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.”
As comedies go, the film very nearly is, which makes any adaptation a fraught proposition. This one, directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, has songs by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman and a book by Matthew López and Amber Ruffin (a later addition, once it was realized that a show that wrung a lot of its comedy from men dressing as women might want at least one female on the creative team). Happily, it wants its audience to have a fine night out and the production elements, like Scott Pask’s art deco fantasia of a set, Gregg Barnes’s glittering costumes, Natasha Katz’s pearlescent lights, are a celebration of Broadway glamour and excess. A handful of the performances – chiefly, Ghee’s Jerry and Daphne, Kevin Del Aguila’s dippy millionaire and Angie Schworer in a smaller role – serve razzle-dazzle on a silver-plated platter.
But the show itself feels noisily overwrought and incomplete, an attempt to bend the source material into shapes it doesn’t want to go. A lot of the songs sound like pastiches of other, better songs, like Let’s Be Bad, borrowed from Wittman and Shaiman’s Smash soundtrack and indebted to All That Jazz, or Ride Out the Storm, which wants to be Stormy Weather and isn’t. Some songs, like a couple of Hicks’s numbers, A Darker Shade of Blue and At the Old Majestic Nickel Matinee, shouldn’t be here at all.
In previews, complaints emerged, in the grimmer corners of the Broadway message boards, that the show was too woke for its own good. Wokeness merely refers to an awareness of systemic bias and injustice, past and present, which any revival or new adaptation should have. Here Lopez and Ruffin have written Jerry/Daphne, Sugar and the bandleader Sweet Sue as shrewd expansions of the original. But in wanting to treat the comedy of men in dresses with greater care and sensitivity – a terrific goal in and of itself – changes the meaning of Some Like It Hot itself. The original, in its sophistication and ambivalence, is a celebration of disguise, of the quick wits, silver tongues and wild cheek that let Joe and Jerry juggle their multiple fictions. Yet in this version (as in López’s earlier play The Legend of Georgia McBride), drag becomes a means to self-acceptance, a beribboned road to truth. It’s scrupulousness that’s feted here, not the scam. Here’s the millionaire’s response to Daphne this time: “You’re perfect.”
In putting on a dress, Jerry uncovers a nonbinary identity, although that language isn’t yet available to Jerry. “I don’t have the word for what I feel I just feel more like my self than I have in all my life,” Jerry tells Joe. This revelation affords the show its best song, You Coulda Knocked Me Over With a Feather, a hymn to self-discovery. Ghee, who also identifies as nonbinary, sings it to bits. Gorgeous, full-throated and tailor-made for its performer, Feather doesn’t sound like it’s trying to be anything else. And in this silly, woozy, pretty show, with its endless tap numbers, it doesn’t exactly fit.
