SOME LIKE IT HOT
Book by Matthew López and Amber Ruffin
Music by Marc Shaiman
Lyrics by Shaiman & Scott Wittman
Based on the screenplay by
Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
Directed by Casey Nicholaw
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
Billy Wilder’s film, Some Like It Hot, screenplay by him and longtime collaborator I.A.L. Diamond, (in turn based on a ‘30s French film farce that was remade in Germany and in Russia) is one of those very rare properties from which two licensed musicals have been fashioned. This is different than citing a copyrightable property that has had more than one legitimate musical version. As some of you know, I’ve got authorship in one of those: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was the basis of three separate and distinct adaptations (including a prior one involving me as lyricist only) before the fourth, an altogether new one where I was also librettist, opened in Montreal in 2015 and became the official musicalization forever and amen.
Though getting there was, as they say, a journey, how we achieved the milestone was ultimately simple…the show, which happily did very well, was able to run well past a contractual number of paid performances. And with that number having been achieved, the option on rights to Mordecai Richler’s source novel no longer had to be renewed; they merged permanently with the musical rights. (And that was a BIG day; anecdote for another time.) The previous versions had not done as well, had not run that long and had lost the option.
Similarly… Shaw’s Pygmalion merged with My Fair Lady; Kaufman and Hart’s Merrily We Roll Along merged with the Furth-Sondheim musical. That’s why there can be no other musicals based on those (or the wealth of similarly merged) source materials. I’ll start with the paradox first. It amounts to both protection and exclusivity.
So while I don’t know the contractual particulars informing Some Like It Hot, I can tell you one thing for sure: The arrangement that made an iconic screenplay, to one of the most heralded comedies in all of cinema history, available for a second musicalization and a second merging of rights is a huge freaking deal.
And the first important question is: Why even bother?
Let’s take a look at the story:
It’s 1929, Chicago. Jazz saxophonist Joe and jazz bassist Jerry are desperate for work. Depending on the version of the story, plot machinations differ right here, but one way or another, they accidentally witness a gangland murder, exposing their identities to the mob boss into the bargain. They have to take it on the lam and do it incognito. They learn about an all-female band going on tour, needful of a bassist and a saxophonist, disguise themselves as women and apply for the positions. They pass muster with bandleader Sweet Sue and become part of the ensemble. Joe will start falling for lead singer Sugar Kane—necessitating him to invent/impersonate yet another personality, this one an available playboy millionaire…while Jerry finds himself being courted by an eccentric, multiply divorced authentic millionaire, Osgood Fielding Jr.
As originally filmed by Billy Wilder for release in 1959, Some Like It Hot had an all-white cast. Jack Lemmon (Jerry), Tony Curtis (Joe), Marilyn Monroe (Sugar), comic Joe E. Brown (Osgood) and Joan Shawlee (Sue). Theoretically a cast of straight characters too, but Wilder was slyly dancing on the edge. (It’s also worth noting that the criminous aspect was the innovation of Wilder and Diamond. In previous filmed versions of the story, the buddy-duo at the center had nothing more in mind by dressing in drag than getting available jobs with a band that would otherwise not hire them.)
As adapted by Peter Stone (libretto), Jule Styne (music) and Bob Merrill (lyrics), for a 1972 musical originally under the title Sugar (in subsequent productions and in London it would go back to the movie title)—again, an all white cast: Robert Morse (Jerry), Tony Roberts (Joe), Elaine Joyce (Sugar), Cyril Ritchard (Osgood) and Sheila Smith (Sweet Sue). This one didn’t dance quite so near the edge (though with direction and choreography by Gower Champion, it for-sure danced). Osgood’s identifying song is what most signaled that the team were playing it safe (in the original production, with a backup chorus of similarly old men, he sang the deceptively titled and deceptively erudite “November Song,” whose actual refrain is “Even Naughty Old Men Need Love”; replaced in subsequent productions with the less subtle “Dirty Old Men”)…but I don’t believe that was out of caution or restraint. I honestly believe that the completely straight creative team, working in a more traditional vein, didn’t have the renegade vibration in them—nor permission from the era—that would allow them to inch the sensibility forward. But what they did was pretty much a paraphrase of Wilder-Diamond, so if they didn’t gain much, they didn’t lose much…and more on that in a bit.
But in the new millennium, especially in the wake of a virtual explosion of aggressive emphasis on diversity, inclusion and self-identity…the source version of Some Like It Hot gives a musical creative team a lot to unpack—the unpackers being Matthew López & Amber Ruffin (book), Mark Shaiman (music) and, with Shaiman, Scott Wittman (lyrics), with direction by the redoubtable Casey Nicholoaw—for aside from the traditional tropes of gender-bending farce, there are now additional implications to cross-dressing.
