Spoiler alert for the movie and the musical. In the movie, when Jack Lemmon takes his wig off and announces he's a guy, the man who fell in love with him says "Well, nobody's perfect." Famous ending for a famous movie. In the new musical, in the same situation, the last line is "You're perfect."
But that's not all, as the Guardian critic, Alexis Soloski writes:
In previews, complaints emerged, in the grimmer corners of the Broadway message boards, that the show was too woke for its own good. Wokeness merely refers to an awareness of systemic bias and injustice, past and present, which any revival or new adaptation should have. ...
[I]n wanting to treat the comedy of men in dresses with greater care and sensitivity – a terrific goal in and of itself – changes the meaning of Some Like It Hot itself. The original, in its sophistication and ambivalence, is a celebration of disguise, of the quick wits, silver tongues and wild cheek that let Joe and Jerry juggle their multiple fictions. Yet in this version... drag becomes a means to self-acceptance, a beribboned road to truth....
In putting on a dress, Jerry uncovers a nonbinary identity.... “I don’t have the word for what I feel I just feel more like my self than I have in all my life,” Jerry tells Joe.
Because it's the 1920s: He didn't have access to the word "nonbinary" (or "trans").
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51 comments:
Wokeness merely refers to an awareness of systemic bias and injustice, past and present, which any revival or new adaptation should have.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
"You're perfect"
Ick. Funny how, to cater to the trans crowd, the argument about sexuality is turned on its head. We're back to seeing sexuality as a choice instead of something you are born with. He fell in love with a man thinking he was a woman and the revelation that he's not a woman doesn't change anything important. It supports the claim that men who won't date trans women are transphobic; lesbians who won't date trans women are terfs. There's no other reason but irrational hate.
It's appalling the way the gay movement has sold itself out for trans people. They will get will nothing in return.
I saw this show around 20 years ago at the Fisher Theater in Detroit. Staring the still living Tony Curtis in the Joe E Brown Roll - Osgood Fielding III (the dirty old man who keeps hitting on Daphne). The show was written in a way that highlighted Osgood, and put the Joe and Jerry in the background. It was awful. Though I did go backstage to meet Tony Curtis and he signed my copy of the original movie script. He was an odd duck too. Wearing a full length white fur coat with a matching wide brim white fedora, and carrying a teacup terrier.
This is what drives many up walls - create your own stories, characters, etc., instead of modifying a prior artist's work to fit your tastes and then selling the edited version.
It’s as cringey as someone making a Christianized version of a classic - but Christians don’t do that because they’re not as lame, preachy, self-righteous and boring as wokies. Way to go guys - you’re less cool than evangelicals.
Fiction from Some Like it Hot to Tootsie to the TV sitcom Bosom Buddies used trickery regarding assumed innate differences between men and women. The men were not transgender nor were they gay crossdressers or in the closet. They were gaming the system for personal goals/advantages.
So, it's no surprise that some biological males may use the blind 100% acceptance ideology of the transgender movement for personal advantage. No sincere *competitor* would want to compete against a class of weaker, slower, smaller people (i.e., biological women) or feel that 'winning' was desired or deserved. Only insecure cheaters and dominant bullies and mentally unstable people want this. Competition serves to prove your relative strength and ability...the winners of true competition cannot be denied.
I myself am going to join a trans-adult sports league and show how much stronger, faster, and smarter I am than nursing infants. I'll go to the park and show those mothers pushing strollers that their kids have nothing on me. Monkey bar master. Swing king. Teeter-totter tyrant. I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it people like me. Signed - Senator Al Franken.
Broadway will likely learn that "Get woke, go broke" applies to them as well as Hollywood.
How to destroy a classic.
Well timed.
Elon Musk one hour ago: "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters".
It wrecking everything. Movies...music...comedy...fun...society.
It is a mind virus. It destroyed the value of a college education and is now working its way down to destroying K through 12.
The "adults" employed as part of the education establishment are the Typhoid Marys of the Woke mind virus.
