How would you set about defining what life was like in 1980? Well, it was the year Pac-Man came out, Moscow hosted the Summer Olympics and the world wanted to find out who shot JR. You couldn’t miss off the list, either, that unlikely end of year movie sensation 9 to 5. Dolly Parton’s revenge comedy about three harassed female office-workers who hold their loathsome male boss hostage, humiliating him and transforming their work-place, arguably marked a significant cultural moment in office and gender politics; a warm-hearted feminist rallying-cry for a pink-collar revolution.
It cost $10m to make, took over $100m at the box office, sent the title-song, that wry, upbeat anthem about the daily grind, to the top of the US charts and propelled ‘the queen of country’ (starring alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin) into the mainstream. “I remember going to a movie theatre on opening weekend in December,” the film’s writer Patricia Resnick recalls in the programme to this stage-musical spin-off. “We saw a small line from the box-office to the end of the block but when we turned the corner, the line actually went on for blocks and blocks!” They had captured the zeitgeist…
And perhaps this colourful, feelgood – but also flimsy and slight – show has done that for Parton and Resnick again. Firstly, owing to the basic need for escapist froth, as alarm-bells ring politically. More saliently, though set firmly in the Eighties, it chimes with the #metoo moment. Yet the evening doesn’t take itself too seriously – it looks back to a time when chauvinistic dinosaurs roamed the corporate land but doesn’t labour the implied point that they’re not yet all extinct.
