Could The Cher Show possibly satisfy a superfan?
By Robrt L. Pela | Photo courtesy Meredith Mashburn Photography
The Cher Show is coming to the Mesa Arts Center, and I’ve been trying to talk myself into going.
I’m not embarrassed to admit that I’m a great, big, giant Cher fan, but I’ve never loved watching actors portray famous people. I’m still recovering from seeing Tovah Feldshuh play Kate Hepburn in some cruddy TV movie in the late ’70s.
I figured if I called Mary McCray, she’d say something that would make me want to go see a 22-year-old actor in a Cher wig and a Bob Mackie headdress sing “Half-Breed.” Mary writes about Cher as a feminist icon and an expression of the American ethos, mostly at a website called Cher Scholar, “an exercise in pondering aspects of Cher product and Cher’s influence on pop culture.”
McCray told me once that liking Cher was the first aesthetic decision she ever made.
“I was 4 or 5,” she said. “I liked Mr. Rogers, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ and Cher. She was the most sparkly thing I’d ever seen.”
When McCray and I talk Cher, we usually wind up in the weeds. I’ll phone her and ask why “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” was released with two different B-sides, and then she’ll want to know if I think it’s weird that Cher has a skin-care line or why Cher’s first husband, Sonny Bono, hired a guy who made dog food commercials to direct Cher in the movie Chastity.
That’s the other reason I’m worried about seeing The Cher Show. It tells the story of Cher for the masses, not for someone who cares about who chose the songs for Cher’s Backstage album in 1968 or whether her crème rinse infomercial was a misstep.
“I get it,” McCray told me. “You already know the story. And it’s always frustrating to see someone impersonate Cher. They never get the magic of it. It’s so hard to do that The Cher Show has three different actors
playing her!”
McCray went on to say that she’d seen the show on Broadway and really liked it. She thought Stephanie J. Block had been a pretty good Cher, and the production was colorful and fun. She mentioned that, for the London production of The Cher Show, they’d gone with colorblind casting, and one of the Chers was played by a Black woman.
But I didn’t hear any of that. Because the thought of three different people pretending to be Cher made my head hurt and my ears stop working, and I had to go lie down in a dark room with a cold rag on my forehead.
The Cher Show performs at the Mesa Arts Center March 28-30.