Many show biz people have been attracted to presentations of "drag," including Shakespeare. Does this mean they tend to think there are more than two genders--possibly as many genders as there are people? Not likely. Even if "many sophisticated people" think so, does that make it true? Are all of them honest in saying they believe this?
"Wokeness merely refers to an awareness of systemic bias and injustice, past and present, which any revival or new adaptation should have"
As this very sentence shows, wokeness is not "merely" that. It is also the desire to amass power, alter the culture, and make everything and everyone bow down before it--or else. Its very impulse is totalitarian.
“I saw this show around 20 years ago at the Fisher Theater in Detroit”
There was an older adaptation of the movie, which must be what you saw. I’m reading that that was closer to the mov. This new one is trying harder to fit with current themes.
I think the original was a big winking gay wet dream to begin with, and they went as far as they could go at the time.
Never liked drag myself, though Pythons were pretty funny. But Monty Python was a comment on how far gone British men were. I mean, worthless.
With the numbers of trans men and women I see on reddit I have to think we're pretty far gone now too.
As I remember, the premise of Some Like It Hot was that there was something comical about men dressing up as women. The joke is older than Charley's Aunt or a Milton Berle skit. It's been around forever because it works. This sounds like a different kind of show. When a man dresses up as a woman and thereby finds fulfillment is not such comic premise.
Lloyd, show business people just know that friction is friction, regardless of source, where sex is concerned.
Spoiler alert means Trigger warning which equals clicks. Remember to do your Amazon Christmas shopping via the Althouse gateway to Jeff Bezos' retirement fund.
The schtick of the old movie was everyone knew they were "Playing" and not really serious. It was slap stick and tongue and check. It loses the humor if you change the main premise of the movie/play, it is what made it funny.
We have a local controversy about a Pantomime of Alice in Wonderland for kids. There was always cross dressing, but it was done obviously for laughs with bad costumes and make-up. The actor was an older gentleman who made it very age appropriate (with a wink from the stage to the audience). This year they brought in drag queens who are made up to the hilt and are not playing it in the same slapstick style manner. Changes the humor of the show.
Both are examples of cross dressing and humor which are done in different manners.
I was trying to remember who was in the movie with Jack Lemmon. I thought it might be Matthau. It surprised me that it was Tony Curtis. I would have thought Lemmon and Curtis were a little too much alike. Marilyn Monroe was in it, of course, and an old timey cast of George Raft, Pat O'Brien, and Joe E. Brown. And Nehemiah Persoff, who finally passed away this year at the age of 102.
Billy Wilder was in Vienna and Berlin between the two World Wars. He was probably familiar with practices and orientations that Hollywood wanted to keep out of the movies and audiences didn't want to see on the screen. The picture may have worked because of the tension between what Wilder couldn't say and what he could imply. I'm not going to bother with the new musical, though.
I admit I've never seen the original except in snippets; men dressing as women is in the same category as clowns for me: Stupid and unfunny.
The line is said after a litany of other reasons that Jack Lemmon gives for trying to get out of it, none of which faze Osgood.
I never understood that Osgood said "Well, nobody's perfect" in a way meant to be literal, that he thinks that women are perfect. It was just the last in a sequence of "so whats?" It was always pretty clear that Osgood was into Lemmon being a man for quite a while before then, rather than this being some newly-born kink. So the change is dialogue is rather pointless.
Also, I never have found the movie all that funny or interesting.
What a strange world!
The victory of gay marriage and acceptance of homosexuality came so fast that the huge Human Rights Campaign fund-raising juggernaut had little left to do--so they moved on to trans-people. There is a crisis in the acceptance of mentally ill people who think that they were born in the wrong sex! Academia was already on board. The train left the station. Gay people were left behind.
If there is any justice, somewhere in the universe the extremely cynical Billy Wilder is having a good laugh.
WOKE seems to me to be a mass Hypnosis that commands submission like a Nazis had to wear the swaztika and salute the Fuhrer. It has no other meaning. Trying to find a rational base behind WOKE power is a useless waste of time. Ignore them.
"Wokeness merely refers to an awareness of systemic bias and injustice, past and present, which any revival or new adaptation should have. ..."
