Because I’m so hooked on The Sting, director George Roy Hill’s seven-Oscars-winning 1973 flick—with its devilish David S. Ward script and its top-billed Paul Newman and Robert Redford (when has masculine pulchritude been on better celluloid display?)—I feel extremely proprietary about the damn thing.
In other words, when I walked into The Sting, the musical adaptation by Bob Martin (book), with songs by composer-lyricists Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis and additional music and lyrics by Harry Connick Jr., who also stars, I was very much in a Missouri “show me” state of mind.
They showed me, all right. So did director John Rando, who rarely makes a false step whenever he’s at work, and choreographer Warren Carlyle, whose steps—with an emphasis on taps—are consistently mesmerizing. (Carlyle is fresh off the Hello, Dolly! revival, a set of feathers in anyone’s cap).
All of the above showed me their mettle with the delightfully stylish and stylized transfer from screen to stage that should be transported from the Paper Mill Playhouse to the Great White Way as quickly as traffic allows. It’s certainly a long chalk better than the overrated Mean Girls, the totally illogical Frozen and the offensive Rocktopia that have been deemed Broadway-ready this season.
Is The Sting a paragon of perfection as it stands? Not quite, but more of that later—after the ways of its many pluses are counted. The place to start is with Martin’s wise adherence to screenwriter Ward’s plot, which the movie divides into chapters with wipe-away images (“The Sting” is the final one) and this version indicates with a showgirl holding up a placard while crossing the stage.
The deft tale? After smalltime Joliet, Illinois conman Johnny Hooker and pal Luther pull off a heist associated with bigtime gangster Doyle Lonnegan and Luther is killed, Johnny heads to Chicago. There he meets the suave, sometime unkempt Henry Gondorff, who’s between scams. Together the two—along with Gondorff’s sometime squeeze Billie—concoct an expansive poker game and betting parlor scheme to outwit Lonnegan. They do so by overcoming some neat obstacles with breath-taking skill.
Following those outlines, Martin throws in a few changes. The most notable is writing Hooker as an African-American. So is Luther, which means this Sting adds a meaningful layer of racist concerns, which are sometimes treated sometimes seriously and sometimes treated with rhythmic joy. Martin also turns Luther into an affable narrator, who doesn’t disappear after his death but returns more than once to chat up the audience and join the musical numbers.
It would be a mistake to get too far into this review without carrying on about the cast. Connick—sexy as hell in the 2006 revival of The Pajama Game and then unfairly dismissed in the 2012 On a Clear Day You Can See Forever revisit—proves he’s got the leading-man goods as Gondorff.
Not only that, Martin and pals have seen to it that, first-rate jazz man that Connick is, he sits down to the spinet and tickles the ivories as they should be tickled. He taps like a veteran hoofer, too.
Right up at his level are J. Harrison Ghee as Hooker, Kate Shindle as Billie, Kevyn Morrow as Luther, and Tom Hewitt as Lonnegan, along with Janet Dacal as Hooker love interest Loretta, Robert Wuhl as the Hooker-stalking Lt. Snyder, and Peter Benson as the bumbling Erie Kid. And don’t they all look swell on Beowulf Boritt’s nifty-shifty sets, in Paul Tazewell’s 1930s duds, and under Japhy Weideman’s shifting, nifty lights?
There may not be room in this enthusiastic review to say nearly enough about Rando’s direction and Carlyle’s choreography, both contributions overwhelmingly responsible for the smooth-as-silk-stockings way in which this Sting moves. The energetic chorus is forever on the glide, filling up the numbers with drilled enthusiasm and serving as cheerful guides from scene to scene.
From start to finish direct Rando and choreographer Carlyle are full of surprises, as is Martin (loved for The Drowsy Chaperone) with no end of prominent laugh lines or mere throwaways. Close listening is a requirement so that some of the cunning asides aren’t missed. Pay special attention to the first-act button. It’s a doozy.
Now several words about the words and music. Urinetown tunesmiths Kotis and Hollmann go toddlin’-town here with any number of songs—often traditional 32-bar entries—that hit the spot. The opening number, “You Can’t Trust Nobody” could be the best opening number since “Hello!” from The Book of Mormon. Not every ditty is a total winner, but it could be that the two are busy toning up the score for the Manhattan move they’re hoping for and deserve.
Although the program doesn’t specify which songs Connick has come up with, it’s probably a valid bet that whenever he plays and sings, he’s performing one of his concoctions. That could certainly apply to the rousing second-act kick-off song-and-dance called “This Ain’t No Song and Dance.”
The Sting begins with trombone player Dion Tucker alone at center stage intoning “The Entertainer,” the Scott Joplin rag that Marvin Hamlisch used so smartly—with other Joplin rags—in the marvelous film. Tucker’s appearance, which recurs, is an irresistible notion that’s only the first of what seem like hundreds in this irresistible musical.
The Sting opened on April 8, 2018, at the Paper Mill Playhouse and runs through April 29. Ticket and information: papermill.org
