Comparing a Broadway adaptation of “Some Like It Hot” with the original illustrates the difference between a good night out and genius
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskIt is invidious to compare a film of 1959 with a musical adaptation staged today. And not just any film: “Some Like It Hot” is one of the greatest of all time and probably the best comedy. Invidious but inevitable, and instructive: about the distance between then and now, the virtues of subtlety and the rich grey areas to be found in black-and-white movies.
The musical retains most of the plot and some of the dialogue and gags. But amid the new songs—several of them corkers—and the roof-lifting choreography, the story has been tweaked. In a delirious screen sequence that might now be called post-modern, Curtis’s character impersonates a millionaire to seduce Monroe’s, imitating Cary Grant’s accent as part of the act. Here, in a nod to Wilder, he pretends to be a German screenwriter.
This is a salutary update. The gender politics have been revamped too. The film draws some broad laughs from the spectacle of men Amid the smooching, innuendoes and couchette parties, the film’s most radical moment comes in a less famous line . “I’m Daphne,” says Lemmon’s character when first introduced as a woman, spontaneously ditching her intended name, Geraldine. An independent persona is born, which—comically yet sincerely—soon takes off and over. As Curtis put it in a racy memoir of the movie, the implication is that “a person can be more than one thing.
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