“Nobody’s perfect,” goes the famous final line from Some Like It Hot, after Jack Lemmon’s Daphne confesses to a doting suitor that he’s really Jerry, a man in disguise. But even if the new Broadway musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s classic isn’t perfect either, J. Harrison Ghee, playing a reimagined Daphne, comes pretty close.
The plot’s basic outline is, more or less, unchanged: When Joe (Christian Borle) and Jerry witness a mob hit, they escape town by joining an all-female band led by Sweet Sue (NaTasha Yvette Williams) and fronted by the singer and would-be starlet Sugar Kane (Adrianna Hicks). But this Some Like It Hot, with a whiz-bang book by Matthew López (a Tony winner for The Inheritance) and talk show host and comedian Amber Ruffin, keeps the hijinks intact while zeroing in on Daphne’s gender exploration: being seen as a woman, Daphne ultimately discovers, “I just feel more like my self than I have in all my life.”
As the hyper-kinetic Osgood (Kevin Del Aguila) courts Daphne with a Mexican folk song, “Fly, Mariposa, Fly,” about a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, Ghee, who identifies as non-binary, listens with an alternatingly present and faraway expression, as if Daphne is quietly tying together the disparate parts of herself into a coherent whole for the first time. This pensiveness explodes in the next scene in a joyous coming-out aria that Ghee imbues with a vibrant self-love.
But Daphne’s emergence from her chrysalis isn’t just a “get out of jail free” card for the authors to tell a retro story, which, in the film, clearly frames its comedy around men pretending to be, rather than identifying as, women. It becomes, improbably, the point of the story itself, a touching narrative about identity and authenticity nesting in a classic 1959 gangster plot as if it’s been there all along. The scene that leads into that coming-out song is almost word for word from the movie—it’s just that now we’re laughing with Daphne instead of at her.
Of course, there’s lots going on in Some Like It Hot that isn’t about Daphne. As expected from director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw (The Prom, Mean Girls, The Book of Mormon), the dancing comes fast and furious from the start. And while the Prohibition-era moves are delightful and deliriously frenetic, they’re not exactly hot; in fact, there’s something coolly synthetic about the assembly line of production numbers that send the ensemble tap-dancing off into battle while rarely tapping into the dramatic arc of the story.
The score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the songwriting team behind Hairspray, is a Cole Porter pastiche, with occasional hints of something bluesier and a ballad for Sugar that sounds an awful lot like “Mister Snow” from Carousel. And while the music is ephemerally engaging (credit Charlie Rosen and Bryan Carter’s orchestrations and Glen Kelly’s sizzling dance arrangements, which enliven the tunes exponentially), the laughs are all in López and Ruffin’s book scenes rather in the lyrics, which are usually generic and sometimes so densely over-rhymed that they’re more than a little hard to follow. Porter’s topical references in “You’re the Top” from Anything Goes may be dated now, but they presumably meant something to his 1934 audience. By contrast, when Wittman and Shaiman toss in couplets like, “Can’t have Kipling without his ‘Kim’/You can’t have Dempsy without the gym,” it’s impenetrable filler.
Wiliams’s slick Sweet Sue scats magnificently and delivers some of the shrewdest, funniest material. Hicks sings with glorious strength as Sugar, but even wizened up from Marilyn Monroe’s on-screen ditz and provided with a backstory about a childhood of Hollywood dreams during a time when the South was segregated, she’s left with not much arc. López and Ruffin engage throughout with gender more successfully than they do with race. When Joe, as Josephine, asks Sugar what’s holding her back from becoming a star, she responds, knowingly, “The world,” but when racist bullies appear, Some Like It Hot merely scares them off with pre-prepared tap routines. Once waltzed offstage, they seemingly cease to exist.
Borle’s Joe, meanwhile, is more in need of self-awareness than self-love: Both in his relationships with Daphne and Sugar, he’s forced to confront his own arrogance. As poor Josephine, he’s much-mocked for looking old, which is the only part of the show’s handling of gender that feels regressive. If Daphne’s appearance as a woman was similarly a punchline instead of a cause for celebration and a magnet for male desire, would she still be able to embrace her identity? But Borle, a two-time Tony winner for Peter and the Starcatcher and Something Rotten, is, as always, a game comic foil, scampering over Scott Pask’s impressive set, full of sliding, slamming doors, and in and out of some of Gregg Barnes’s bedazzled costumes.
When Some Like It Hot first announced its Broadway arrival, after a long, Covid-delayed journey, some wondered if, after Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire, this was really the time for yet another musical adapting a classic film comedy premised around men wearing dresses. “We don’t need to make history, honey,” Sweet Sue tells one of her band members. “Just survive it.” Some Like It Hot’s predictable pizzazz may be enough to help the show survive in an economically turbulent Broadway landscape, but it’s Ghee’s Daphne, an explosive star turn, not to mention history-making for a non-binary actor, that’s one for posterity.
Some Like It Hot is now running at the Schubert Theatre.
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