DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS: Nothing not to like if you liked it before. |
There are more echoes in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (at the Opera House through March 18) than rattle around the Grand Canyon. The most insistent is that of TheProducers — not a bad show to imitate if you’re looking for a Broadway hit. Also based on a film about a pair of con men who extract cash from wealthy ladies, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the 2005 Broadway musical based on the 1988 Frank Oz film of the same name, recalls the Mel Brooks hit not just in its plot but also in its bawdy comedy and merry self-mockery.
There’s no “Springtime for Hitler — and Germany” in this musical remake by television writer Jeffrey Lane and Full Monty composer/lyricist David Yazbek, here directed with cartoon zing by Jack O’Brien. Just high summer on the French Riviera, where suavely self-smitten Lawrence Jameson (Tom Hewitt) poses as an exiled prince to woo well-heeled American females out of their cash and tiaras until bumpkin grifter Freddy Benson (D.B. Bonds) shows up to horn in on his territory, hustling the rich dames with tales of a sick grandma. The two swindlers hit heights of absurdity trying to work together before scaling more savage silliness in a competition to wrangle $50,000 from a Suzanne Somers–like blonde (Laura Marie Duncan) whose soubriquet “the American soap queen” ought to warn them who’ll get taken to the cleaners.
Don’t get me wrong: the winking, energetic, pun- and innuendo-filled Dirty Rotten Scoundrels isn’t bad. Certainly its madcap, fourth-wall-breaking shenanigans are a relief from the ponderousness of the Andrew Lloyd Webber–like musicals that have all but sucked the comedy out of the musical-comedy genre. And there are a couple of very funny send-ups: the overwrought romantic ballad “Love Is My Legs” and the white-boy hip-hop travesty “Great Big Stuff,” through which the Ritalin-infused Bonds bumps like K-Fed. But to find more delight than déjà vu here, you have to have a healthy appetite for the recycled — from the innocent vulgarity of The Producers to the bright cynicism of Chicago to the sparkly Riviera settings of La Cage aux Folles to the slinky movie melodies of Henry Mancini that keep intruding on the bouncy, unmemorable score. In other words, there’s nothing here not to like if you don’t mind having liked it all before.
Closer to harsh reality, if not to realism, is John ADEkoje’s Six Rounds/Six Lessons, which is being given its world premiere by Company One (at the BCA Plaza through March 31). The Nigerian-American ADEkoje is a past winner of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, but he does not write plays set in the living room. This one, described by the author as a “tragicomic hip-hop concerto,” is set in and around a boxing ring and is refereed by a DJ spinning a sort of soundtrack — mostly hip-hop, some of it original — to the urban African-American characters’ lives. Neither does he aspire to the plainspoken eloquence of A Raisin in the Sun. He’d rather unwind his cyclical tale of paternal abandonment and young people struggling against street violence in the heightened language of Raisin’s title inspiration, Langston Hughes. But though the heightened situation of the play, which is set against a backdrop of black history, works, its excursions into poetic talk, as opposed to hip-hop rhyme, do not. There are occasional striking phrases (the failed father speaks of pouring his family “down to the bottom of a liquor glass”), but the story is more effectively told in the language of the streets, which has a hard, hip imagery of its own.
