‘Some Like It Hot’ Review: Broadway Sizzles With A Musical Scorcher
12.12.2022 - 06:07
/ deadline.com
Next to the jukebox musical, the Broadway genre getting and usually deserving the least amount of respect is that woebegon Frankenstein that starts life on the big screen only to have its parts jumbled and reassembled for the stage. The failure-to-success ratio of such attempts should keep any sane stage director as far from a movie house as humanly possible.
We’re all fortunate that Casey Nicholaw has ignored any such warnings, and has instead assembled a glorious new Some Like It Hot, a tap-dancing, razzle-dazzling embrace of everything to love about classic American musical theater, Golden Age Hollywood and Broadway talent at the top of their games, all of it crafted with a 21st Century wisdom that knows what’s worth clutching from the past and what insists on a refresh. Some Like It Hot is a delight from start to finish.
Nicholaw both choreographs and directs and seems to be having the time of his life – or at least since the similarly irresistible The Prom some years back – doing both. With a new book by Matthew López (The Inheritance) and Amber Ruffin (The Amber Ruffin Show) that sticks close to the main plot of the classic 1959 Billy Wilder film comedy, the stage musical shimmers with new energy and perspective – López is a gay man and Latino (the first to have a play win the top Tony) and Ruffin is a Black woman and pioneering force in the world of late-night comedy writing, and they can’t help but bring that mid-century modern comedy into a brand-new not quite mid-century century.
You know the plot: Chicago, 1930s, Prohibition, gangsters, fast-talkers always on the take and two musician buddies down on their luck. They would be sax player Joe (Christian Borle) and Jerry on upright bass (J. Harrisonn Ghee), a
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