Thelma and Louise Musical Is Almost There at the Young Vic

The new stage musical of Thelma and Louise, now playing at the Young Vic, is "almost there," according to critic Ruth Leon, who praises its two leads while faulting director Trip Cullman for a pace she calls "lazily plodding."

Callie Khouri, who wrote the screenplay for the 1991 film, has adapted her own script for the musical. The story remains the same: two ordinary women, best friends in a small town in the American South, set out on a road trip to escape a dead-end waitress job and an uncaring husband — to have a weekend of fun without their overbearing men, just, as Leon puts it, "to feel the wind in their hair." Thelma, the married "good girl," dances too close with a stranger in a bar, and when he tries to rape her, Louise shoots him. Convinced they cannot explain "how he got dead," the two women flee, half a step ahead of the law and hardly a full step away from their men, who co-operate with the police in tracking them down.

Things go from bad to worse. Thelma has an ill-advised fling with a young adventurer who awakens her sexuality and then steals all their money, until the two women find themselves, in Leon's words, "on the brim of the Grand Canyon with nowhere left to run."

Leon's verdict that the show is "almost there" rests on a central pairing she finds exemplary. Amy Lennox and Rachel Tucker are "perfect as two nice women setting off on an adventure that unravels into a disaster they could never have anticipated." Both sing the country-pop score by Neko Case "as though its idiom was their usual way of speaking." The men, Leon notes, are important but peripheral to the story. Jordan Luke Gage is "no Brad Pitt" but "engaging enough" as JD, the young drifter the women meet on the road, and Trevor Dion Nicholas is "fine" as the only Black police officer in Arkansas, whose sympathy for the women he is pursuing is tempered by thoughts of his own two daughters.

The production gathers strength as it moves toward its inevitable conclusion. "As the evening unwinds to their inevitable capture, the production's strength increases and the show gets miles better," Leon writes. The decision to base the staging and choreography on line dancing has been "carefully thought through" by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, giving shape to the shifting scenes in bars and roadhouses; the supporting cast, Leon suggests, could well be the cowboys and local girls of any small Southern town.

But pace is the problem. Cullman has given the show a tempo Leon finds mismatched to material that demands "flash-bang movement as the 'girls' drive faster and faster across state lines." The first act, though "blessed with some good songs," drags. Only in the second half of the second act does urgency arrive, "as the net tightens on the two runaways and the inevitability of their end becomes too clear to miss."

Whether the production can tighten its first act may determine whether Khouri's story, already canonical on screen, earns a lasting second life in the musical theatre canon.