Broadway's SOME LIKE IT HOT

 I'm sure I am not alone in admitting that Billy Wilder's SOME LIKE IT HOT is one of my all-time favorite classic film comedies. I love the story's cleverness of the public identity covering up the true self coupled with sexual attraction. You know that the film stars Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. At the time, Monroe (a master at playing big screen comedy) was the top international blonde bombshell sex symbol of her day. Men all over the world from major political figures to the average working class guy who lived next door to you fantasized about being alone with her. In SOME LIKE IT HOT, Lemmon and Curtis each, under their assumed identities, gets to be alone with her and next to her at night in a dimly lit space. But both must pretend to not be sexually attracted to and stimulated by her because it'll blow his cover. The two musician buddies are fleeing blood-thirsty gangsters who committed a deadly crime the buddies witnessed.

There's a running theme of pretending to be someone or something else in SOME LIKE IT HOT. Jerry and Joe pretend to be Geraldine and Daphne. The lovely but unlucky at love ukulele player, Sugar Kowalczyk, has turned herself into Sugar Kane, vocalist for an all-girl band.

And there's the all-girl band with its strict leader, Sweet Sue. The band has to play syrupy, white bread, Lawrence Welk-like dance music at a gig in Florida. But, when we hear the girls play "Runnin' Wild" on the train, we can tell they're big fans of the kind of hot jazz Louis Armstrong was recording in the 1920s. Those gals can really swing it.

Years ago, one summer's night while I was watching my DVD of SOME LIKE IT HOT, I mentally cast the Sugar Kane role if Marilyn had not been available to play her. I put Dorothy Dandridge in the role in a racially diverse version of Wilder's classic. As Lena Horne once said about Dandridge's movie star significance to the Black community, "She was our Marilyn Monroe."

In 1972, there was a Broadway musical based on Billy Wilder's 1959 classic. The musical was called SUGAR with a score by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill. Those two men also gave us the score to FUNNY GIRL starring Barbra Streisand. Now there's a new musical based on the classic film. The original score is by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the gifted pair that turned the John Waters movie comedy, HAIRSPRAY, into a Broadway musical hit,

This new version of SOME LIKE IT HOT gives us a brown Sugar. I have heard fabulous things about it from friends back in New York who saw the show which is now in previews. I'd love to see it. Opening night is set for December 11th,.

Here's a taste of it now. Adrianna Hicks plays Sugar in Broadway's new SOME LIKE IT HOT. Here, she sings a song from the show -- "A Darker Shade of Blue." Enjoy.