Cyndi Lauper and Jojo Levesque team up for ‘Working Girl’.

In the 1988 film Working Girl, an assistant secretly stays in her absent boss’s apartment, views her luxury alongside her best friend and tries on a $6,000 dress.

New musical version From the beloved film recreates this iconic scene with nine women on stage. They enter the glamorous residence with thick curly hair, off-the-shoulder padded jackets and white sneakers—the latter for commuting from the outer boroughs to Manhattan—and take turns admiring Chanel tweed suits, Versace silk robes and vintage Hermès scarves. Then they quickly change into gorgeous metallic gowns, and with the help of LED panels and lighting signals, the bedroom transforms into a fashion runway featuring glamorous secretaries, singing and dancing in a raucous, feminine atmosphere. And this gorgeous dress? Now it costs $7,000.

This moment sums up the approach to this adaptation, which makes its world premiere Tuesday at the La Jolla Playhouse: Take the most memorable parts of the film and turn up the volume on stage. The result: an unabashed celebration of women, theater and everything ’80s, led by the perfect musician who embodies it all: Cyndi Lauper.

“I want the audience to have fun — to laugh, cry, stand up and feel like they can do all that too,” Lauper said of the show, which has already been extended until December 7. “It’s not that you can go into your director’s closet and dress up, no! But that exciting feeling of living in the city in the ’80s, being creative and not holding back.”

A corporate Cinderella story, the 20th Century Fox comedy starred Melanie Griffith as Tess, a stubborn secretary at a Wall Street brokerage firm who learns that her boss, Katherine, has taken credit for her business proposal. When a skiing accident keeps Katherine out of the office, Tess pretends to be her boss to team up with Jack – an investment broker played by Harrison Ford – and pitch her idea to the higher-ups herself.

Directed by Mike Nichols, “Working Girl” was nominated for six Oscars, highlighting the performances of Griffith, Sigourney Weaver as the delicious Catherine, and Joan Cusack as Sean, Tess’s best friend. “Tacitly recognizing the barriers to the emergence of Cyns and Tesses and not compromising on them in direction and in [the] The script makes “Working Girl” one of the warmest films Nichols has ever touched. She praised The Times film critic Sheila Benson in her review.

Since the plot of Working Girl is confined to the 1980s – “If you tried to present yourself as a CEO today, people would Google you, and it would be over!” The musical fully embraces the aesthetics of the era in its costumes, choreography and, of course, its score, joked director Christopher Ashley. “Sonically, there was a lot of individualism at that time, with a lot of new sounds and genres,” recalled Lauber, a born-and-raised New Yorker who briefly worked as an office assistant before launching her career. (Loper’s agent even encouraged her to audition to play Tess in the film.)

With the launch of MTV, the ’80s were the first time we were there monitoring The music continued. “Like the first time we saw him.” Annie Lennox in the conference room in that suit with her fist on the tableHe looks right at us and says, “Sweet dreams are made of this.” Oh my God, that stopped you. It wasn’t just her androgynous image or her hair color that was cool, but it was also the fact that, perhaps for the first time, we got a real sense of her, because music videos were where the artists were in creative control. However, there were a lot of things going on at the time, and we wanted all of that in the show.

Lauper – which was his first theatrical appearance, “Kinky Boots” was a hit on Broadway in 2013. She’s won six Tony Awards, including her original score, and has been writing the “Working Girl” score for a decade. To create songs for the five-piece band that fully represented a variety of the era’s music — electronic, hip-hop, hair metal and more — Lauper brought in her “Time After Time” co-writer Rob Hyman of The Hooters, Cheryl James of the rap group Salt-N-Pepa and Sammy James Jr., who co-wrote the theme song for the film “School of Rock”. (Carly Simon’s original Oscar-winning song “Let the River Run” is not in the score.)

“Working Girl” is the latest hit comedy to attempt the jump from ’80s film to musical theater, following “9 to 5,” “Big,” “Beetlejuice,” “Footloose,” “Tootsie” and “Back to the Future.” Not all of these titles were successful, either critically or commercially.

“I think some musicals get involved in trying to recapture the exact image of the movie,” Ashley said. “We have the fortunate circumstance that Kevin Wade, the screenwriter of the film, passed this along to us and said, ‘Take what works and reproduce what you need.’”

The production stars Joanna “JoJo” Levesque plays Tess, who is “a little more rough around the edges” on stage, Levesque said. “We’re leaning into her working-class background because we’re really telling a story about class, and the haves and have-nots. And in this time we live in, it’s important to talk about.” (Yes, Tess still says her legendary line: “I have a mind for business and a desire to sin.”)

Likewise, Levesque’s co-star, Leslie Rodriguez Kretzer, quipped that Katherine has moments of funny, frenetic energy — a signature of Kretzer’s character. However, she remains as statuesque and unforgiving as Weaver was on screen. “This is my third film adaptation of a musical,” said Kretzer, who originated roles in the musicals “Legally Blonde” and “Beetlejuice.” Every time, “it’s about knowing how to make it different and still give the audience what they want.”

Although Tess and Catherine are rivals on the show, veteran stage actor Kretzer has become a mentor of sorts for Levesque, a pop star who has entered the theater scene with a 2023 stint in Broadway’s “Moulin Rouge!” He creates a role for the first time. In rehearsals, they help each other incorporate key vocal influences: Lennox, Pat Benatar, Roxette, Joan Jett, Patti Smith, Blondie, and Looper herself. On stage, the secretaries collectively echoed the same attitude of helping women, which might inspire any young woman watching.

“There is so much beauty in Cindy’s words about dreaming big and using hope as fuel,” said book author Teresa Rebeck. “In the 1980s, companies kept being bought up and split up, but our story celebrates that struggle for opportunity and coming together to build something new. It mattered then, and it matters now.”

Will all this appeal to working girls today? “It’s been my experience that a lot of kids love ’80s music,” Lauper said. “I’m always amazed when I see how many kids are in my audience.”