MUSICAL REVIEW There's lots to like in 'Scoundrels'

Top-flight cast complements David Yazbeck's appealing score.
By PETER MARKS
WASHINGTON POST
NEW YORK -- Falling in love may be too much to ask of an evening with "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," but there are plenty of reasons for falling in like. It's pure escapist silliness -- musical mischief dressed up in ritzy threads and fancy rhymes. If the sparkle dulls from time to time, what of it? Your hosts for the festivities are well versed in the art of entertaining, determined to keep the refreshment flowing until all of us feel good and tipsy.
Based on the 1988 movie of the same title, "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," which opened Thursday at the Imperial Theatre, is a real wisenheimer of a musical, and for that we can be grateful. In the category of well-made repository of the show tune, "Scoundrels" is the Broadway season's first sign of intelligent life. Composer-lyricist David Yazbek -- responsible for the underappreciated music for the 2000 stage version of "The Full Monty" -- provides another droll and appealing score here, on a polished par with some of the delicious comic songwriting of the past. (Anyone with the brass to rhyme "Oklahoma" and "melanoma," or, for that matter, "pajamas" and "Lorenzo Lamas," is all right by me.)
Lithgow is superb
A top-flight cast has been assembled to execute the musical's screwball -- and occasionally lowball -- antics. Leading the way are a preening John Lithgow, at his supercilious best, and the prodigiously talented Norbert Leo Butz, in a performance so earthy and ripe you can smell it. They portray a pair of mismatched bunco artists at play and at odds on the glittering sands of the Riviera. Their Bob-Hope-and-Bing-Crosby-style friction constitutes the enjoyable, wiseacre's soul of the show. Sherie Rene Scott, playing a gullible Midwestern tourist, makes a comely third wheel, but wide-eyed naivet & eacute; does not come naturally to her.
"Scoundrels" often feels as if it is paying homage to those '30s musical comedies by the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hart, breezy shows like "Babes in Arms" and "Strike Up the Band" that didn't worry about being mistaken for art. "Scoundrels' " heart is in something of the same place. Yazbek and the clever book writer Jeffrey Lane steal openly and brazenly -- this is a musical about confidence men, after all -- down to lifting a line verbatim from "My Fair Lady." (Which, by the way, stole the line from its own source, George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion.")
Blue-collar work
The accent in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" is often on the, uh, dirty. Not porno dirty, no. Let's just say the production is not afraid to work blue. Yazbek is a guy's guy of a composer, as he demonstrated in "The Full Monty," which may come to be remembered as the heyday of Yazbek's specialty -- the slobsical. You can see how this sensibility plays out in "Scoundrels." He reserves a lot of his best material for Butz's seedy Freddy Benson, an unlikely con artist among the more continental flimflam men of the south of France.
To wit: Butz offers a slam-dunk rendition of the first-act rap number, "Great Big Stuff," that lays out Freddy's Budweiser wishes and Mallomar dreams. "Oh give me a home," he croons, "where the centerfolds roam." Later, Butz, impersonating a simpleton brother to help Lithgow's snooty Lawrence Jameson scare off an overbearing Oklahoma cowgirl (the vivacious Sara Gettelfinger), is singing of some of his unseemly obsessions, which will not be described any further.
Some of the low-road lyrics seem designed to make overgrown fraternity pledges feel at home. They do no lethal harm, but Freddy's charmlessness -- and the lack of an ineffably adorable dimension to Butz's performance -- exaggerates rather than mitigates the coarseness. Still, Butz proves highly skilled at physical comedy, and his slovenly shtick is well paired with Lithgow's clownish fop. It's great to see Lithgow -- whose matinee idol suavity is conjured here by sheer force of will -- in tiptop madcap form.
Sometimes, "Scoundrels" lets you down. Yazbek is not quite as persuasive with a love song, and, like virtually everything else produced these days, the show could use a bit of a trim. Yet there's enough gleeful irreverence to discount the flaws. Set designer David Rockwell knew what he was doing when he decked the fronds of the palm trees in rhinestones. There are occasions when it's just plain fun to spot the fakes.
X"Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," approximately 2 hours 35 minutes at the Imperial Theatre, 249 W. 45th St., New York; (800) 432-7250; www.telecharge.com.