Playwright: music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill, book by Peter Stone. At: Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace, 100 Drury Lane, Oak Brook. Phone: 630-530-0111; $31-$45. Runs through: Aug. 1
It's one of the most no-risk premises in the history of comedy: two itinerant musicians accidentally witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Fleeing pursuit by the hit squad, their only escape is to dress up as women and join an all-female dance orchestra bound for a gig in Miami. Complications ensue when one of the men falls for the band's unlucky-in-love vocalist and the other attracts the romantic attentions of an elderlybut richsuitor.
The very perfection of Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond's screenplay, however, is what puts the score of lightweight ditties in conflict with a story steeped in expedient immediacy. Unlike musicals built from scratch, Jule Styne and Bob Merrill's songs, instead of propelling the plot, halt its progress for characters to explore their feelings at that particular moment. And so despite director Jim Corti's heroic efforts to hurdle these obstacles with alacrityamong them, a scenic conceit involving onstage grips wheeling spotlights and backdrops wherever neededwe are constantly reminded that we are experiencing music imposed upon, rather than integrated with, a text.
That said, Peter Stone's 1972 book is a decided improvement on some now-outmoded social aspects of the 1959 original: When Joe/Josephine assumes a second personathat of a millionaire playboyto flirt with the unwitting Sugar, the absence of the gratuitous Cary Grant impression adopted by Tony Curtis for the film leaves us room to consider the honorable intentions behind his otherwise caddish ruse. And while Jerry/Daphne declares his motives in encouraging his would-be Daddy to be strictly mercenary, his immersion in girlish courtship fantasies allows us to revel in his deception without reservation. Sugar, too, liberated from Marilyn Monroe mannerisms, emerges as an ingenue vulnerable, but never stupid.
Rod Thomas and Alan Schmuckler's transvestite sidemen exceed the limits of their stock-type buffoon to lend Joe and Jerry an intimacy that wins our sympathies inexorably, as does Jennifer Knox, whose sunny smile endows our title character with vivacity over vacuity as her chief trait. Joe D. Lauck likewise lends depth to the utilitarian role of the fuddly geriatric swain, as do Tammy Mader and Norm Boucher as the necessary antagonists. Playgoers willing to put aside their memories of the movieno shouting out the famous tagline ahead of the actors, you wiseacreswill find in this Drury Lane production a sweet-n-quaint entertainment not unlike those of its period setting.