The Cher Show
Four decades of Cher in 2+ hours!!!
We went to The Cher Show this Friday, the 35 smash hit, 2 1/2 hours of unabashedly fabulous musical storytelling of six decades of the life and artistic journey (which so far includes two husbands, a Grammy, an Oscar, an Emmy, and oh-so-many Bob Mackie gowns) of one of the most iconic performers of any generation.
The Theater
The new production, featuring Bob Mackie’s dazzling original Tony Award-winning Broadway costumes, hit the road in November 2023, traveling to 57 markets across the USA. Playing at Boston’s Wang Theater (named for An)/Boch Center (named for Ernie) for this weekend only, of course RainyDayMagazine was going to be there on opening night!
The happiest line in the Theater District – all going to see Cher! WE LOVE YOU, CHER!!
In 1925, the theater, designed by Clarence Blackall, opened as the Metropolitan Theatre and was later renamed The Music Hall. In 1983, Dr. An Wang made a very large donation and it became the Wang Center. Between 1989 and 1992, almost $10 million was raised to refurbish the Theatre to its glory days of the 1920s.
The theater started with Vaudeville, and is completely over the top – just like Cher!
The Crowd
The audience was decidedly over 40, with a sprinkle of those in their 30s, but Boston absolutely turned out huge for The Cher Show. We, the children of the 70s, were definitely the majority.
Talk about love – they used all of the “Cher” logos she used in her career!
Personal Note: The Cher Show for DateNite is pretty hard to beat. Four decades of Cher compressed into 2.5 hours instantly transported the two of us back to high school!!!
“We few, we happy few, we two of 3,200 audience members…”
The Show
Just to be clear: I love Cher. LOVE HER.
And have since I was nine-ish and my parents let us stay up and watch The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.
This Irish-American on one side/Canadian Maritime provinces on the other bookworm of a girl from Quincy would sit absolutely mesmerized by this woman with the long gorgeous black hair and non-Northern European features. And the outfits. Ohhh my gawd the outfits: nothing—NOTHING—in my world looked like that. That’s what a grown-up lady could look like? Wow….
Morgan Scott as Star. Photo by Meredith Mashburn Photography (and looking exactly like Cher)
And the singing. I don’t remember any singing in my house (I think now that my mother, at least, was tone deaf), so watching a show that wasn’t The Lawrence Welk Show (my parents were ten years older than my friends’ parents) that had so many songs was just…life changing, actually, although I didn’t know that at the time.
Cher showed me that there was more to the world than the teeny-weeny section of it that I inhabited. And it thrilled me. There’s a whole wide world out there, most of which I don’t know anything about!
So natch, being a female person of a certain age (ahem) and a certain locality, when RDM got word that The Cher Show was playing at the Wang Theater (thank you, Mr. Wang, for everything), there wasn’t even a nano-second between “there’s a Cher show” and “OH MY GAWD YES!!!” (For those of you curious: a nanosecond is one BILLIONTH of a second).
The Cher Show did not disappoint. Not even for a picosecond (one trillionth of a second).
The Cher Show starts in the 1950’s, at the beginning of Cherilyn’s journey into Cher-ness, then moves into the shows with Sonny, and closes out in the 1990’s with her comeback and her Oscar for Moonstruck. And, of course, the costumes; personally I think she still wears the Oscar presenter outfit when she’s goes to the grocery store…
Ella Perez as Babe and Lorenzo Pugliese as Sonny. Lorenzo Pugliese as Sonny and Catherine Ariale as Lady. Photos by Meredith Mashburn Photography
There is so much to Cher’s life that three—THREE—actresses are needed to play her at different times of her life: Babe Cher, Lady Cher, and Star Cher. And in a nice “THIS is why theater is so magical,” all three Chers talk to each other on stage. Really lovely, kind of like the other selves that live in our heads, but on stage.
The Cher Show has it all: the highs, the lows, the songs, the outfits, the people (extra-super awesome kudos to fashion designer Bob Mackie, who pretty much gave us the fashion-Cher we know) (and also Mom).
Catherine Ariale as Lady, Morgan Scott as Star, Ella Perez as Babe. Photo by Meredith Mashburn Photography
Not a single person in the audience did not know ALL the songs the Chers sang. It was just a CLF (Cher Love Fest) from beginning to end.
The sets were great, the dancers were astounding, the singing/acting/being were all just…so…fantastically awesome.
Oh, what a ride. We highly, highly recommend seeing this. It’s in Boston for four more shows this weekend, and then it’s off to the next locale in its national tour. Go go go if you can! And the tickets are actually reasonable for this type and length of show!!
Leave a comment