It's not quite fair to review an out-of-town tryout of a new musical: everyone involved knows it's not there yet; that's why they're trying it out. But what's wrong with "Sweet Smell of Success" is less a failure of execution than conception. This piece hasn't reached its intended destination not because it's still en route but because it's headed in the wrong direction.
The main problem is the music. Whoever decided to musicalize one of the most cynical movies ever made by bringing in Marvin Hamlisch had either never seen the movie or never heard Hamlisch. The score is pleasant and occasionally even stirring, but it has precisely the wrong sensibility. Hamlisch here, as everywhere else, is fundamentally sweetˆexactly what the Ernest Lehman/Alexander McKendrick movie was not.
As a result, a movie in which amoral press agent Sidney Falco will do anything to get ahead–grovel, smear, pimp–becomes a musical in which Falco is just a small-town boy trying to make it in the big city. Oh, he still grovels and smears and pimps, but music, lyrics and Brian D'Arcy James's spectacular voice all conspire to make us root for him, throwing the meaning of the piece fundamentally out of whack. Falco's idol-nemesis, powerful columnist J.J. Hunsecker, goes from being his sister's oppressive and probably incestuous guardian in the movie to being a love-struck yokel who's somehow failed to notice that the person he's serenading with moon-June lyrics in "For Susan" happens to be a close relative. John Lithgow does his best, but he lacks the deep-down smarminess that made Burt Lancaster so brilliant in the part. So the two central characters get transformed from full-throated unapologetic schmucks to poor misguided boys. Can Spencer Tracy, bearing sage advice and forgiveness, be far behind?
But Hamlisch shouldn't shoulder all the blame. John Guare, who should know better, has turned the movie's opening five minutes into a first act that takes 80 minutes–nearly as long as the entire screen running time. Rather than Hunsecker's simply assigning Sidney the task of getting Susan (Kelli O'Hara, another spectacular voice in search of a character) away from her jazz-musician boyfriend Dallas (Jack Noseworthy, adequate in a nothing part), Guare constructs an elaborate series of feints and path-crossings, full of coincidence and complexity and signifying nothing.
Though some of the songs are well-crafted, including especially the ensemble pieces "Rumor" and "Welcome to the Night," others seem lifted at random from the Hamlisch songbook. Though the show takes place in the 1950s and the musical milieu is smoky jazz, when Dallas tells Susan, "I wrote a song for you" he sings "Don't Know Where You Leave Off" (unconsciously apt title), a virtual template of 1970s lush pop.
Guare's dialogue is competent, if long-winded, but lacks the crackle of the Ernest Lehman- Clifford Odets screenplay, except where lifting it word for word. The choreography, by Broadway novice Christopher Wheeldon, is forgettable and derivative, without profiting much from its larceny. Lithgow's soft-shoe to "Don't Look Now" should have been this show's equivalent of "Chicago"'s "Razzle-Dazzle," where the crooked lawyer charms even as he threatens; but here it makes the bad guy look cute.
A "Musical Numbers" insert in the program made it clear that numbers were being rearranged, and doubtless the book was getting a going-over, too; but it's hard to imagine a cut-and-paste job that could make the show work. All these skilled collaborators have labored to produce Sweet Smell Lite, a de-fanged, nearly apolitical version of the original, and then assured its failure by giving it the wrong score. This would have been perfect material for Kander and Ebb.
"Sweet Smell"'s producers had hoped for, well, another "Producers" when they chose to try it out in Chicago. No such luck, for them or the audience.
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