“The Cher Show” is a lavish musical that tells the fabulous and occasionally fraught life story of the sensational single-named superstar actress, pop singer and fashion icon. You will undoubtedly learn things you never knew about Cher, but for many audience members the real question is “What will Cher be wearing?”
Happily, the show stars three different women playing Cher at different phases of her career, so none of her classic outfits goes unworn.
“The Cher Show” ran on Broadway from Dec. 2018 through August 2019. A national tour was announced for 2020 with Hartford as one of the stops on it. That Equity union tour never happens due to the COVID pandemic, but a non-Equity tour has picked up the slack. It started in November and is at The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts on March 5-10.
The musical boasts a book by Rick Elice, co-author of one of the best-written jukebox musicals ever, “Jersey Boys.” Elice’s non-jukebox shows include “The Addams Family” and “Peter and the Starcatcher.”
“The Cher Shows” producers were smart enough to make sure that besides a fascinating life story and several decades of hits from “I Got You Babe” to “Bang Bang,” “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves,” “Half Breed,” “If I Could Turn Back Time” and beyond, the show is also a fashion parade. Many of the outfits created expressly for Cher by the flashy designer Bob Mackie have been replicated for the show.
Mackie is even credited as the show’s costume designer. He’s also a key character in the musical, portrayed on the tour by Tyler Pirrung.
The tour has enlisted a costume coordinator, Janine Loesch, to maintain the glittery shimmering standards of the Cher wardrobe.
Loesch has worked for 16 years at the Gateway Playhouse on Long Island, which happened to stage one of the first post-Broadway regional productions of “The Cher Show” in 2022. “I assisted on that show and was recommended for this. It’s my first tour,” Loesch said, though she has since been part of a second show with the same producers, Big League Productions’ national tour of “Little Women,” whose 19th-century dresses and ballgowns are a far cry from the Vegas-glam frocks of “The Cher Show.”
“It’s such a massive show, a very large, costume-heavy, change-heavy show,” Loesch said. “It’s not like most musicals.”
The way Loesch tells it, the costumes practically become characters in the musical. “Each song has a moment where it’s not about the song propelling the story,” she said.
With three Chers (Morgan Scott, Catherine Ariale and Ella Perez) and nearly 20 other people in the cast, the show’s costumes number in the hundreds, and there are even more on the tour than there were on Broadway since cast members rather than stagehands now do the scene changes between acts and dress appropriately to do them.
Loesch doesn’t have to travel with “The Cher Show” but gets nightly reports from the tour’s team of two wardrobe supervisors, one of whom is also the head dresser. There have been no cast changes on the tour yet, Loesch said, “so everything still fits.” Mostly she hears about “small tears” in the outfits. She marvels at how well-constructed they are. Even the filmiest nearly non-existent garments have clever form-fitting support elements built in. “They are almost pieces of art. They are so well thought out,” she said.
Even the relatively straightforward sweaters and suits worn by the Mackie character are made of cashmere.
“They look simple, but knowing what they are, right next to Cher’s gorgeous beaded outfits, they’re special, too” Loesch said. The costumes really add to the story.”
The three Chers in “The Cher Show” are known as “Babe,” “Lady” and “Star,” covering the three key phases of her long career. The show only needs a single Sonny Bono, however, who interacts with all three Chers.
Bushnell Broadway series subscribers will recognize the actor playing Bono, Lorenzo Pugliese, as the star of the “The Spongebob Squarepants Musical” tour that played the venue in 2019. If you think that the scrappy undersea cartoon characters seem to have similarities with Cher’s husband, songwriter and TV variety show comedy partner, Pugliese sees it, too.
“Their names both begin with S. They’re both short. They both can be highly energetic and charismatic. And they have these high squeaky voices,” Pugliese said, adding that he watched hours of TV appearances and interviews of Bono to get the voice right. “I tried to mimic it as much as I could. Even though he’s high energy and an entertainer, he can also be soft-spoken and slur his words.”
Pugliese did further research by reading Bono’s 1991 autobiography “And the Beat Goes On.” The book was written after Bono began his political career as mayor of Palm Springs, just before he was elected a U.S. Representative for California and seven years before his death in a skiing accident in 1998.
“I came to respect him,” Pugliese said. “He would agree to do things before he knew how to do them, then figure them out on the spot. That’s a valuable skill, being comfortable not knowing how something will turn out.”
Sonny and Cher, whose relationship began with her being a muse for the pop songs he wrote, were married from 1964 to 1975. In the musical, “it starts off innocent with love and growth,” Pugliese said. “Then we see Sonny get carried away and lose sight of what’s important. There’s a power struggle.”
“The Cher Show” also dramatizes Cher’s whirlwind relationship with musician Gregg Allman.
Bono fanatics will be disappointed to learn that his solo hit “Laugh at Me” is not in “The Cher Show,” nor is anything from his unintentionally hilarious psychedelic solo album “Innervisions,” which included the cult classic “Pammy’s on a Bummer.” While the “Sonny & Cher Show” theme “The Beat Goes On” gets a big second act routine in the musical, Sonny’s not there to sing it and it becomes a showcase for the three Chers and the Mackie character instead.
“It’s all a little more focused on Cher,” Pugliese said in a convincing Bono-like deadpan.
“The Cher Show” plays March 5-10 at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. $36-$138. bushnell.org.
