Ulgh, my local paper, the Rockland Journal News nearly trashed it..by Jacques Le Sourd:
Look at it this way. If you can't get tickets to "Monty Python's Spamalot," you can always go to "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels."
It's this seaso's consolation prize.
The new Broadway musical, which has a wonderful cast headed by John Lithgow, Norbert Leo Butz, Sherie Rene Scott and Joanna Gleason, is a giddy high-octane show that encourages you to ignore its considerable flaws.
The show, which is an easy (if not particularly graceful) crowded pleaser in the mold of "The Producers" opened last night at the Imperial Theatre. ("Spamalot," which opens March 17 and has not yet been reviewed, is already a much tougher ticket to get.)
"Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" is based on the 1988 movie with Steve Martin and Michael Caine, about a couple of con artists--one elegantly British, the other low-down American--let loose on the French Riviera.
Lithgow, an extremely agreeable actor who is back on Broadway in a big way, plays the sleek and more than slightly oily Lawrence Jameson, the English half of the team. His hair oddly marcelled for this occasion, Lithgow could easily step into either lead role in "La Cage Aux Folles."
(In the last three years, Lithgow has starred in "Sweet Smell of Success," which won him a best-actor Tony Award, the extraordinary "Retreat From Moscow," which Eileen ATkins and A. R. Gurney's estimable "Mrs. Farnsworth." Before his movie career and his three emmys for TV's "3rd Rock From the Sun," he had a 10-year career on Broadway.
His partner, and low-class nemesis, Freddy Benson, is played by Butz, who works hard to be amusing and succeeds much of the time. But he sure breaks into a sweat doing it.
Will this role finally make Butz a sstar? We've been waiting, having admired his work in the flop "Thou Shalt Not," the hit "Wicked" and a short-lived Off-Broadway work, "The Last Five Years."
An admirable subtelty was the signature of Butz's earlier work. Now he sings a plotzy number called "Great Bug Stuff," which advertises the crassness of Benson's wish list, and follows it up with an extended scene as Jameson's fictional nutty brother--invented to scare away a female suitor--whose schtick would be better done by Jerry Lewis or Jim Carrey. The abundance of thoroughly forgettable tunes is contributed by composer-lyricist David Yazbek, one of Broadway's younger talents, who showed far more score-writing charm in "The Full Monty." This show is all clumping songs you'd rather forget.
Even the normally brilliant director Jack O'Brien seems to stumble a bit. The man who won two Tonys in one year(for "Hairspray and "Henry IV") and staged "The Full Monty" and "The Invention of Love" seems flummoxed by this show's messy meat.
The dumb-and-dumber nature of the material isn't O'Brien's fault, or even Yazbek's. The fault lies, we think, with Jeffrey Lane, a first-time book-writer. Lane, whose background is entriely in television(he wrote for "Mad About You" and "Ryan's Hope") studs the script with lame psuedo-jokes that don't even try to be funny. (They just sound as if they should be funny, which works on TV.)
When the two men are making a bet, Jameston tells Benson, "If you lose, you not only leave town graciously, you agree to work only in the following territories: China, Iceland, El Salvador and, just to show there are no hard feelings, I'll throw in White Plains."
Far more seriously, Lane is hopless at the architecture of a plot: The show keeps ending and not being over, as he tacks on one anticlimactic scene after another.
Sherie Rene Scott, another should-be star who didn't quite make it in "Aida" or even her co-starring role with Butz in "The Last Five Years," is delightfully pleasant here as a soap queen from Cincinatti who becomes a mark for the two con men, who both wind up falling in love with her. But, amazingly, she is not given a decent song to sing. (She has quite a few crummy ones, including one called "Love is My Legs."
The same goes for the luminous Joanna Gleason (who won a Tony in the original cast of "Into the Woods in 199
, who plays an heiress who falls for Jameson and then is sidelines to a secondary affair with a French chief of police (Gregory Jbara of "Victor/Victoria," who now eerily resembles Mel Gibson). The costumes Gleason is forced to wear (designed by Gregg Barnes) are particularly hideous, though in truth all the costumes are notably ugly.
The sets, by David Rockwell, manage to make even the Cote d'Azur look cheap, despite an awesomely immodest Playbill biography that claims his sets "ingeniously advance the story through rich, compelling and unexpected visual languages."
What the scenery suggests is some tacky-looking jewelry, although these con men are nor principally jewel thieves.
It's the kind of shortcoming that would puzzle an audience if it were paying attention. As it is, the audience at the Imperial is just happy to welcome Lithgow, Butz, Scott and Gleason back on a stage, any stage, for a bit of mindless entertainment with an obligatory uplifting ending.
Oy. It certainly didn't deserve this pan. What is worse is most people like my mom and my aunt who love Broadway only read our local paper review and decide that it means all reviews agree with it. I'll try to show my Mom the post review, but I really don't like or understand this review.
"If there was a Mount Rushmore for Broadway scores, "West Side Story" would be front and center. It snaps, it crackles it pops! It surges with a roar, its energy and sheer life undiminished by the years" - NYPost reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli
