Some Like It Hot: The Musical has opened on Broadway – you can read a selection of reviews here, with a special focus on how Sugar Kane, Marilyn’s character in the movie, has been reimagined for the stage.
“The basic plot remains the same … The musical, however, moves the events from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, to 1933, in the waning days of Prohibition.
This time around, Joe (Tony winner Christian Borle) is white but Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee) is Black, as is Sugar (Adrianna Hicks) and the bandleader Sweet Sue (NaTasha Yvette Williams). And instead of Florida in the Deep South, the band heads to Hollywood, where the perpetually heartbroken Sugar hopes not to find a millionaire but to become a movie star … The book has to do a lot of work in keeping the energy of the original in place while updating the world of 1933 for a 2023 audience, and it mostly succeeds.
Then there’s Adrianna Hicks who is, in short, a star. Remember those? Originating the role of Sugar, in her very capable hands, Hicks makes Sugar the next great leading lady of the musical comedy stage. She carries the emotional heft of the show, as Marilyn Monroe did in the film, with her two numbers ‘At the Old Majestic Nickel Matinee’ and ‘Ride Out the Storm,’ which also showcase both her vocal and dramatic range.”
– Lester Fabian Braithwaite, Entertainment Weekly
“As Sugar, Hicks is as starry-eyed and heartbroken in love as Marilyn’s version, but she brings it to a more grounded, less vampy level. Alas, Hicks’s emphatic facial gestures are wildly distracting, and it’s hard to understand Joe’s obsessive craving for her—a more exquisite Sugar would have sweetened the pot—though by the end, Hicks does belt out a sensationally bluesy ‘Ride Out the Storm,’ and even lands her punchlines.”
– Michael Musto, Village Voice
“Where the show disappoints is the score, even though the performances, arrangements and orchestrations are always top shelf. While the title song is smashing (and cleverly used in advanced promotion of the show), most of the rest of the tunes are merely OK, with lyrics that are often metaphorically tiresome and too on-the-nose. Sugar’s numbers, which should be captivating — and which Hicks delivers with all she’s got — are just generic.”
– Frank Rizzo, Variety
“I didn’t find the humour adequately replaced in the musical … The comic bits that worked best were more or less verbatim from the movie. What works best overall for me in the musical Some Like It Hot is the music – and the performers who deliver it, especially NaTasha Yvette Williams, whose character the bandleader Sweet Sue thankfully gets a much larger role in the show than the character did in the movie. Most of the melodies aren’t distinct enough to be memorable, but they make for lively listening in the moment.”
– Jonathan Mandell, New York Theatre
“Playing Sugar, Adrianna Hicks has a powerful voice, but Monroe’s je ne sais quois is missed. So much of the character, we realise, was Monroe’s iconic personality — and without it there’s not much left except the script not knowing what to do with Sugar’s drinking problem … The funniest people in the show, actually, are NaTasha Yvette Williams as Sweet Sue and Angie Schworer as the Society Syncopators’ manager of sorts. Kudos to them, but their prodigious skill and knack for a punchline underlines the lead actors’ lacking material.”
– Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post
“Regrettably, I find Adrianna Hicks a less thrilling member of the cast. She sings so loud you can hear her in New Jersey, but without a personality to match, there’s a sameness to her numbers that is enervating. Through the years, truthful horror stories about Marilyn Monroe’s endless problems during the filming of Some Like it Hot that nearly drove Billy Wilder insane have reached mythic proportions (57 re-takes for a three-word line?), but among her many unimpeachable charms as Sugar was a ditzy glamour the role’s current occupant seriously lacks.”
– Rex Reed, New York Observer
“Both Monroe’s character, the unlucky-in-love beauty Sugar Kane, and Lemmon’s, a double bass player named Jerry (or Daphne, in his drag alter ego) are Black here, and the discrimination they’ve faced is communicated both in punchlines and in more sober, pensive touches. In one of the latter, a yearning ballad called ‘At the Old Majestic Nickel Matinee,’ Amber, played by a sweetly plucky Adrianna Hicks, whose robust singing voice can have the texture of velvet or gleaming brass, recalls sitting in a segregated section of her local cinema as a girl, imagining ‘that it was me up there/But with Mary Pickford playing my maid.'”
