You may have seen people in pink sweatshirts with Greek letters around campus this past week—that is because those people were involved in Hillel Theater Group’s production of Legally Blonde, which premiered on Thursday night in the Shapiro Campus Center Theater. The line to get into the theater snaked from its doors across the SCC Atrium a whole half hour before the play started. When audience members were settled into their seats, they were informed that it was a sold out show. It seemed half the campus had come out to see the fun, fashion-forward and feminist musical.

Legally Blonde was first a book, then a film, and now it’s a musical. It tells the story of Elle Woods (Sarah Brodsky ’15), a sorority girl who follows her ex-boyfriend Warner (Kaelan Lynch ’17) to Harvard Law School to win him back. However, when she gets there, she realizes her hidden potential with the law, and that Warner is a jerk. Elle transforms in the musical from pretty-in-pink sorority girl to navy blue legal mind. It is only at the end that she realizes she can be both feminine and smart, and that she doesn’t have to sacrifice any part of herself; she can be legally blonde.

The show featured a live orchestra from the back of the stage and two very simple sets, designed by Krishna Narayanan ’17. One set was the columns and roof of the sorority house; the other was the brick columns and roof of Harvard.

Most notable, though, were the costumes. The show had a 40-person cast, consisting mostly of women, and it seemed each of them had a costume change in almost every scene. There were the sorority costumes, the blue cheerleader costumes (my personal favorite), the Harvard student costumes, the workout/prison costumes and many more. Yael Jaffe ’18, who played a TV reporter, a law student, a shopper and a jurist, said in an interview with the Justice, “It’s wild, sweaty and disgusting, and so much fun because we’re all doing it together,” about all the costume changes. The show had an executive costume designer (Ana-Sofia Meneses ’16), a costume coordinator (Bethany Greenbaum ’16) and 11 costume designers.

The musical numbers were light and often funny, though many of the lines in the songs were repetitive. In most numbers the songs had a good portion of the cast participating in them, and still each number had its own choreography.

One has to give props to the music directors, Zoe Fong ’15 and Jake Hurwitz ’16, and choreographers Mikah Atkind ’16 and Lisa Petrie ’17, who had a huge cast to work with and still made the singing and dancing look awesome. One particularly impressive dance was to the song “Whip Into Shape.” It featured lead Brooke Wyndham (Isi Filipovic ’18) and six of her followers performing a workout video in which they combined dancing with jump roping.

In an interview with the Justice, director Alison Thvedt ’15 said the one thing she was worried about was everyone fitting on the stage for the numbers that included the entire cast. My personal favorite was the witty, hysterical, and entirely catchy “Gay or European” song. One song had the character Paulette (Scarlett Huck ’18), doing an Irish jig, and when she was asked in an interview with the Justice if she had had to learn it for the show, Huck said that she had actually taken five years of Irish step dance classes.

The leads in the show, though often overshadowed by their hoards of backup dancers, each added their own spark to the character. The actors were believable for the parts they had to play. I truly believed that Elle was super perky, Warner was a jerk, Paulette was spunky and Emmett (Nathan Schneider ’18), Elle’s love interest in the show, was adorable.

Thvedt said that she thought the main message of the show was “to celebrate Elle as a woman who doesn’t have to give up herself … and to celebrating sisterhood … and feminism all around.”

She also said though that some problems with the show were that “there was some slut shaming, which I tried to draw attention to … and that for a feminist show there are some really not-so-feminist lines, so it’s not a perfect musical.”

Thvedt said that there was an instance of fat-shaming in the show when Elle is criticized by her sorority sisters for eating Milky Ways after her break-up with Warner, so Thvedt added the line, “we’re a Snickers only sorority” to turn a problematic line into something comedic.

Additionally, Thvedt defied conforming to body stereotypes by casting Brodsky, and not casting someone with a Reese Witherspoon-type (the actress who plays Elle in the film) supermodel body. Brodsky looked beautiful up on that stage.

Legally Blonde was a fun and perky whirlwind of dancing and singing while still managing to have a meaningful message and a well deserved standing ovation from the audience.

—This article was edited on March 6 2015 to correct the spelling of Ana-Sofia Meneses' name.