The new musical Some Like It Hot opened this month at the Shubert Theatre, and the word is already out that it’s a huge hit.
I was lucky enough to score a ticket this week and I immediately succumbed to the barrage of toe-tapping, slap-sticking joy that flooded from the stage.
Some Like It Hot feels like a challenge accepted:
“Hey, can Broadway still Broadway?”
Broadway: “Hold my beer…”
Some Like it Hot is based on the Billy Wilder film from 1959 starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. The plot is ripe for comedy; Joe and Jerry who are musicians witness a mob hit and go on the lamb with an all-female orchestra – dressed as women.
Shenanigans ensue.
For this telling of the tale, Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin finessed the plot just so, presenting a mixed-race, gender fluid musical comedy without glossing over the realities of prejudice but also never sacrificing the effervescent pace necessary to make this sucker swing. Christian Borle and J. Harrison Ghee play the leading men in crisis – already facing the realities of their mix-race tap dancing duo, addressed gleefully in the number “You can’t have me (If you don’t have him.)”
Seemingly seconds later they witness a murder and during the hilarious “Vamp” they put on dresses, pack their bags and the comedy and eye-popping dancing don’t let up until intermission.
Of the many stories we like to tell ourselves about America, this is one of our favorites, and who knows maybe it’s mostly true. We revisit it often enough and the story doesn’t change much.
I’m talking about the Jazz Age…Prohibition. There’s bathtub gin and there’s gangsters and by God there is jazz. And where there is jazz, the Lord said, “let there be a horn section.” And when the heat gets too hot, you keep dancing and just like that, it’s tomorrow and there’s another show because what the hell else would anyone want anyway?
And so it went. Or so they say.
The show addresses how the marginalized characters in the show would have been treated in the 1920s with wit and heart – a utopia where everyone accepts each other, and everything works out just fine in the end, and that is still one of the best reasons to go to the theater.
When J. Harrison Ghee who plays Jerry/Daphne realizes he prefers to be a woman and decides to go on living as Daphne it seems a head smackingly obvious choice and works beautifully. The number when he explains his epiphany, “You Coulda Knocked Me Over with a Feather,” is one of the highlights of the second act.
The band travels west to Hollywood rather than south like in the film, because here the band leader is a black woman. When one of the girls asks why they don’t head south, “Look at me and ask that again,” is her weary response. When they make it to California, the women in the band – a tireless dance ensemble – want to slip across the border into Mexico for a night of tequila and bad decisions. The second act opens with the multi-layered “Let’s be Bad” as they all sneak off with their many agendas. In this case the “bad” is also the characters’ decisions to betray the people in their lives they care for – but like so often, being bad feels so good. Again, the show’s creators thankfully let the audience arrive at the irony of Americans sneaking over the border into Mexico without ever stopping to point it out.
The rubber-faced Christian Borle is at the top of his game as Joe/Josephine. Laughably ugly as a woman, he falls for Sugar, the band’s singer (the luminous Adrianna Hicks,) who will make you forget Marilyn Monroe before her name can even form in your mind.
The second act taps on the brakes just long enough for the characters to bare their souls and clean up their messes before the gangsters arrive and the jig is up. Cue the eleven o’clock number; an over-the-top five straight minutes of dancing, door slamming and bullet dodging. When it was finally over I wanted to run on stage to hand out towels and Gatorades.
I almost had to slam my hand in a car door to stop smiling as I left the theater and as the pull quotes plastered on the Shubert already attest, this is the kind of Broadway you forgot you missed. Some Like it Hot is going to be putting smiles on people’s faces for years to come.