– Elysa Gardner, New York Sun
“The producers decided early on to cast a Black woman as Sugar, and the show modeled the character’s persona after Lena Horne. The storm metaphors abound in her songs … Hicks’s voice seems to contain an entire brass band, and she can pull off a key change with ease, though her best number is the relatively quieter ‘At the Old Majestic Nickel Matinee.’ It’s a melancholy monologue about falling in love with the movies despite the fact that ‘not one vamp or Wall Street wife/ Held up a mirror to my life,’ and it gives Sugar’s Hollywood dreams more motivation. The only problem is that, within the confines of the plot of Some Like It Hot, there isn’t much room for Sugar to act on those dreams.”
– Jackson McHenry, Vulture
“Borle’s Joe/Josephine feels lost, or maybe just not as precisely captured as Ghee’s Jerry/Daphne … Sugar is oddly underwritten. This isn’t to compare Hicks’ performance to Marilyn Monroe’s, but rather question the rendering of her character. From the outset, Sugar knows everything, she wisecracks and whipcracks, she is nobody’s fool … It feels like there is no journey for the central female character to take because she’s basically fine from the outset … Monroe has such a vivid and varied canvas to play on in the movie, Hicks deserves the same. Her biggest laugh occurs near the end, with a perfectly delivered revelation around her identity, echoing the central theme of the show.”
– Tim Teeman, Daily Beast
“Josephine falls head over very high heels for Sugar Kane (the incandescent Adrianna Hicks, here seeming less Marilyn Monroe than Josephine Baker, all the better). Sugar, who has a secret or two of her own, is devoted to her new bestie Josephine, but really has the hots for the traveling Viennese scriptwriter Kiplinger Von Der Plotz. Does it really need pointing out that Kip is Joe who is Josephine? (The movie’s Cary Grant impersonation used by Tony Curtis, by the way, is AWOL, replaced by cartoon Teutonic that works just fine).”
– Greg Evans, Deadline
“In the movie, Sugar is out to marry a millionaire after having been left with the ‘fuzzy end of the lollipop’ by several saxophone-playing jerks. In the new musical, Sugar is out to become a movie star, which has nothing to do with all those former lousy lovers. That disconnect between the character’s goal (stardom) and her past (bad boyfriends) is a problem. In the movie, Monroe beguiles and wins our approval by trying not to repeat Sugar’s past mistakes with men. Sadder but wiser, she’s out to marry a millionaire. As played by Adrianna Hicks in the musical, though, Sugar now takes a bulldozer approach to achieving her dream … Never has more been way too much.”
– Robert Hofler, The Wrap
“López and Ruffin have also reimagined the character of Sugar, whom Marilyn Monroe played as the kind of sweetly damaged sexpot that was her specialty: ‘Monroe gives perhaps her most characteristic performance, which means that she’s both charming and embarrassing,’ wrote Pauline Kael. As rendered by Hicks (who last showed off her mix in Six), the musical’s Sugar is more refined … But if this Sugar is no longer embarrassing, she’s not quite charming either … Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman wrote the songs for TV’s Smash, and their work here suggests what that show’s show-with-in-a-show might have been like if, instead of being about Marilyn Monroe, it had been an adaptation of a Marilyn movie.”
– Adam Feldman, Time Out
“This new musical comedy, a Big Broadway rewrite of the 1959 classic movie, Some Like it Hot, offers fabulosity: huge production numbers, flashy costumes, marvelous tap dancing, and many loud, brassy songs … What the show doesn’t offer is anything like the sophistication of the movie, and of course it doesn’t have Marilyn Monroe in all her gorgeous, braless vulnerability, as well as the masterful comedy of Tony Curtis in mock-Cary Grant mode and the wonderful frenzied panic of Jack Lemmon. Rather than updating, the show has been downdated, giving audiences plenty of wholesomeness to cheer for, but missing the charm and wink and shock of its last line … Some of the songs are fun, some sentimental, with production numbers that sometimes go on too too long. Some Like it Hot a good time if you don’t mind spending a couple of hours in an irony-free zone.”
– Toby Zinman, Phindie
The Marilyn Report 
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