SOME LIKE IT HOT On Broadway - Reviews & News Thread- Page 40

[Charley Kringas Inc]

Posted: 8/13/23 at 12:15am

Finally caught up with this, mostly because I was hoping to like it more than I did the cast album, but unfortunately it didn't hold together for me. The big tap chase was the closest the show came to coming alive, with the kind of escalating but tightly controlled frenzy that drives great farcical musical comedy. As others have commented, though, it's nothing we haven't seen before, and I don't think it was done well enough to set it apart, as funny as the final reveal is.

The whole show has a muddled energy to it. This hit the hardest for me in the lyrics, which I didn't love on the cast album and found actively aggravating in the theatre. I like the idea behind most of them, but then the meter keeps fluctuating because they're forcing through extra syllables, and punch lines get swallowed because the inflection doesn't match the music, and often they're just kind of hard to follow because the metaphors get all mixed up and lead in a dozen different directions. I would go so far as to say that the lyrics are often lazy.

I did get a number of good laughs out of the book (I was expecting them to do more with the girl who keeps going into the wrong rooms) and I thought Daphne's arc was really well done, but there's a lot of sagging here and there. Too often it just wasn't punchy enough, and settled for being cute, charming, or amusing, which is bad for farce, particularly a musical farce where most of the songs not even trying to be funny.

It's weird because I wouldn't call it a bad show outright - it's not boring, there are a few good melodies that are energetically sung, and everyone's giving it their all. But then there's so much missing or missed that it just sort of flops along.

edit: the score really bothers me for some reason.

Zee Bap, for example, is supposed to be a rousing song about women standing up for themselves, presumably with the irony that they're being taught this by two (at that moment) men in drag. Fine! But the scat-and-stomp gag is a dud, and the song doesn't really take advantage of the scat genre. It also doesn't build, so it's just the same rigid melody with more voices, and the idea is the same from start to finish - "when a man is bad to me I say zee bap and get rid of him". The examples given aren't clever, either:

"And when a caveman like him says 'Dollface
It's time to settle down and be my wife'
Then ladies, zee bap [etc]
will tell him 'Not on your sweet life!"

There's no punchline, nothing elevating it above a really basic statement besides the fact that it rhymes.

Or this stanza from Take It Up A Step:

"So when we hit the bandstand
For the time to sink or sail
We all were pros because we did the prep
Cause when the rhythm starts a-callin
And it's time for you to wail
Yeah ladies wake it up
And make it up
And take it up a step"

When we hit the bandstand, sure, but to sink or sail? Are bandstands seaworthy? Why boat imagery in a song that takes place on and around trains? Also, they were pros who did the prep, so "make it up"? I'm being unbelievably nitpicky but this is the kind of idea salad that plagues this whole show and muffles the effect of the songs.

The title song is particularly bizarre. Sue starts it with a metaphor about choosing your life like items on a menu. Ok, fine, there are lots of things you can play with, food-wise, particularly if you're going to use the "hot" metaphor, but then she switches immediately to lyrics about landscapes and weather - cool pastoral scene, warm Hawaiian clime (with a terrible bit of tortured scansion on "in a grass shack", which comes out as "inagra...shack" ). She comes back to "hot" by way of a moth drawn to a flame, and then there's an attempt at double entendre with "consummate with consumme" (presumably sex with coagulated aspic).

Why bother with the setup about the menu if you're not going to bring up food until halfway through the song? In fact, of the three references to things that are hot, only one is food. The first is the moth flame, the second is egg foo young, and the third is hell. There are more food references towards the end of the song, though they're hampered by not being heat-related, and have their own internal issues. The line about casting a line for salty seafood is followed up by the suggestion to "keep on diving for some new fish in the sea" - first we're fishing, then we're diving, which is not the way most people catch fish (or is this a half-baked oral sex joke?). Or the line "let your tootsie roll", which is cute, but rolling your tootsie typically implies an ankle injury, so at best it's just a meaningless pun.

So many of the lyrics in this show are like that - they have to say something, so they just say whatever. It's like if Maria sang "the hills are alive with the sound of music/they're lovelier than paintings by Monet" and then went on to list the ways she loves mountain greenery in ways that have nothing to do with singing or music. 

Again, I'm being so utterly, insufferably, painfully nitpicky, but almost every song is like this, and it drove me crazy, particularly since this is on Broadway in the same cycle of shows as Shucked and Kimberly Akimbo. The former had a breakout hit with "Independently Owned", which has at least two decent jokes and a great, rolling climax, and the latter has "Anagram", which cleverly uses spoken letters as a vocal motif, plays with anagrams in the lyrics, and connects the idea of an anagram to Kimberly's desire to see and be seen in a different way.

