I’ve been told that Broadway’s diversified, woked-up stage musical of Some Like It Hot isn’t doing so well commercially. No stars to speak of is one reason. Overly woke-icized may be another.
The show ignores the basic scheme of the Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic, making more than half the characters black with the Jerry/Daphne character (played by Jack Lemmon in the Wilder film) embracing transgenderism and yaddah yaddah. And the show buries the film’s final line — “nobody’s perfect.” Of course it does!
Directed by Casey Nicholaw and featuring Christian Borle (Joe/Josephine), J. Harrison Ghee (Jerry/Daphne), Adrianna Hicks as Sugar (called Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk when she was played by Marilyn Monroe) and Kevin Del Aguila as an Latino Osgood, Some Like It Hot opened just under three weeks ago — 12.11.22.
HE reader Des McGrath: “The Jack Lemmon character has been rewritten to discover that he is a trans woman over the course of the story.
“The immortal final line? Gone. Instead of Osgood Fielding responding ‘Nobody’s perfect’, he tells Daphne ‘You’re perfect just the way you are’ (or something like that).
“And the Marilyn Monroe character is no longer a dumb blonde but a strong black woman, who sings about how as a child growing up in a small town in Georgia she liked to go to the movies, but ‘could only use the balcony. Like the movies, life could be that black and white.’
“So now she wants to break the color barrier in Hollywood.”
HE to McGrath: “Like the film, the show is set in 1929. Sugar wants to break Hollywood’s color barrier in nineteen-twenty-fucking-nine? The new Some Like It Hot, in short, is another exercise in presentism — transposing the woke sensibilities of today to the jazz age.”
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