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Gentlemen prefer … the movie.
The wobbly quality of the new Broadway musical “Some Like It Hot,” which opened Sunday night at the Shubert Theatre, is made much more obvious by the indisputable greatness of its source material.
The 1959 Marilyn Monroe film is one of the best comedies of all time. And, so, as only Broadway knows how to do, it has churned out a mostly charmless song-and-dance version of a beloved title.
However, even if you go in totally cold — “Who’s Jack Lemmon?” God forbid — the show still disappoints as a stand-alone piece of theater.
The repetitive songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman gnaw on the ears, there aren’t enough big laughs in Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin’s book and the revised ending, in which a character questions their gender identity, feels neither honest nor natural, but as if it’s been exhaustively focus-grouped to avoid Twitter backlash. (And, after the “Tootsie” fracas back in 2018, it probably was.)
“Some Like It Hot” amounts to yet another man-in-a-dress musical that’s not as tuneful, moving or hilarious as “La Cage aux Folles.” When musicians Joe (Christian Borle) and Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee) first don frocks and wigs to disguise themselves while on the run, there is a collective exasperation of “You again?”
The two penniless bums wind up in women’s attire after they witness an organized crime hit in Chicago during the 1930s. Fearing for their lives, they get all dolled up, hop aboard the train to California and join a touring all-female band called Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopators.
