“Pretty Woman” provided the soundtrack to Matt Stocke’s senior year at Bishop Canevin High School. The 50-year-old Green Tree native remembered breaking up with a high school girlfriend and listening to Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love,” a song from the “Pretty Woman” soundtrack that you “couldn’t turn on the damn radio” in 1990 without catching, Stocke said.
More than three decades later, he is on tour with “Pretty Woman: The Musical” as Philip Stuckey, a role originated in the 1990 film by “Seinfeld” star Jason Alexander. The “Pretty Woman” tour is stopping by the Benedum Center this week, and Stocke is excited to make his triumphant return to Pittsburgh.
“Sustaining a career now for 27 years, I feel like I earned a career,” Stocke told the Post-Gazette. “Coming home now is more a sense of pride that I’ve been so fortunate to have made a career doing this. Now, I get to come and simply enjoy being in Pittsburgh and at the Benedum and just enjoying the hometown part of it.”
“Pretty Woman: The Musical” is the fourth Broadway tour to play the Benedum since October. Adam Pascal stars as Edward Lewis, the lonely lawyer played in the movie by Richard Gere who slowly falls in love with a prostitute he picks up on a whim. Olivia Valli, the granddaughter of Four Seasons crooner Frankie Valli, steps into the role of Vivian Ward that made Julia Roberts a household name.
The musical runs Tuesday through Sunday; tickets cost $33-$115 and are available at trustarts.org. The Benedum is still requiring that all patrons provide either a proof of vaccination or negative COVID-19 test along with their ticket and a current photo ID.
Stocke loved the “small-town suburban feel” of growing up in Green Tree. He began his college days at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Md., on a baseball scholarship before coming home to attend Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama. He lived with fellow CMU alumni Patrick Wilson and Christian Borle before graduating in 1995, and the training he received there has helped him find consistent work on Broadway since 1998 “with very few lags in between.”
“One of the things that has sustained my career is that every audition I’ve ever gone into, nobody is better educated than I am or has better training than I have,” Stocke said. “That’s a very confident thing to take into auditions with you. In a business that’s very subjective, that’s one thing I can always rely on. ... On that level, I can’t thank Carnegie Mellon enough.”
He’s not the only CMU alumnus involved with “Pretty Woman: The Musical”: The show is being produced by Paula Wagner, a Youngstown, Ohio, native and 1969 CMU graduate who is on the school’s board of trustees and is a professor for its master of entertainment industry management program. She also co-founded Cruise/Wagner Productions with Tom Cruise and has produced films like “Mission Impossible,” “War of the Worlds” and the Pittsburgh-filmed “Jack Reacher.”
She started acting at The Youngstown Playhouse when she was 13 and did a little theater work on Broadway before transitioning to the world of talent management with the Creative Artists Agency. She spent 13 years there before starting Cruise/Wagner Productions. Now, she’s back to producing theater, which she described as being “the kind of core of it all” in terms of her love for entertainment.
In addition to being a big fan of the original “Pretty Woman,” Wagner was close with director Garry Marshall, who died in 2016 at age 81. Marshall “was such a part of our world,” Wagner said, and she believes the stage adaptation does justice to this romantic comedy.
“I think it’s just the show people need to see right now,” she said. “In the cold of winter, it brings warmth and joy. If you loved the movie, I think you’ll love the show. I think that what we have done is present the essence of what Garry Marshall intended this to be.”
Having previously had roles in stage musical versions of “Titanic,” “The Full Monty” and “The Wedding Singer,” Stocke knows how to make a well-known film work for live theater. He relishes playing a “smiling assassin” like Stuckey who is all outward charm but is pretty vile deep down. There’s a scene in the movie in which Stuckey tries to assault Vivian that Stocke said has “been turned drastically” to show Vivian putting Stuckey in his place.
Stocke and Wagner said the production is carefully handling omicron. Wagner emphasized that everyone has been “really strictly adhering to protecting and preserving the safety of our cast, staff and the audience.”
For Stocke, “nothing gets taken for granted” — including this opportunity to perform at one of his hometown’s most prestigious theaters. Wagner echoed an iconic movie line from Vivian about her aspirations in life to explain why this show is the sort of balm everyone could use right now.
“If you’re going to see a movie or play or musical, once in a while you want to see something where everything works out well,” she said. “It’s uplifting, you feel good. Everybody needs a little fairy tale once in a while.”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and Twitter @jaxelburgh.
First Published: February 1, 2022, 11:00 a.m.
Updated: February 1, 2022, 11:06 a.m.