Some Like It Hot comes kinda close with "You Coulda Knocked Me Over With A Feather", but it's sort of a mess of a song - it starts big and stays big, it sounds like too many of the other songs in the show, and the lyrics are an unruly thicket with some really haphazard rhymes (one stanza: ball, leg, well, fall, egg, chimed, bell).

In fact, I think the show's best number is "Poor Little Millionaire" for the simple reason that it adheres to a single motif (sailing), has some sort of dramatic progress (Osgood has nobody to love, then meets Daphne), and uses pastiche in a way that suits a character (of course he would stop the show for a daffy charm song about self-pity, he's the clueless wealthy son of a soda baron). It still has some clumsy lyrics (the bellhops use the word "float" right before Osgood's "root beer keeping me afloat" line, or the bit about "merging" with a sea siren) but they're at least parsable and maintain inner logic.

Updated On: 8/14/23 at 12:15 AM

[bfreak]

Posted: 8/18/23 at 9:03am

Any cast vacations coming up that anyone is aware of? Thanks!

[JSquared2]

Posted: 8/18/23 at 10:02am

Charley Kringas Inc said: "Finally caught up with this, mostly because I was hoping to like it more than I did the cast album, but unfortunately it didn't hold together for me. The big tap chase was the closest the show came to coming alive, with the kind of escalating but tightly controlled frenzy that drives great farcical musical comedy. As others have commented, though, it's nothing we haven't seen before, and I don't think it was done well enough to set it apart, as funny as the final reveal is.

The whole show has a muddled energy to it. This hit the hardest for me in the lyrics, which I didn't love on the cast album and found actively aggravating in the theatre. I like the idea behind most of them, but then the meter keeps fluctuating because they're forcing through extra syllables, and punch lines get swallowed because the inflection doesn't match the music, and often they're just kind of hard to follow because the metaphors get all mixed up and lead in a dozen different directions. I would go so far as to say that the lyrics are often lazy.

I did get a number of good laughs out of the book (I was expecting them to do more with the girl who keeps going into the wrong rooms) and I thought Daphne's arc was really well done, but there's a lot of sagging here and there. Too often it just wasn't punchy enough, and settled for being cute, charming, or amusing, which is bad for farce, particularly a musical farce where most of the songs not even trying to be funny.

It's weird because I wouldn't call it a bad show outright - it's not boring, there are a few good melodies that are energetically sung, and everyone's giving it their all. But then there's so much missing or missed that it just sort of flops along.

edit: the score really bothers me for some reason.

Zee Bap, for example, is supposed to be a rousing song about women standing up for themselves, presumably with the irony that they're being taught this by two (at that moment) men in drag. Fine! But the scat-and-stomp gag is a dud, and the song doesn't really take advantage of the scat genre. It also doesn't build, so it's just the same rigid melody with more voices, and the idea is the same from start to finish - "when a man is bad to me I say zee bap and get rid of him". The examples given aren't clever, either:

"And when a caveman like him says 'Dollface
It's time to settle down and be my wife'
Then ladies, zee bap [etc]
will tell him 'Not on your sweet life!"

There's no punchline, nothing elevating it above a really basic statement besides the fact that it rhymes.

Or this stanza from Take It Up A Step:

"So when we hit the bandstand
For the time to sink or sail
We all were pros because we did the prep
Cause when the rhythm starts a-callin
And it's time for you to wail
Yeah ladies wake it up
And make it up
And take it up a step"

When we hit the bandstand, sure, but to sink or sail? Are bandstands seaworthy? Why boat imagery in a song that takes place on and around trains? Also, they were pros who did the prep, so "make it up"? I'm being unbelievably nitpicky but this is the kind of idea salad that plagues this whole show and muffles the effect of the songs.

The title song is particularly bizarre. Sue starts it with a metaphor about choosing your life like items on a menu. Ok, fine, there are lots of things you can play with, food-wise, particularly if you're going to use the "hot" metaphor, but then she switches immediately to lyrics about landscapes and weather - cool pastoral scene, warm Hawaiian clime (with a terrible bit of tortured scansion on "in a grass shack", which comes out as "inagra...shack" ). She comes back to "hot" by way of a moth drawn to a flame, and then there's an attempt at double entendre with "consummate with consumme" (presumably sex with coagulated aspic).

