First there was Legally Blonde. Then Mean Girls. Then The Devil Wears Prada. Then Clueless. Now comes the latest 20-year-old romcom to be brushed off and given the musical treatment: 50 First Dates. The 2004 film starring Drew Barrymore as a woman with short-term memory loss and Adam Sandler as the besotted man attempting to win her heart anew each day has been spliced with songs and adapted for stage, with its debut run on at The Other Palace theatre until 16 November.
There’s already an obvious discrepancy between this latest attempt at nostalgia-harvesting and its many predecessors. Namely, the fact there isn’t any. 50 First Dates, while considered a commercial success at the time, garnered none of the cult following or devotion inspired by, say Mean Girls or Clueless. People have not been quoting it affectionately for the past two decades or naming it as their go-to comfort watch. It’s not even the most beloved Barrymore-Sandler collaboration (The Wedding Singer, with its Eighties soundtrack, was already given a musical makeover way back in 2006). The film, therefore, feels like a bizarre choice that raises a question early on and fails to answer it: who is this for?
The production itself is pleasant enough; David Rossmer and Steve Rosen have done a decent job at adapting the story for the stage. Georgina Castle stars as a convincingly charming Lucy Whitmore, the kind, quirky art teacher whose only drawback is the anterograde amnesia she’s suffered since her car crash a year ago – a condition that means she is unable to make new memories and wakes every morning thinking it’s the same day. The character of Henry Roth, played by Josh St Clair, has been updated from a womanising marine veterinarian with a fear of commitment to a womanising travel blogger with a fear of commitment. His plans to launch his “Perfect Day” brand in Europe are scuppered when he meets Lucy and pursues their Groundhog Day-style romance. There are moments that are genuinely funny and supporting star Chad Saint Louis stands out, both vocally and comedically, as a waiter whose greatest ambition in life is to work at Epcot Walt Disney World Resort.
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Alas, there are no proper dance numbers as such, and the songs themselves, while perfectly inoffensive, have zero sticking power. After watching the Clueless musical, I was humming along to “Reasonable Doubts” and “Human Barbies” from KT Tunstall’s original score of earworms for the rest of the week. In contrast, the tracklist for 50 First Dates resembles musical Teflon, numbers like “Coffee, friends and Happy Endings” and “They’re Not You” sliding right out of my brain without a trace the moment they finished.
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Worse still, without Sandler’s signature bombastic charisma – that inimitable knack for balancing sweetness with gross-out humour – the character of Henry is shown up for what he is: kind of a creep. The whole “love story”, in fact, feels a bit icky when viewed through a modern lens. Here is a man who only wants a woman when she’s perpetually hard to get – a woman he has to convince, cajole and persuade to love him every day. Here is a man who can only commit once he has the ultimate get-out – at any point he could leave and Lucy would immediately forget he existed. Here is a man whose perfect woman is someone who cannot ever truly get to know him inside her daily 12 hours of memory banking. She’ll never bring up old grievances or bitter histories; the slate’s wiped clean every morning. The power dynamic makes for an incredibly imbalanced relationship.
All that is to say that behind the perky songs and cast of Lucy’s chirpy friends and family cheering on Henry in his attempts to woo, propose, marry and eventually impregnate her lies a question mark tainting this romcom’s entire premise: isn’t their whole “romance” morally dubious?
Thankfully, I’m not going to worry about it for too long. The whole experience was as instantly forgettable as a day in poor Lucy’s life.
