Also this issue:

Play Time
CP’s theater critics take a look at a few current productions.
-David Anthony Fox and Toby Zinman

Two Worlds Colliding
Fine installation links two diverse exhibits at DaVinci Art Alliance.
-Robin Rice

Asians Misbehavin'
-Juliet Fletcher

Company B Program
-Deni Kasrel

Ronald K. Brown/Evidence
-Deni Kasrel

Flamenco Olé!
-Janet Anderson

Marcel Marceau
-Janet Anderson

March 27-April 2, 2003

artpicks

Some Like It Hot

by Steve Cohen

"I started my career like a king, ended up like a pauper for a while, and I worked my way through it," says 77-year-old Tony Curtis from a Florida hotel room, as the musical Some Like It Hot heads for an opening in Wilmington this weekend. It is a new stage musical version of the 1959 movie that many critics call the best film comedy of all time.

In the movie, Curtis and Jack Lemmon played a pair of musicians on the lam from the mob in Prohibition-era Chicago. They become Josephine and Daphne to hide out in an all-female band whose singer is Marilyn Monroe. In this musical, Curtis is Osgood Fielding III, the playboy millionaire who romances Daphne. In the film, Fielding was played by Joe E. Brown. It’s the fourth-biggest part, but Curtis is the show’s headliner. As the movie’s sole surviving principal, he connects the musical to its source. "My Osgood Fielding is a really intriguing fellow. Eccentric, handsome millionaire: There isn’t anything in the world he can’t have. … It’s typecasting!’’

"Maybe some of the people come to see this because of the fact that I was in the original," he says. "I think the producers are using me as bait -- like I don’t know."

"Theater is so unusual, so completely different from film," he adds. "Before this, I’d never spoken scripted lines before a live audience. I never heard the audience. In moviemaking, there’s nobody out there in the dark. I like the idea of doing a show live because it’s so unpredictable. You never know how a line is going to come out. Some nights I convolute a line in ways I can’t even imagine."

Curtis is touring in Some Like It Hot until June. Traveling with him is his fifth wife, Jill Ann VandenBerg, 32.

The show is re-conceived from a 1972 musical adaptation of the film called Sugar, which was a moderate success on Broadway. The new book is by Peter Stone. The new show’s music uses Sugar’s score, by the late Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, plus other songs from Styne’s large catalog.

Some Like It Hot, March 28-April 6, $45-$63, The Playhouse Theatre, 11th and Market sts., Wilmington, Del., 800-338-0881.