Why bother with the setup about the menu if you're not going to bring up food until halfway through the song? In fact, of the three references to things that are hot, only one is food. The first is the moth flame, the second is egg foo young, and the third is hell. There are more food references towards the end of the song, though they're hampered by not being heat-related, and have their own internal issues. The line about casting a line for salty seafood is followed up by the suggestion to "keep on diving for some new fish in the sea" - first we're fishing, then we're diving, which is not the way most people catch fish (or is this a half-baked oral sex joke?). Or the line "let your tootsie roll", which is cute, but rolling your tootsie typically implies an ankle injury, so at best it's just a meaningless pun.

So many of the lyrics in this show are like that - they have to say something, so they just say whatever. It's like if Maria sang "the hills are alive with the sound of music/they're lovelier than paintings by Monet" and then went on to list the ways she loves mountain greenery in ways that have nothing to do with singing or music.

Again, I'm being so utterly, insufferably, painfully nitpicky, but almost every song is like this, and it drove me crazy, particularly since this is on Broadway in the same cycle of shows as Shucked and Kimberly Akimbo. The former had a breakout hit with "Independently Owned", which has at least two decent jokes and a great, rolling climax, and the latter has "Anagram", which cleverly uses spoken letters as a vocal motif, plays with anagrams in the lyrics, and connects the idea of an anagram to Kimberly's desire to see and be seen in a different way.

Some Like It Hot comes kinda close with "You Coulda Knocked Me Over With A Feather", but it's sort of a mess of a song - it starts big and stays big, it sounds like too many of the other songs in the show, and the lyrics are an unruly thicket with some really haphazard rhymes (one stanza: ball, leg, well, fall, egg, chimed, bell).

In fact, I think the show's best number is "Poor Little Millionaire" for the simple reason that it adheres to a single motif (sailing), has some sort of dramatic progress (Osgood has nobody to love, then meets Daphne), and uses pastiche in a way that suits a character (of course he would stop the show for a daffy charm song about self-pity, he's the clueless wealthy son of a soda baron). It still has some clumsy lyrics (the bellhops use the word "float" right before Osgood's "root beer keeping me afloat" line, or the bit about "merging" with a sea siren) but they're at least parsable and maintain inner logic."

 

Jeezus, it's a fun, flashy Broadway musical comedy --- not a doctoral thesis -- lighten up!

 

[Charley Kringas Inc]

Posted: 8/18/23 at 11:43am

JSquared2 said: "Jeezus, it's a fun, flashy Broadway musical comedy --- not a doctoral thesis -- lighten up!"

I found it funny, flashy, and energetic, but lacking as a musical, which is a complaint I've seen more than once about this show, and I was intrigued as to why. I'll admit that I'm an overenthusiastic analyzer but I find the craft of lyric writing to be fascinating, particularly in cases like this where they clearly have the reach, but the grasp falls short due to consistent issues. Shaiman/Wittman are capable of good lyrics, so the fact that the lyrics in this show are almost uniformly their clumsiest (and mostly for the same reasons) stood out to me. They spent millions of dollars and years of effort to bring this show to Broadway, the least I can do is pay attention to it!

[DramaTeach]

Posted: 8/18/23 at 12:42pm

Seems as though the male leads have been out a bunch, especially J Harrison Ghee. Understudy is on again tonight.

[brdwyrobb0134]

Posted: 8/18/23 at 2:56pm

It's a shame this isn't doing better. It's personally my favorite of the season!

[nealb1]

Posted: 8/18/23 at 3:52pm

I've seen the show twice.  First time was in November of last year during previews, and again this past May.  Loved every minute of it.  Just fantastic!  Pure, musical comedy heaven.  And, I'll be seeing it again in November.  

 

Updated On: 8/18/23 at 03:52 PM

[ChairinMain]

Posted: 8/18/23 at 11:14pm

JSquared2 said: "Charley Kringas Inc said: "Finally caught up with this, mostly because I was hoping to like it more than I did the cast album, but unfortunately it didn't hold together for me. The big tap chase was the closest the show came to coming alive, with the kind of escalating but tightly controlled frenzy that drives great farcical musical comedy. As others have commented, though, it's nothing we haven't seen before, and I don't think it was done well enough to set it apart, as funny as the final reveal is.

The whole show has a muddled energy to it. This hit the hardest for me in the lyrics, which I didn't love on the cast album and found actively aggravating in the theatre. I like the idea behind most of them, but then the meter keeps fluctuating because they're forcing through extra syllables, and punch lines get swallowed because the inflection doesn't match the music, and often they're just kind of hard to follow because the metaphors get all mixed up and lead in a dozen different directions. I would go so far as to say that the lyrics are often lazy.

