There are several chase scenes in Some Like It Hot, the top-heavy musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s 1959 film comedy. Multiple characters bustle across the stage, typically in tap shoes, hurtling up and down stairs and in and out of doors. But as the chase goes on, it becomes increasingly hazy what they’re running from or toward. As befits a show with at least two percussionists, the show rushes to the beat of multiple drums. And as the name of the in-show band, the Syncopated Sisters, suggests, Some Like It Hot often dances just out in front or a stroke or two behind.
Broadly, the outlines of the movie and musical overlap. Two Chicago musicians, Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in the original, Christian Borle and J Harrison Ghee here) witness a mob hit. They then go on the lam, in bobbed wigs and heels, disguising themselves as Josephine and Daphne, members of an all-female jazz combo, fronted by tipsy lead singer Sugar Kane (Adrianna Hicks, stranded in the Marilyn Monroe role). Joe falls for Sugar. A giddy millionaire lunges for Daphne. The mob is in pursuit. Somehow it all ends happily. In the film, when Daphne confesses her gender identity, the millionaire replies, cheerfully, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
