Some Like It Hot - Oh boy! This is a tough one. Had they changed the name to Some Like it Hotter, I'd been a bit more empathetic with some of the changes. This show is more "woke" than Fox and Friends! As a primer, Some Like it Hot is probably my second favorite film, behind another Billy Wilder film The Apartment. It is Silver Screen perfection! I think one must venture very very carefully when modifying anything Wilder has done.
Sweet Sue is provided a more centralized role in the film, likely to pad out the musical. While not the star of the show, she certainly feels like the central foundation of it. She and Gerald's characters are black, which comes into the musical for about the first quarter of the show, and then they forget about it. The person playing Sugar (Monroe's character) is also Black, but they don't really ever go in to it with her character, so it is uncertain if she is playing a white girl or not, like Eliza Doolittle's father in My Fair Lady (a bit more obvious in that show. Sugar is played as her own character, as trying to fill Monroe's void-less charisma is impossible. Funny, I'd say the person playing sugar was likely much more talented than Monroe, but she was so much smaller than Monroe on stage. Odd how charisma works.
They generally follow along with the story, just with a bit more discreteness on the shooting. The first half of the show, which takes them down (and over) to San Diego, felt a lot like filler. A few songs fill in the gaps of the film, providing background, some more effectively than others. Broadway shows have cliché bits, that I wish they'd recognize was cliché.
The second half of the show uses music a lot more effectively at filling in gaps of the film. Gerald/Daphne meets the wealthy suiter, who plays the cliché role of the outside looking in goofball element. He does it well, but it was again... cliché.
The chase scene that develops near the end is very very well choreographed! Spats isn't in town for the fans of the opera convention, but rather to ice the two witnesses (which is a bit odd seeing you'd let goons do that stuff, you wouldn't do that yourself as a mob boss). So the ending is little less bloody, but well performed.
The trouble comes about with the Transgender angle, which, while it got a few hoots and hollars, felt unrealistic, ham fisted, and brutally inorganic. Gerald discovers he is gender fluid. But his road to get to this point was extraordinarily undeveloped, making it a forced plot device rather than anything regarding inner discovery, growth, etc... It also fucks up the entire comic premise of the plot and how it ends! Worse, the rich guy doesn't even need to be told what's going on... he seems to have known and is good with it. I look too deeply into some of this stuff, but in a comedy, a lustful old guy going for a guy only pretending to be a woman is funny. Trying to twist that into a lustful old guy meaningfully falling in love with a guy who was pretending to be a woman but now thinks he is 50/50... all as a fair accompli? Oi! Lazy and illegitimate writing!
Speaking of which,, my issue with this then gets exposed more with Sugar and Joe. Sugar and Joe get together in the end in Some Like It Hot not because either of them changes. They finish the film as the exact same flawed people they enter into it. You know it is doomed! You don't dwell much on it due to the line "Nobody's perfect" that sends the movie out with Gerald befuddled as to what is to come next. In this show, Joe is the same manipulative guy, manipulating the situation, lying to Sugar. But they pretend that he is a diamond in the rough... when in fact the only time he is honest is when he admits who he is. Sugar then goes on about how she saw the golden hearts of both of the faux people Joe was playing (ie making up and lying about). And so she falls for Joe. WTF?! You got Gerald who has this inner discovery on his identity and determines he feels he is both a man and woman... and the main female star who is way out of Joe's league does the ole Hollywood high prospect female going for the middle-aged bum... the anti-My Fair Lady adaptation update. Again, a forced meaningful connecting of hearts.
With a show, there are limitations with doing certain things, like shooting a tommy gun after popping out of a birthday cake. So I can appreciate some of the modifications that will lead to, though they could have swapped things up a little bit better. I felt the music could have been a bit less filler. Had the first act been a bit less filler, that'd made the show more enjoyable. The trouble in the end is the incongruent social adaptations really held the show back from being better. As per the norm, the show quality was top rate. The cast brilliant, Sweet Sue holds the show together brilliantly. Sweet Sue's assistant probably had the best comic lines as well, if not a little bit obvious, but well performed.
9 of 4 