I did get a number of good laughs out of the book (I was expecting them to do more with the girl who keeps going into the wrong rooms) and I thought Daphne's arc was really well done, but there's a lot of sagging here and there. Too often it just wasn't punchy enough, and settled for being cute, charming, or amusing, which is bad for farce, particularly a musical farce where most of the songs not even trying to be funny.

It's weird because I wouldn't call it a bad show outright - it's not boring, there are a few good melodies that are energetically sung, and everyone's giving it their all. But then there's so much missing or missed that it just sort of flops along.

edit: the score really bothers me for some reason.

Zee Bap, for example, is supposed to be a rousing song about women standing up for themselves, presumably with the irony that they're being taught this by two (at that moment) men in drag. Fine! But the scat-and-stomp gag is a dud, and the song doesn't really take advantage of the scat genre. It also doesn't build, so it's just the same rigid melody with more voices, and the idea is the same from start to finish - "when a man is bad to me I say zee bap and get rid of him". The examples given aren't clever, either:

"And when a caveman like him says 'Dollface
It's time to settle down and be my wife'
Then ladies, zee bap [etc]
will tell him 'Not on your sweet life!"

There's no punchline, nothing elevating it above a really basic statement besides the fact that it rhymes.

Or this stanza from Take It Up A Step:

"So when we hit the bandstand
For the time to sink or sail
We all were pros because we did the prep
Cause when the rhythm starts a-callin
And it's time for you to wail
Yeah ladies wake it up
And make it up
And take it up a step"

When we hit the bandstand, sure, but to sink or sail? Are bandstands seaworthy? Why boat imagery in a song that takes place on and around trains? Also, they were pros who did the prep, so "make it up"? I'm being unbelievably nitpicky but this is the kind of idea salad that plagues this whole show and muffles the effect of the songs.

The title song is particularly bizarre. Sue starts it with a metaphor about choosing your life like items on a menu. Ok, fine, there are lots of things you can play with, food-wise, particularly if you're going to use the "hot" metaphor, but then she switches immediately to lyrics about landscapes and weather - cool pastoral scene, warm Hawaiian clime (with a terrible bit of tortured scansion on "in a grass shack", which comes out as "inagra...shack" ). She comes back to "hot" by way of a moth drawn to a flame, and then there's an attempt at double entendre with "consummate with consumme" (presumably sex with coagulated aspic).

Why bother with the setup about the menu if you're not going to bring up food until halfway through the song? In fact, of the three references to things that are hot, only one is food. The first is the moth flame, the second is egg foo young, and the third is hell. There are more food references towards the end of the song, though they're hampered by not being heat-related, and have their own internal issues. The line about casting a line for salty seafood is followed up by the suggestion to "keep on diving for some new fish in the sea" - first we're fishing, then we're diving, which is not the way most people catch fish (or is this a half-baked oral sex joke?). Or the line "let your tootsie roll", which is cute, but rolling your tootsie typically implies an ankle injury, so at best it's just a meaningless pun.

So many of the lyrics in this show are like that - they have to say something, so they just say whatever. It's like if Maria sang "the hills are alive with the sound of music/they're lovelier than paintings by Monet" and then went on to list the ways she loves mountain greenery in ways that have nothing to do with singing or music.

Again, I'm being so utterly, insufferably, painfully nitpicky, but almost every song is like this, and it drove me crazy, particularly since this is on Broadway in the same cycle of shows as Shucked and Kimberly Akimbo. The former had a breakout hit with "Independently Owned", which has at least two decent jokes and a great, rolling climax, and the latter has "Anagram", which cleverly uses spoken letters as a vocal motif, plays with anagrams in the lyrics, and connects the idea of an anagram to Kimberly's desire to see and be seen in a different way.

Some Like It Hot comes kinda close with "You Coulda Knocked Me Over With A Feather", but it's sort of a mess of a song - it starts big and stays big, it sounds like too many of the other songs in the show, and the lyrics are an unruly thicket with some really haphazard rhymes (one stanza: ball, leg, well, fall, egg, chimed, bell).

In fact, I think the show's best number is "Poor Little Millionaire" for the simple reason that it adheres to a single motif (sailing), has some sort of dramatic progress (Osgood has nobody to love, then meets Daphne), and uses pastiche in a way that suits a character (of course he would stop the show for a daffy charm song about self-pity, he's the clueless wealthy son of a soda baron). It still has some clumsy lyrics (the bellhops use the word "float" right before Osgood's "root beer keeping me afloat" line, or the bit about "merging" with a sea siren) but they're at least parsable and maintain inner logic."



Jeezus, it's a fun, flashy Broadway musical comedy --- not a doctoral thesis -- lighten up!