For example: In this new version, Joe (Christan Borle) more-or-less fulfills the traditional tack…although Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee) will find that being in drag releases his true self…and Osgood (Kevin Del Aguila) manages to be both over-romantic and sexually under-defined.
And of course, with jazz having its roots in African-American culture, that’s acknowledged; and further emphasized in a bi-racial ensemble—Jerry, Sue (NaTasha Yvette Williams) and Sugar (Adrianna Hicks) are now conceived as specifically black.
And oh yes, Sugar is no longer sweetly naïve. She has, as they say, agency. If she doesn’t see through Joe’s subterfuge, she’s at least an inner-strength match for him.
And here’s the paradox. And the paradoxes within.
(Bear in mind before I continue…I’m old enough to have seen the original production of Sugar. Twice. During and after my senior in high school. Between the two viewings and the cast album, I got to know it reasonably well.)
I interviewed Peter Stone for my college paper, right around the time that his straight play adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s Full Circle was on Broadway—and comparing 1776 (which he considered the jewel in his crown) to Sugar, even he characterized the latter as “just fooling around.” Which I don’t believe he meant literally.
(He in fact had had a showdown with producer David Merrick over changes Merrick wanted to enforce. Stone was not only President of the Dramatists Guild at the time, he also controlled the option to the Wilder film and was perfectly happy to pull the show if Merrick brought in anyone to monkey with the material. Merrick folded.) [PS, if the adaptation is your idea born of your passion, don’t let anyone else control the rights; you can’t be bullied, you can’t be fired and you get to move on if you have to.]
I rather think Stone meant to suggest that he saw Sugar as a light entertainment without deep agenda. Indeed, Sugar was a slick and dutiful adaptation with a very attractive score, that entertained hugely—
But the show didn’t dazzle. Sugar was a throwback.
Company and Follies had broken the mold in the two years before Sugar opened—a mold that Hal Prince had been steadily whacking away at with such as Cabaret and shows he produced such as Fiddler on the Roof—even David Merrick had pushed into modernity with Promises, Promises (adapted by Neil Simon from yet another Wilder-Diamond screenplay), simply by having Burt Bacharach and Hal David, the very iconography of mid-late ‘60s pop, write the score—
—and right from the moment Sugar started, you could sense that it was displaced in time. That it would have been more at home five or ten years before.
The 2022 iteration of Some Like it Hot goes in the opposite direction. It tries to infuse the Wilder-Diamond story with the sensibility of diversity-inclusion enlightenment. The old story, but with the implicit themes specifically addressed; the familiar characters, but guided by new-millennium outlook and psychology.
And it’s just as displaced. While Some Like It Hot can bear up under a transformation that includes black characters, and more authentically black-inflected jazz, it hits the wall every time it denies the socialization realities of the story’s era. This is not to say that the creative team were obligated to abandon all-out comedy for social drama: but to conceive the comedy without embracing those realities as part of the farce—to basically tell us we’re watching a story set in 1929 when it’s really been air-lifted and dropped into 2023—rather as if the world of 1929 had continued on for almost a century and along the way picked up some more evolved attitudes about homosexuality, same-gender marriage and interracial—makes us very consciously aware of a creative team using a classic story as a diversity-inclusion delivery system.
And that has taken a toll on its score, which is jazzy and attractive but also frenetic. So much patter, so much that’s aggressively rhythmic…it rarely lets you absorb it and breathe with it. It just keeps coming at you.
And I believe that’s a consequence of the songs being more concerned with the new millennium refocusing than on the story itself; they always seem angled a little bit off the primary dramatic point, or landing squarely on the new point the authors wish to make. (To be fair, the song in which Jerry celebrates discovering his true identity (through being Daphne when he’s with Osgood) has been cited by many as a high point—but that’s because it’s where the thematic agenda and a main character’s epiphany are in sync.)
For all that Sugar’s oldschool approach was quaint even when it opened, most of its songs hit the dramatic-placement bulls-eye; setting up the world, establishing the characters and their problems to solve, spotlighting plot turns, furthering relationships, soliloquy and celebration where-and-as appropriate—and because each was so attuned to its unique purpose, there was an organic, natural variety to the score within the stylistic palate.
Sugar was thus a better show for the 1970s than the retooled Some Like It Hot is for the 2020s. And it would hold up better even now, with casting as diverse—which would all by itself easily make the points that the current show puts such effort into articulating.
And that state of affairs may, more than anything else, be at the crux of why a show that has gotten reviews as strong and acquired fans as passionate as Some Like It Hot has…is still not, as of this writing, anyway, doing the box-office numbers expected. It’s not making its case because it’s sidestepping, and sometimes flat-out denying, the truth of its storytelling universe. And I think such incongruity somehow gets out into the universe.
Don’t get me wrong—Some Like It Hot is a very decent entertainment with a lot to recommend it and I wish it well.
But I also wish it were better.