Catch Me If You Can

When I started this blog in January, one of my stated goals was to get free tickets to something, so imagine my delight when I got a pair of seats to Catch Me If You Can as part of Bloggers Night. Why they'd choose to do this now when the show is closing in a few weeks in kind of beyond me.

Two things:
a) I'd like to participate in more events like this (I like free things!), so it seems counterintuitive to give a bad review to the first show I got free tickets for.
b) Giving a bad review to a show shortly after it posted its closing notice really feels like kicking someone while they're down.

You sense where this is going, right?

Let's get some more things out of the way: I LOVED Hairspray. I'd put it in the top 5 musicals of the last decade. I know there are those who feel it was too sanitized for Broadway, but I disagree. I really felt like the show was tighter and stronger than the John Waters movie (which I also love). I realize this is basically blasphemy, but I don't care. I loved the songs, the staging, the cast, the set...everything came together perfectly. So when I heard the creators were doing Catch Me If You Can, I was damned excited. I even caught the out of town try-out because I happened to be in Seattle when it played. I was really let down, but I had hoped they'd do the work that needed to be done to make it really shine on Broadway.

What's playing now is, in fact, a tighter, stronger show than I saw in Seattle. But I still wouldn't say it's good. The quickest of plot run-downs: Frank Abagnale, Jr. becomes a con man, fleeces banks out of two million dollars, flies five million miles as a fake Pan Am pilot, lands a job as an ER supervisor after faking a medical license, and even manages to pass the bar. Along the way, he is pursued by FBI Agent Hanrahatty. Imagine what could have been done with this story if all of its hard edges and psychological depth weren't replaced by vaudeville numbers and odes to sexy nurses. Imagine what it could have been if Kander and Ebb had gotten a hold of it--now whitewash that.

As Abagnale, the adorable and clarion voiced Aaron Tveit is charming but shows none of the panache, joy, or neuroses that would make someone risk everything they had (repeatedly) in pursuit of the next big get. Norbert Leo Butz fares better as Hanrahatty (and won the Lead Actor Tony for what I would argue is a supporting role)--he's hammy and fun, but he's more cartoon than three dimensional character.

The show most suffers from a lack of focus. Presented as a television special (a conceit that makes virtually no sense), we are occasionally addressed directly, no chance for a big dance number is passed up, and we're almost forced to view the action at a further remove. This is Abagnale narrating his own story (except when he isn't because he isn't in the scene so we arbitrarily shift focus), but he's too much of a cipher to actually give us a vision singular enough to have weight.

For all the energy on stage, this is an astonishingly okay show. There's enough sheer effort that it should tip it towards great or terrible, but instead it just sits there, inert. It has also, inexplicably, been given what looks like the cheapest production on Broadway. The set is one of the ugliest I've ever seen (a tacky white bandshell and some awkward scrims), and the costumes range from bland to truly hideous. Money also seems to have been saved by not employing dialect coaches (there probably are some, but I didn't check), because present on stage are the worst French and the worst New Orleans accent I've ever heard.

This is the kind of production that I feel like I could pick away at for hours because there are so many elements that could and should have gone right but on level after level it simply misses the mark so there's no one person with whom the blame can be placed. Beyond the set design, nothing is truly awful, it just...is.

But I still appreciate the free tickets! Try me again??