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Sugar
In the early ’70s, with Sondheim, Bob Fosse and others reinventing the look, shape and sound of the Broadway musical, this adaptation of Some Like It Hot by Funny Girl team Styne and Merrill must have felt like a throwback, its buoyantly jazzy but impersonal score and rhyming wordplay reflecting more craft than inspiration. Today, though, Sugar’s modest ambitions seem like a virtue in a musical landscape dominated by spectacle. If it follows its more celebrated filmic source with dogged fidelity, at least it’s telling a story designed to entertain adults, not sell affiliated lines of action figures or fast-food cups.
The musical’s charms are accentuated in Corti’s assured production. Corti and designer Brian Sidney Bembridge transport this Sugar’s Chicago and Miami settings to a film lot. The sumptuously artificial staging reinforces the core theme of gender artifice: Like Thomas’s and Schmuckler’s cross-dressing musicians, or for that matter Knox’s ingenue, Sugar itself becomes a self-conscious construction. Key to its success is Schmuckler’s quite brilliant performance in the Jack Lemmon role. As he gradually warms to millionaire Osgood Fielding’s (Joe D. Lauck) wooing, Schmuckler’s Jerry/Daphne is at once riotous and disconcertingly moving. Offering the sweeping opening set piece of “When You Meet a Man in Chicago,” the awkward grace of the male duo’s soft-shoe in heels and the surreal vision of a millionaire’s chorus intoning “November Song,” this rare revival proves a destabilizing confection.
