A new musical adaptation of “Some Like It Hot,” a classic cross-dressing comedy that is being recalibrated for contemporary audiences, will start performances in November and open in December on Broadway, the show’s producers said Wednesday.
The musical will star Christian Borle (a two-time Tony winner, for “Peter and the Starcatcher” and “Something Rotten!”) and J. Harrison Ghee (“Kinky Boots”) as two musicians fleeing the mob after witnessing a gangland massacre, and Adrianna Hicks (“Six”) as a singer they befriend. In the acclaimed 1959 film, those roles were played by Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe.
The production, first announced four years ago, has faced challenges on its path to Broadway: One of the original producers, Craig Zadan, died; the pandemic prompted the cancellation of a pre-Broadway run in Chicago; and the whole question of how jokes about men dressing as women work has become increasingly contested.
“It’s a complicated picture, bracingly ahead of its time in some ways, wincingly dated in others,” A.O. Scott, a critic at large and the co-chief film critic for The New York Times, wrote in 2020.
The job of reimagining the story, still set in Prohibition-era Chicago, falls to Matthew López, the Tony-winning writer of “The Inheritance,” and Amber Ruffin, the writer and talk show host. The songs are by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who previously wrote the Tony-winning score for “Hairspray.”
Casey Nicholaw, the Tony-winning director of “The Book of Mormon,” will direct and choreograph.
“Some Like It Hot” is being produced by the Shubert Organization and Neil Meron, along with MGM on Stage, Roy Furman, Robert Greenblatt, James L. Nederlander and Kenny Leon. The musical will be capitalized for up to $17.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The show is scheduled to begin performances Nov. 1 and to open Dec. 11 at the Shubert Theater.
