Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder’s 1959 crossdressing farce, is one of the classic movie comedies, with music, romance, gunplay, Marilyn Monroe and one-liners galore, including one of the great closing lines ever. So why turn it into a Broadway musical?

 

The entertaining but way overlong Broadway version answers that question…sort of. Much of the skeleton of Wilder’s film remains with a few notable departures. This isn’t bad in itself, especially if one remembers that slavishly copying the movie did the recent Almost Famous no favors. 

 

Book writers Matthew López and Amber Ruffin have made saxophonist Joe and double bassist Jerry—musicians in Prohibition-era Chicago who are on the run after witnessing a mob hit, disguised as women in an all-female touring band—brothers from another mother: although Joe (the indefatigable Christian Borle plays the Tony Curtis role) is still white, but Jerry (the imposingly talented J. Harrison Ghee stepping into Jack Lemmon’s heels) is now Black, leading to occasionally amusing jokes about their long friendship.

 

Lopez and Ruffin have also moved the band’s destination from Florida to San Diego, which lets them pivot toward Hollywood in the back-story of Sugar Kane, played by Marilyn Monroe in the movie as the ultimate dumb blonde. Instead, the musical’s Sugar is a self-possessed, no-nonsense performer with her sights set on the silver screen, and she falls for Joe while he’s in the guise of a German scenarist with writer’s block. Adrianna Hicks makes Sugar a fiery femme fatale with a soaring voice to match, but there’s little romantic chemistry between her and Borle, who affects an intentionally horrible Teutonic accent as opposed to the tongue-in-cheek Cary Grant impression Curtis did in the film.

 

The plot is more convoluted onstage than onscreen, and even though the show sprints along in its first half—adroitly assisted by Scott Pask’s exquisite sets, Gregg Barnes’ sparkling costumes and Natasha Katz’s snazzy lighting—the second act bogs down with a few clunky songs. (All of the tunes, by Marc Shaiman with lyrics by Shaiman and Scott Whitman, are proficient big-band pastiches, though less of them would be more.) And when we get to a tour de force of literal door-slamming and tap-dancing in the final chase scene, “Tip Tap Trouble,” choreographed by director Casey Nicholaw with the frenzied determination that marks all of his work, it’s simultaneously breathtaking and exasperating.

 

And where are the movie’s classic lines? The second-most famous, buried in the lyrics to “Vamp!”—“this fellow won’t be mellow/more like jell-o that’s on springs”—describes Joe and Jerry in women’s attire rather than, in the movie, how Sugar moves as she walks past them. It’s a minimally clever repurposing of a great, but objectifying, line. Then there’s that last bit of dialogue, which is completely MIA since the musical’s final scenes move the plot in a different direction than the movie—there’s really no room for it in this context.

 

For all its hyperkinetic busyness, Some Like It Hot the musical only fitfully succeeds at fusing old-fashioned show biz with new-fangled gender attitudes. Well—to paraphrase that immortal line in Billy Wilder and I.A. L. Diamond’s original script—no show’s perfect.