Jerry Lewis’s 1963 The Nutty Professor, a farcical take on Jekyll & Hyde set in and around a college campus, is widely considered (from the star on down) his masterwork. It possesses a satiric bite that even now sets the film apart, not just from Lewis’s oeuvre but from most Hollywood comedies up to that time.
The tuner version, now trying out at Maine’s Ogunquit Playhouse, boasts plenty of talent and fine dancing (JoAnn M Hunter choreographed). An amusingly garish palette suggests set designers Wilson Chin and Riw Rakkulchon, and costume designer Mara Blumenfeld, have spent many hours soaking up Paramount’s Technicolor releases of the ‘60s, Elvis’s as well as Lewis’s. The final score by the late Marvin Hamlisch contains his most appealing melodies since A Chorus Line, with Larry Hochman’s orchestrations sweeping us back to Nelson Riddle territory. And director Marc Bruni keeps it all popping along efficiently.
Nonetheless, the decision to tamp down the film’s audacity, apparently to court good vibrations and cater to 2022 morés, causes the musical to become less nutty than nice—which is one adjective that was rarely applied to Jerry Lewis, on or off the screen.
This project’s gestation was protracted even by modern musical standards. Lewis conceived of it as early as 2009, perhaps impressed by how The Producers served to revitalize Mel Brooks’ career in 2001 after a long slowdown. The work of Hamlisch and librettist-lyricist Rupert Holmes (Drood) premiered at the Nashville Rep in 2012, under Lewis’s direction and under wraps (reviews were discouraged, though word-of-mouth wasn’t bad). Since then, COVID and the deaths of Hamlisch and Lewis intervened. What hath the passage of time wrought?
The 1963 film’s conception is daring in both directions, Jekyll-ish and Hyde-wise. Geeky chemistry genius Julius Kelp is a surrealist’s dream, all herky-jerky arms and legs, with a mouth of buck teeth that looks like an untended graveyard and a strained voice which would later be adopted by The Simpsons’ beloved Professor Frink. Kelp’s also an unmitigated horndog, wont to fantasize comely student Stella Purdy (Stella Stevens) in a variety of seductive outfits. But though hardly lovable, he’s a teddy bear compared with his chemically-created alter ego, the loathsome Buddy Love: slicked-back hair, fakey tan, pinky ring, and an utter disregard for the feelings of everyone, especially the opposite sex. (In no way does he resemble Dean Martin, by the way, as was rumored; if anything, he’s probably Lewis’s own id run rampant.)
In the musical’s dual lead role, Dan De Luca is directed not to venture beyond his sweetspot of affability. This Julius is an introverted but clearly cuddle-worthy Sad Sack, his worst obstacle a wardrobe problem that the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy squad could fix pronto. Buddy/Mr. Hyde, meanwhile, has become a charming Rat Packer dripping with unforced cool and a just-slightly-outsized ego. Check out the viral YouTube clip from the 2008 movie Role Models, in which Paul Rudd (whom De Luca closely resembles) cruelly embarrasses a Starbucks barista. You’ll see more meanness in two minutes than the musical’s Buddy demonstrates in the show’s two-plus hours.
To put it simply, the distance between Julius and Buddy has been reduced to a mere set of behavioral issues, tics really, that each can easily work out. But is that what we crave in a Jekyll & Hyde story? Is that anyone’s idea of a recipe for hilarity, let alone suspense? Don’t get me wrong, De Luca is a terrific performer possessing all the chops a lead role demands, and he earns every laugh when suddenly switching voices and personalities mid-mambo. But there’s nothing at stake in his vacillations between nerd and hipster: no urgency and no threat.
The efforts to keep Julius/Buddy rated G—not even PG, but utterly family-friendly and paper-thin—influence the entire production. A student can’t date a teacher, so Stella Purdy becomes a newly-hired English professor who’s gaslighted into mere lecturing and cheerleader coaching, so as to free the male faculty for serious research. Nothing’s done with this, which leaves the vivacious and gifted Elena Ricardo on the sidelines of the plot, restricted to earnest ballads about taking control while there’s still time. Other welcome veterans, Jeff McCarthy and Klea Blackhurst, are saddled, respectively, with a stock villain of a dean who wants Julius fired for no particular reason, and his secretly lovestruck secretary Miss Lemon, who toys with gulping down Julius’s formula to climb out of her shell. The teens are all color-coded ciphers out of Bye Bye Birdie, bigoted and smug until Buddy gives them a sense of how to resist Cold War-era conformity.
The story gets wrapped up in a blanket of self-actualization. Julius didn’t need to become Buddy, he just needed to embrace Whom He Really Is. Miss Lemon shows up in flaming red and hot to trot, but she didn’t drink the potion after all; she just reached down and found her strength from within. So it’s our old friend “Be Your Authentic Self,” “Let Your Freak Flag Fly,” the very message purveyed by innumerable plays and movies over the last quarter century. (Honestly, at this point a musical that avowed “embrace your fake self; it’s a lot easier and you’ll really score” would be downright refreshing.)
It’s not that we don’t need positive self-messaging once in a while. And I concede that Julius’s shamefaced 11th-hour announcement comes right out of the movie, to wit: “You’ve got to like yourself. Just think about all the time you’re going to have to spend with you.” But unlike the libretto, the screenplay doesn’t believe a word of it, because Stella Stevens goes off with Jerry armed with two bottles of Julius’s formula and a wink to the camera. She knows damned well that a honeymoon without Buddy Love would be a big fat zero. The musical sees no need to echo its source’s anarchic spirit. It could be so much more than it is.
Musicals, the best of them anyway, used to be iconoclastic and even transgressive, offering cheeky reminders that we are complex, selfish creatures who often as not don’t behave. But with Sondheim the master gone, and show after show, like this scrubbed-down The Nutty Professor, betting all their chips on moral uplift, you have to wonder whether we’ve lost something we’re not likely to get back.
The Nutty Professor opened July 1, 2022 , at the Ogunquit Playhouse (Ogunquit, Maine) and runs through August 6. Tickets and information: ogunquitplayhouse.org
