In 1970s Philly, Deloris Van Cartier (‘like the diamond!’) is an up-and-coming lounge singer who performs in a nightclub run by her married gangster boyfriend, Curtis Shank (Jeremy Secomb). However, after Delores witnesses Shank and his goons murder a snitch, she must go into hiding until she can testify against him. The cops recommend stowing her away in the one place Shank would never suspect - a nunnery. Once there, Deloris meets a group of extremely unmelodic nuns and gets to work uniting their voices into something beautiful.
Right from the first strains of opener “Take Me to Heaven”, Sandra Marvin’s voice and star quality is truly excellent. Her characterization of Deloris, however, bordered on pantomime. We didn’t really see multiple sides to Deloris, just this one brassy diva energy that’s constantly played for laughs.
Marvin’s character was not the only one to suffer from being caricatured. The main villain’s three henchmen play it painfully, tediously stupid, one with an Alvin the Chipmunk voice to match. At times, I wished the production would let us just breathe. Sister Act is already a very camp, warmhearted, high energy musical, and this production also boasts inspired choreography and fun, striking costuming. It doesn’t need an extra icing of goofiness. Lesely Joseph’s Mother Superior offered a lovely respite, with a poised and nuanced performance as a fiercely protective and traditional nun.
At its heart Sister Act is about empathy: it’s a fish-out-of-water story and a tale of what you can learn from those who are very different from yourself. But we’re not really given much of a sense of the struggle to get the nuns to perform together melodically - one lesson with Deloris and they’re musical marvels.
This is partly because of the plot’s insistence that every character gets their moment in the sun - everyone from the three henchmen to an unconfident cop who dreams of the spotlight gets their own elaborate musical number. While this means the musical might work very well for school productions, here, it really pulled focus from Deloris and the nuns’ journeys.
It was also just a bit overlong. The way a comedian can stretch the tiniest anecdote into a three-minute story, Sister Act takes about 80-90 minutes of plot and stretches it into nearly three hours of showtime.
While we’re getting musical missteps out of the way, “When I Find My Baby”, Curtis Shank’s big number about what he’ll do when he finally finds Deloris, was a profoundly uneasy listen. Starting out as romantic crooning, the lyrics quickly descend into a fantasy of torture. The vocal performance was impressive, and it seemed as though the tonal dissonance was meant to be played for laughs, but there was nothing funny about hearing a man sing about all the ways he could violently murder his girlfriend. No, thank you.
Ultimately, the production had gorgeous costuming, choreography and vocals, but was let down by the over-the-top direction and runtime. Conventional at times, all the attempts at coarser humour felt a bit too forced to be truly funny. It left me with that feeling I got as a kid watching a movie I knew I was a little too grown to fully enjoy. That said, the sheer energy was infectious, and the show was peppered with delightful moments throughout. Whether it’s a hit or miss for you will depend on what you value most in a musical.