Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

No one wants to give up a good scam. Even when it’s clearly not working, we just want to think, maybe it’ll work. Or could it work a little bit? In the new musical DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS, that soulful recognition of failure finally dawns on Lawrence Jackson and Freddy Benson if only for a moment late in the final act. It’s an obvious moral, but it lends itself to the persistent comedy played by John Lithgow and Leo Norbert Butz.

Butz who is a fearless, self-mocking comic with a terrific singing voice pulls off GREAT BIG STUFF his first number in the show with awesome abandon. In later scenes like ALL ABOUT RUPRECHT where he portrays demented royalty, supposedly Lithgow’s younger brother, that over the top physicality turns to the kind of vulgar comedy that makes Ben Stiller popular. It’s slapstick evoking shock and awe.

Lithgow, on the other hand, plays the suave sophisticated classy con artist. But the most cheerful presence here and the most subtle is Sherie Rene Scott as "the soap queen" and the woman with whom both men fall in love. Now who’s chasing who?

Thanks to director, Jack O’Brien, SCOUNDRELS employs every contrivance and variety show element in the book. Hopefully you’re too young to recall "The Road To" movies with Bob Hope and Bing Cosby. This actually is based on the 1980's film with Steve Martin and Michael Cain.

The musical book written by Jeffrey Lane turns a stream of one-liners into everyday on- the-Riviera conversation. David Yazbek’s score delivers a diversity of styles from sappy love song to faux rock ‘n roll. But the tenor of it all resides in David Rockwell’s set of the wealthy Riviera with the love of artifice over sentiment.

Funny? Well, yah. Corny? You bet!

That’s This Week on Broadway. I’m Isa Goldberg.