biographical bullet points and tunestack into place...that it never seems to notice the unintelligible result...At least the musical numbers are gleefully staged."
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"The show whirls through six decades at a dizzying pace that disguises, up to a point, that it doesn’t have much to stand on...Cher’s actual hits can’t support that task: They are likeable but skimpy pop ditties. Elice’s script responds to this challenge by skipping past most of them quickly...Like Cher herself, the musical has the virtue of never seeming to take itself too seriously: It’s a delivery system for fabulousness, right up to its 'Mamma Mia!'–like finale, and as such it succeeds."
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"It’s such a garish, obvious pastiche, such an unabashedly soulless explosion of wigs and trite memoir wisdom, that somewhere in the midst of its overinflated two and a half hours—probably during one of its dips into stodgy, life-lesson-y sentiment between showstoppers—you start to wonder: Is this gusher of shamelessness the only thing that could have happened here?...'Cher’s' triple threat strategy feels a bit cribbed...It’s the show’s blithely formulaic nature that drags things down."
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"May well be the glitziest, campiest musical ever to hit Broadway—the budget line for Bob Mackie’s costumes alone must surely have been big enough to send a another rocket to Mars—but one that is devoid of cleverness, much less wit...Stephanie J. Block, Micaela Diamond and Teal Wicks impersonate Cher at different times in her life, and they all do it well, Ms. Block in particular...Beyond that, there’s not much more to be said for 'The Cher Show.'"
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"Might not disappoint anyone likely to applaud a Bob Mackie-designed Oscar gown, but neither does it do any boundary-pushing...The lack of creative ambition and innovation is dispiriting, especially when 'Jersey Boys,' 'Beautiful' and 'Lazarus' have already proven these things needn’t be dreadful...The songs are almost uniformly well-performed...So why does 'The Cher Show' feel as skimpy as a Mackie dress? Part of it, no doubt, are the cartoonish non-Cher performances."
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"For all the obvious flaws of 'The Cher Show,' it's an honest, self-deprecating effort, given the givens. Vastly different and greatly improved from its Chicago tryout, which was framed around a phony TV show about Cher, the final Broadway version of the show has Block's Cher striding to center stage and proceeding to tell Cher's story...The show still runs into systemic problems in the crucial heart of Act Two when Cher inconveniently turns to acting in straight plays and movies."
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"Despite an icon with attitude, an armful of pop tunes and a can-do cast, the script never quite finds a satisfying style — or a genuine heart — as a winning stage musical...What 'The Cher Show' rarely does is get real, despite the tell-it-like-it-is attitude of its subject. It only takes itself semi-seriously, keeping genuine emotion at arm’s length...The pleasures in the show come from individual performances...Keeping the show afloat are the strength of its combined Chers."
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"We get Cher at three distinct points in her evolution, cracking wise and offering cautionary advice, encouragement and consolation through her ups and downs. That quasi-interior dialogue is often quite affecting...Is the show good? Certainly not in the sense of traditional musical-theater craft. Would I see it again? Duh, already planning on it. Director Jason Moore's production, unashamedly embraces its abundance of trashy-flashy, tacky vintage-Vegas kitsch."
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