SOUND OFF: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, Live In Living Stereo

Even with all the bases covered and loaded given this stupendous creative team, a cast of veritable Broadway all-stars and a surprise bottom-of-the-ninth pop fly play courtesy of Norbert Leo Butz's fresh Tony win, CATCH IF YOU CAN can't seem to get the break it deserves on Broadway. Sure, it just passed the hundred performance mark and it is alive and well, but it deserves far more praise than it has been given. After all, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman's score is every bit as ingratiating and endearing as their work on the Tony-winning Best Musical HAIRSPRAY - if not better; and, I, for one, think it is - so, for that fact alone CATCH ME IF YOU CAN commands the utmost attention from any cast album collector or Broadway baby interested in keeping up with all the scores and stats of Broadway‘s best. And, yes, indeed, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN possesses a score among the very best of the 21st century and is itself the best new score on Broadway this season - MORMON or otherwise. The songstack as represented on the brand new Original Broadway Cast Recording is even more entertaining and enlivening than the show's songs onstage - although they have all their own allure there, as well - and that is a huge credit to the fiercely talented songwriting team who knocks each and every pitch clear out of the park; here, just as always. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN is a fully-decked game of far-flung, fun, and not-so-frivolous fantasy ably aided by some of the most inspiring leading male performances in musical theatre in many years thanks to the wonderful work by the aforementioned Butz, plus the impossibly charismatic leading player Aaron Tveit and a sensitive and suave Tom Wopat. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN is an all-star, all-boys' club.

Caught, Red Hot-Handed

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN - Original Broadway Cast Recording

This score is on fire. Red-hot. It's like taking Noir jazz and Frank Sinatra Vegas live records and mixing them up, all shaken and stirred with a James Bond swizzle stick and infused with effervescent Nancy Sinatra, plaintive and soulful Dusty Springfield and then adding a generous dose of the Rolling Stones on top. That's the score for CATCH ME IF YOU CAN in a martini glass - just as it very well should be served up. While the show onstage may tend to deluge audiences with content due to the TV variety show conception and execution with the orchestra onstage, it is this very conceit that lets the score breathe, build and grow in such a rich and rewarding way over the course of its duration in the show. It is a homerun of a score. To think that this is the second show set in the 1960s from the polished and practiced pens of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, coming after HAIRSPRAY, it is even more to marvel at when you realize how varied and stylistically compelling this score is while never imitating HAIRSPRAY in even the slightest manner. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN is much more adult in its themes and content than HAIRSPRAY - and, certainly, its musical leanings to Sinatra, Jobim, Bacharach and beyond are a testament to that fact - yet, while the comedy is on the back-burner most of the show, this sizzling score manages more jokes per minute that actually land and have wit than that of THE BOOK OF MORMON, and, certainly, if we are comparing them, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN is a score with a thousand times more ingenuity, spirit and style. If the score for CATCH ME IF YOU CAN cannot be accurately described in any meaningful way by comparing it to HAIRSPRAY, which is incidentally set in the same era and composed by the same songwriting team as CATCH ME, than any further comparisons between these two brand new musical comedies will end here. Yet, it is worth mentioning that possibly the greatest original movie musical score of the last thirty years is the result of the collaboration between the MORMON writers - Trey Parker and Matt Stone - along with highly-regarded film composer Marc Shaiman, pre-HAIRSPRAY. I am speaking of SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT, of course. But, back to now - and, better yet: back to the 60s!

