Theater review: Good Company’s ‘Sugar’ is sweetly acted, but the dated premise can leave a sour taste
By Donald Munro
I saw the Good Company Players production of “Sugar,” aka the older version of the “Some Like It Hot” musical, several weeks ago, and I’ve let the material ping around my brain, trying to get some order to my thoughts in terms of why and when an older Broadway show can be problematic. Here’s what I came up with: Sometimes contemporary cultural/political developments can so outpace a creative endeavor, even when the material is lighthearted and scrupulously placed in a period setting, that the experience becomes dissonant. It’s difficult to immerse oneself in the world presented on stage without being dragged out of it by eye-rolling references.
Stated a little less formally: The men-in-drag gag is tough to pull off today.
Pictured above: Erik Bako, left, and Jeremy Marks make a cute couple in “Sugar.” Photo: Good Company Players
Especially when the show is about two men posing as women fleeing to Florida for sanctuary. Florida, of all places. Unless there’s a musical number rhyming a lyric with “DeSantis,” there’s no way to keep “Sugar” – with its jokes about lingerie and men marrying each other and lighthearted physical comedy depicting male torsos staggering in high heels – from seeming out of touch.
Many Broadway shows feature men dressing as women for comic effect, “Hairspray” and “Matilda” among them (not to mention Shakespeare), and the drag component does not seem problematic in them. I think it’s because no one in the world of these musicals actually acknowledges the drag in those shows. The audience gets the joke, yes, but the humor doesn’t derive from the characters addressing or responding to it. What’s more, the humor in these titles doesn’t rely on the idea of drag as inherently ridiculous, as if having to dress and act as a woman is played as kind of demeaning.
In “Sugar” (playing through July 14 at Roger Rocka’s Dinner Theater), many of the laughs are specifically keyed to the idea of cross-dressing. What likely was belly-laugh funny in the 1950s, or the 1970s, or even the early 2000s, plays out much differently in a time of preferred pronouns and anti-drag legislation. In the past few years, even the mention of drag has become a vehement political dog whistle. Library story hours, transgender rights, hell and hand baskets, high school athletic “cheating” horrors and Biblical admonitions get tossed together, often inaccurately, into a sinister stew.
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In order to combat and balance those talking points, drag has been embraced by folks on the other side of the political spectrum as an act of empowerment.
No wonder joking about it – much less basing an entire plot on it – gets harder to pull off.
Yes, but I hear some of you say, this is a story written in the 1950s and set in the 1930s. Can’t we just skip back to simpler times for a few hours and forget politics? I’m sure some people certainly can. Others can’t. I find myself in the latter camp.
The Good Company Players production is directed by Elizabeth Fiester, who tries to sweep the cringey stuff under the rug as much as she can. A charming Trinity Mikel, as the title character, brings a sassy belt and peppy presence, with her performance of “We Could Be Close” a highlight. Lex Martin is solid comically and vocally as Joe, who later goes by Josephine. He’s one of the two pals who dress as women to fit in with an all-female nightclub band after they witness a gangland killing. An inspired Erik Bako gets in some goofy licks as the besmitten Sir Osgood Fielding, the millionaire who falls for the other female impersonator once the “girls” reach Miami.
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And there’s a lot of comic spark from the hard-working Jeremy Marks as Jerry, who becomes Daphne. (Marks has excelled in a number of roles, and this is the GCP veteran’s final show for a while before heading off to the acclaimed musical theater program at Cal State Fullerton.) In a featured role as a tap-dancing gangster, Peter Marks wrings every last laugh out of his solo moments.
Still, the premise is more often leaden than light. Daphne isn’t exactly a convincing woman – with her curly wig and Marks’ height, “she” looks like the love child of Shirley Temple and the Jolly Green Giant. As an audience member, I’m not sure what to do with that. Are Josephine and Daphne really fooling the women in the band? Is Osgood oblivious to his newly beloved’s five o’clock shadow? Or is everyone in on the ruse in a nudge-wink way? The original “Some Like It Hot” offered a smidgen of awareness, especially with its extremely famous last line (which I won’t ruin for you here), but mostly it played everything straight, so to speak.
I don’t blame Fiester or GCP for not being able to work around the creakiness of the material. This can be the hazard of staging older titles, at least at the community theater and regional level: You aren’t supposed to change copyrighted material, at least the words as spoken and sung.
As a coincidence, a new musical version of “Some Like It Hot” – bearing the original title and featuring a different book and songs – hit Broadway in 2022. I haven’t seen it, but considering that J. Harrison Ghee, who portrayed Daphne, was the first non-binary actor to win a Tony Award, it’s obvious that the storyline meandered in a much more modern direction. Compared to “Sugar,” that sounds like a sweet move.
Steph
Such an incredibly difficult job to pick a season for a community theatre barely making ends meet – in Fresno of all places.
Ginger (the hardest working costumer in show biz) once told me “art doesn’t sell” in Fresno.
And GCP needs to cater to their base of those who remember the ‘50’s fondly while hoping all those grandkids who get brought to the shows become new dedicated (and hopefully donating) fans. Thank goodness for the milkshakes.*
So we get the Sugar, we gleam at the Beautiful, the Fiddler returned to hear the Sound of Music, all so hopefully the middle aged will pack the house fire Legally Blonde. Meanwhile they’ll sneak in a Secret Garden and maybe all these fans will stand and cheer.
They do what they can to survive while possibly longing for the smaller stagings of art in Selma. Dan Pessano et al give 100% no matter what, and well, nobody’s perfect.
*I must say the food there is absolutely some of the best in town. The dinner shows are worth savoring.
Roger Christensen
Billy Wilder’s film is not “set in the 50s” but a century ago and as a German Jew who escaped Hitler his influences were two international hits: the first “Victor and Victoria” from Germany in 1933 and specifically the 1935 French “Fanfare d’Amour”. These were not “simpler times”.
I am sorry so many have lost their sense of humor and context about “men in drag” comedies. In addition to enemies who demonize drag as a threat to family and God, too many today get all puffed up, roll their eyes, and talk about “cringey”. I always loved it when drag performers and characters of yore veered into being tasteless. It was an act of defiance at once hilarious, unpretentious, and liberating.