Review: SOME LIKE IT HOT Jazzes Up the Issues at Benedum Center

It's a wonder Some Like It Hot, the Billy Wilder film, has held up as well as it does without seeming totally creaky and outdated. This is, after all, a 1959 Hollywood comedy, albeit one that is remarkably fluid in its attitudes towards both gender and sexuality. (Not to drop a spoiler for a film almost a century old, but the final punchline, "nobody's perfect" was only adopted because the original punchline, "I know," was deemed too shocking for the fifties). It's even more of a wonder that the new musical adaptation by legendary musical-comedy team Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, with libretto by Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin, manages to keep that wacky magic alive, while also updating the sensibility for an era that has much different takes on racial and queer issues. Can you do a woke farce? Apparently you can, with a team as good as this one.

Joe (Matt Loehr) and Jerry (Tavis Kordell) are the Tip Tap Twins, adopted brothers turned vaudeville duo fallen on hard times. The 1930s weren't always amenable to an interracial dance duo, leading to Joe and Jerry taking a gig at a mob-affiliated supper club. When they accidentally witness a mob hit and go on the lam, they steal dresses and wigs from two showgirls and slip into an all-girl touring jazz band as a cover. Predictable shenanigans ensue... as do unpredictable ones when Jerry, now Daphne, discovers that life may feel better and more honest in this new female identity. Along the way, they find themselves variously entangled with a beautiful songstress (Leandra Ellis-Gaston), a flamboyant millionaire (Edward Juvier), a firebrand bandleader (Tarra Conner Jones) and an amiable but murderous gangster (Devon Goffman), leading to the frantic, door-slamming climax every farce depends upon.

Right off the bat, it's impossible to not be won over by Matt Loehr and Tavis Kordell as the Tip Tap Twins, whether in drag or out of it. Besides being great singers and comics, they're a true tap sensation, and when they run a routine together it makes you wish YOU could dance like they do, even if you're unathletic with two left feet (like me). Kordell is a double "triple threat," mastering both the tight, athletic and masculine language of dance for Jerry and a more fluid, feminine physicality when they totally embrace the new persona of Daphne. They pair exceptionally well with Leandra Ellis-Gaston's Sugar Kane, who sings like an angel and taps like Sutton Foster's wildest dream. She's a feistier, fierier character than Marilyn Monroe's dreamy space-case Sugar in the film, which makes her a much more active participant in the story and lends a jolt of adrenaline to the fast-paced farcical elements. And Edward Juvier's Osgood is a living cartoon character in the best way: bouncing like a spring, singing across an almost unrealistically wide vocal range and even getting a wonderful, almost-fourth-wall-breaking title drop moment. 

I'm aware that there has been a recent pushback against "drag disguise comedy," as outdated, hacky or even transphobic. These are all entirely valid points of view, but I can't help but think of Some Like It Hot as a show ABOUT that, not simply a show that DOES that. As Joe puts on an imitation of his second grade teacher, minces around and burlesques femininity cluelessly, Jerry discovers a lived truth and an authenticity that doesn't come so much from changing your voice or your body language, but from embracing things about yourself that you weren't ready to embrace before. I love Mrs. Doubtfire and Tootsie as much as the next (straight, white-ish, middle-class) guy, but those stories are Joes. Some Like It Hot is a Jerry... or more accurately, it's a Daphne.