The score for CATCH ME IF YOU CAN is 60s cocktail hour high society one moment ("The Pinstripes Are All They See"), reigned-in-yet-raucous "Son Of A Preacher Man"-esque soul the next ("Fly, Fly Away"), then some straight-up 60s HULLABALLOO ("Live In Living Color"), Rat Pack-ery racking up a steep bar tab ("Butter Outta Cream", "Little Boy, Be A Man"; the heinously cut showstopper "Fifty Checks", which is generously included here as a Bonus Track), and even a little country-flecked folk ala Jan & Dean ("Seven Wonders"), a cakewalk that would not have been out of place in Lawrence Welk Land ("Our Family Tree"), a proto-funk frolic ("Doctor's Orders"), an Antonio Carlos Jobim/Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 mash-up homage ("Don't Be A Stranger") and the oh-so-very progressive late-60s electric guitar rock sounds of Tveit's hair-raising eleven o'clock number ("Goodbye"). Then, there is Butz's material - since his character, Hanratty, is a curmudgeon who is only concerned with the central case of the show, that of Frank Abignale, Jr., Shaiman and Wittman wisely provide this character with the most idiosyncratic material of all as to make him truly unique in all ways, music first and foremost - equal parts moving, hilarious and pleasingly mysterious. Tveit gets the surefire audience-pleasing production numbers, such as the cannon-shot "Live In Living Color", the swingin' "Jet Set" and, my personal favorite of these such songs, "Someone Else's Skin", and it is more clearly drawn that Tveit and Butz share the duties of carrying the score of the show now - out of town, Tveit‘s role largely dominated the proceedings and he still gets more musical material, but it is more balanced. Tveit makes an indeliable impression and has a crystal-cutting, piercing instrument that is so very versatile as to leave one dumbfounded, and his dedication to the sounds of singers of the era was not lost on this attentive listener, believe me. Tveit is just tops, beginning to end. Who could ask for more? But, back to Butz: "Don't Break The Rules" has already been cited as one of the best character number showstoppers of recent years, but in "The Man Inside The Clues", "Christmas Is My Favorite Time of Year" and the final duet number with Tveit, Butz is allowed to access his heretofore lesser-known skill as a classic crooner - lest we forget his bright Broadway debut in the troubled Harry Connick Jr. original musical THOU SHALT NOT playing a crooning corpse - or was it merely a ghost? - for the entire second act of the dark THERESE RAQUIN (Zola) story with a pulsating jazz score. Butz makes a big impression, but the disc belongs to Tveit - and so does the score, in the end. Tveit is the MVP.

The ladies - or, more to the point: the female characters - got most of the choice cuts in HAIRSPRAY, so in many ways CATCH ME IF YOU CAN is sort of the male counterpoint alternative to that show's score not only in that it provides similar opportunities for performers to shine - and few can provide such songs as precipitously as Shaiman/Wittman - but, also, because the score takes on entirely different aspects of the 60s sound that both scores share. It is quite illustrative of the sheer cornucopia of content in the music of the 60s that two Broadway scores by the same songwriting team could sound so very different yet both be so very apropos to the sound of the time of their respective shows as HAIRSPRAY and CATCH ME IF YOU CAN are. Furthermore, neither score really plumbs the depths of the Broadway sound of the era (maybe "Miss Baltimore Crabs" in HAIRSPRAY or "Our Family Tree" here come closest), so I suppose there's a whole other, new show there somewhere if we are looking for one! Speaking of the one: while Tveit, Butz and Wopat get some truly spectacular material, the song of the show is undoubtedly Kerry Butler's "Fly, Fly Away". Once in a great while a brand new Broadway standard arrives on the boards and makes its presence known and CATCH ME IF YOU CAN gives us not one, but two such numbers right at the close of the second act. Butler‘s performance of "Fly, Fly Away" evokes the most striking aspects of - and the gospel inflections imperative to - the best of Dusty Springfield (particularly her cover of "Bang Bang" made famous in KILL BILL) and polishes it all off with her gloriously big and beautiful Broadway belt, pushing it over into something truly special by the final chorus. While HAIRSPRAY clearly had more musical theatre influence in the surface sound of the score, the drama and character interactions are woven sensitively and seamlessly into the fabric of the songs throughout CATCH ME IF YOU CAN in a sophisticated and delicate manner. This is one of those scores that gets better and better every time you hear it - and, anyway, how can you not love it right off of the bat?

Speaking of knocking it out of the park, Tveit makes "Goodbye" the type of closer that would make Merman herself blush. He wrings this masterful, powerful song for all its emotional and musical worth and power, with the result being the play of the game in this score bursting over the brim with unbelievable plays and one hell of a Hail Mary in Kerry Butler - it's even worth mixing baseball and football metaphors for, it's so good! What more can really be said? CATCH ME IF YOU CAN has every single element of the very best Broadway scores of the Golden Age and, certainly, now, and Shaiman/Wittman have managed to better even their perceived-to-be impenetrably perfect score for HAIRSPRAY. It is truly that good. So, catch wise and catch on to CATCH ME IF YOU CAN already!

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