"

Naaaaah even fun, flashy musicals require a certain amount of craft. Shaiman and Whitman are capable of better technical writing than is on display here. HAIRSPRAY and SMASH are both full of splendid lyric-writing on a technical level, Some Like it Hot attempting to recapture the same mood, is largely on the sloppy side. 

[Jarethan]

Posted: 8/18/23 at 11:53pm

I personally concluded that my disappointment with the show lay firmly in the mediocre music and lyrics.  Given the professionalism of the direction, choreography, performances (excluding one), all design elements and the book, how could I have felt so let down??  I left the theatre humming a little bit of the title song, but that was it.  If the music and lyrics had been better, I would have been a big hit.  I have come to think of them as one hit wonders, and Hairspray was a long time ago.

I even blame my disappointment with one performance, the actor who played Sugar, on the terrible songs she had to sing.  As I remember from my viewing 3 months ago, they all sounded the same…too many ballads.  

[kdogg36]

Posted: 8/19/23 at 11:30am

JSquared2 said: "Jeezus, it's a fun, flashy Broadway musical comedy --- not a doctoral thesis -- lighten up!"

I personally think it's great when posters take a deep dive like this. I'm an analytic, academic type of person, though.

With respect, I do wish that those responding would do some pruning rather than quoting the entirety of the long post, though. 

[dramamama611]

Posted: 8/19/23 at 12:33pm

I thought it was sweet, but not much more. I had fun, and then just forgot about it. I certainly wouldn't "warn" anyone to stay away , but I'm also not recommending it to anyone. 

 

 

[Charley Kringas Inc]

Posted: 8/30/23 at 4:10pm

Per this Reddit post regarding their Instagram story, Borle was out today and J Harrison Ghee will be out of the show for the next six weeks due to surgery (I also watched the story and the transcript seems correct). I haven't seen their understudy, DeMarius Copes, but Ghee was certainly a highlight of the show for me, so Copes has some shoes to fill! Hopefully Borle isn't out too long either.

[EDSOSLO858]

Posted: 8/30/23 at 4:13pm

This isn't the first instance where Ghee has missed some time due to injury in this show's run. Prayers up.

Updated On: 8/30/23 at 04:13 PM

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 8/30/23 at 4:16pm

Was Casey Garvin on today? Will he be on tonight??

[EDSOSLO858]

Posted: 8/30/23 at 4:18pm

Jordan Catalano said: "Was Casey Garvin on today? Will he be on tonight??"

KJ Hippensteel is on for Joe/Josephine/Kip both shows today.

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 8/30/23 at 4:19pm

[BCfitasafiddle]

Posted: 8/30/23 at 4:20pm

Noooooo. I'm so sorry to hear about Ghee! God, I hope the show lasts 6 more weeks for them to return. 

[gibsons2]

Posted: 8/30/23 at 4:22pm

Charley Kringas Inc said: "Per this Reddit post regarding their Instagram story, Borle was out today andJ Harrison Ghee will be out of the show for the next six weeks due to surgery(I also watched the story and the transcript seems correct). I haven't seen their understudy, DeMarius Copes, but Ghee was certainly a highlight of the show for me, so Copes has some shoes to fill! Hopefully Borle isn't out too long either."

I saw DeMarius Copes and he's fantastic. He certainly has some big shoes to fill in, but he's definitely up to this task. 

Updated On: 8/30/23 at 04:22 PM

[Dylan Smith4]

Posted: 8/30/23 at 5:23pm

Here’s to a speedy recovery for Ghee! They were magnificent in the show! 

[ErmengardeStopSniveling]

Posted: 8/30/23 at 6:12pm

Wishing them a speedy recovery.

[OppositeBarracuda91]

Posted: 10/3/23 at 10:08pm

Has anybody rushed recently? How were the seats?

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 10/4/23 at 5:13pm

Thanks to those who contacted me to let me know Casey was on for Joe today. I rearranged my schedule and, of course, was there. Y’all rock. xoxo

[GiantsInTheSky2]

Posted: 10/4/23 at 6:45pm

What did you think of his performance? 

[TaffyDavenport]

Posted: 10/11/23 at 6:02pm

According to their Instagram story, J. Harrison Ghee is back at work tonight.

[EDSOSLO858]

Posted: 10/11/23 at 6:10pm

TaffyDavenport said: "According to their Instagram story, J. Harrison Ghee is back at work tonight."

Great news! Now I hope Tia Altinay can return from her ACL tear from last November and close the show too.

Updated On: 10/11/23 at 06:10 PM