Since Some Like It Hot begins brash from its opening moments – a big-band intro to a sprawling nightclub dance caught in mid-debauch – I’ll kick off by brashly asserting that it’s a freakin’ joy, one of the most confident of Broadway musicals since… well, since Hairspray, with a score by the same gifted team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. Like Hairspray, the new show is filled top to bottom with skilled pros, many of whom deserve to become instant headliners with this appearance. None of them ever doubts their own ability to dazzle, and they all barrel on through to do just that. If you’re a sucker for fast-paced glamour executed in high style, this is the one for you.
Many on The Street, with memories of 1972’s grim Sugar and an even grimmer 2002 revision that toured under the original movie title, doubted that a successful musicalization of Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy classic was possible, let alone necessary. But where earlier attempts merely recycled the movie with new songs grafted on, what’s on display at the Shubert is a through-and-through makeover.
The original foundation remains: Two male musicians (Christian Borle and J. Harrison Ghee), witnesses to Chicago gang murders, hide out in an all-girl swing band on the road. But rethought characters, altered motivations and changed plot points mean that fans of the film will still be surprised along the way. More significantly, librettists Matthew López and Amber Ruffin are likely, I think, to sidestep the heat that Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire took, to name two recent guys-in-dresses tuners seen as clumsily handling the demands of contemporary sexual politics.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
On film, Jack Lemmon’s wickedly horny Jerry-turned-Daphne squirms in gowns and heels, while Tony Curtis’s Joe takes his Josephine getup in stride, discarding it only to take up a Cary Grant impersonation that will seduce the band’s lead singer, the inimitable Marilyn Monroe as sad, daft Sugar Kane. But leering Lotharios playing fast and loose with their dames, and gross laughs induced at the expense of transvestism, simply won’t pass muster in 2022. Neither will an alcoholic child-woman numbed by the search for someone to watch over her. Nuh-uh.
The solution, to the males’ problem at least, is deftly achieved by assigning both Lemmon’s oafishness and Curtis’s pushy narcissism to Borle’s Joe. The butt of jokes for being aged and unattractive, “Josephine” (that is, Joe the lech) will be made to learn that decency and good fellowship mean more in life than reckless ambition. Meanwhile, Ghee’s Jerry becomes the down-to-earth, contemplative one – surprisingly comfortable in ever more elaborate gowns, eventually accepting the inner female he’s possessed all along. “I feel like I fit in,” Jerry muses. “These girls get me.”
None of this revision comes across as self-consciously “woke” (hate that term). It simply is what it is: human and touching and real, particularly in the hands of such fine performers. Borle has been a character-man VIP in many lesser shows for ages; you can sense his appetite for taking center stage, and he makes the most of it. And Ghee is simply amazing, droll and understated yet poignant as well. Our stars are made to be talented dancers, so “The Tip Tap Twins” get to sparkle away from the bandstand, becoming “The Tip Tap Trio” when Sugar (Adrianna Hicks) reveals a pair of happy feet as well.
Speaking of whom, the authors have said this revamped heroine is meant to evoke the likes of Lena Horne and Billie Holiday, Black superstars struggling to make it in a largely segregated era. Sounds good on paper, but little of it shows up on stage; the legendary Monroe vulnerability is replaced by conventional musical comedy spunk. Sugar feels less essential, somehow, in this retelling.
Fortunately, Hicks gets the heft she merits in the score if not the book. Failed romances with jazz musicians are mourned in the moody “A Darker Shade of Blue,” and a little girl’s dreams of Hollywood fame animate perhaps the show’s best number, “At the Old Majestic Nickel Matinee.” If Shaiman and Wittman’s work impresses as less varied than Hairspray’s, it could be because there’s less period pastiche to lean into. But their lyrics (especially in list songs like “You Can’t Have Me”) sparkle with rhyme, and Shaiman’s melodies are catchy as ever. If you can get the title tune out of your head after a couple of choruses, you’re better than me.
The comedy is in equally good hands with accomplished writer/improviser Ruffin, plus López, who had already navigated the drag-show world in The Legend of Georgia McBride. (The brilliant The Inheritance wasn’t a lot of laughs, so who knew he had such an acute funny bone?) Both know how to layer comedy scenes for impact. Borle and Funny or Die doyen Joe Farrell get explicit program credit for “additional material,” which I take to mean jokes, and while many land, even those that don’t are sold with gusto.
For instance, scatting champeen NaTasha Yvette Williams’s doesn’t have notably hilarious lines as Sweet Sue, long-suffering leader of the Society Syncopators. But she plants her feet apart with Eve Arden-ish sidelong glances, and every aside is received with an explosion of laughter. Both Williams, and Kevin Del Aguila as an ebullient, rubberlegged Osgood Fielding (Daphne’s super-wealthy inamorato), give the kind of performances that make you cheer every appearance, wonder where they’ve been all your life, and look forward eagerly to the next time you see them. They’re that good.
The hard-working ensemble races through Casey Nicholaw’s propulsive staging and choreography, culminating in a glorious hotel corridor chase, with doors on casters, that must have been a bear to stage. And the physical production is wholly high-gloss, from Gregg Barnes’s extravagantly colorful costumes to Scott Pask’s towering sets that out-Deco Art Deco, under Natasha Katz’s typically evocative lighting. Characters make occasional reference to the collapsed U.S. economy, though it all looks like the Roaring 20s and there’s not an apple seller in sight. Ah, who cares. In this Depression was I depressed? Nowhere near.
Some Like It Hot opened December 11, 2022, at the Shubert Theatre. Tickets and information: somelikeithotmusical.com