"Wokeness merely refers to [a delusional exaggeration] of systemic bias and injustice, past and present, which any revival or new adaptation should have. ..."
There, fixed!
The Guardian is a Marxist rag. Always has been.
Social Media has become the insidious re-education camp that surrounds all of us.
I knew about this of course and was familiar with the premise, but i had never seen it until if was part of a Billy Wilder film festival at Hillsdale College in 2018 or 19. The whole thing was just flat with me. I and my girl friend agreed on this. I attributed its success to having been somewhat outre in the late 50s/early 60s when it was made. I never found the cross dressing schtick all that amusing nor have I found it, for the most part, convincing in Shakespeare. It requires a willing suspension of disbelief that I am not capable of.
That it has been "revised"to this extent it not surprising, in fact it was inevitable. Nothing creative about this unless you consider water running downhill to be a novel experience.
Wokeness has invaded and is ruining entertainment.
We have had season tickets to a musical series for years. We get the big productions and the big stars for the traveling shows.
But in each play, whether a classic like 'Oklahoma' or a Disney show like 'Frozen' it is in your face.
Most of the time it's the casting. A traditional white lead (Oklahoma farmer circa 1902) is now a 350-pound, black transexual. You get the point.
I can just imagine how these producers pat themselves on the back and see who can have the most 'diverse' cast, but it really can take you out of the show.
In our play 'Frozen,' the sisters were both white, but the mom was Hispanic-ish and the dad was black. Wtf?
They should be appalled because it's the ultimate in lazy. Cast white roles for blacks. Mens' roles for women. Straight for queer.
Wow, you're soooo creative and edgy. All the time the audience is cringing and some (like me) are trying to decide if we buy the series next year at a not unsubstantial price during a recession.
My contention is that we've already paid reparations by casting every black person in America in a TV commercial, but that's a topic for another time...
But Monty Python was a comment on how far gone British men were. I mean, worthless.
That was part of it, but it was also simply wanting the non-gorgeous female characters in their sketches to be portrayed by reliably funny actors, ie, themselves. For all the voluptuous female characters, they had Carol Cleveland.
Kids In The Hall would be the other comedy troop known for their decision to do the same thing and for the same reason, I'd say. They knew they were funny and didn't have any female cast members.
Watched the film as a teen. I thought the ending was like a hope-crosby or lewis-martin joke, where one guy gets the beautiful girl and one guy doesn't, nothing more. Guess I will have to rewatch.
Osgood said "Well, nobody's perfect"
Perhaps a re-write to, "Well, we can cut those parts off" is in order.
Big laughs all around.
Lloyd W. Robertson,
Many show biz people have been attracted to presentations of "drag," including Shakespeare.
Well, careful, now. You need to start with the fact that all parts in Shakespeare, and all contemporaneous English theatre, were played by men and boys only, as a matter of course. So when (say) Romeo confesses his love to Juliet, the male actor playing Romeo is speaking to the boy child-actor dressed as Juliet. But, in addition, Shakespeare (and, again, many others) liked to to have his female characters (boys) "dress up" or disguise themselves as men. Happens in many plays (though I don't know the comedies as well as the tragedies and the histories, so nothing actually comes into my head at the moment but Cymbeline.)
Speaking of the histories, I can't really imagine a boy taking an elderly woman's part. Can you see any boy as, say, Queen Margaret of the Henry VI trilogy? I can't.
Guess I will have to rewatch.
By all means, watch it again -- it's very funny.
But your original reaction was right. It's just funny.
Love Wilder, but Some Like It was never in the same class with Witness for the Prosecution, Sunset Blvd, Double Indemnity. In the Fifties, it was funny to see two men dressed as women. Now, it's just corny, with or without the woke rewrite.
Not sure why, but I'd recently been thinking about Victor/Victoria, and wondering how that might fare with today's zeitgeist.
There is already a musical based on Some Like it Hot, it is called "Sugar".
"Sugar is a musical with a book by Peter Stone, music by Jule Styne, and lyrics by Bob Merrill. It is based on the 1959 film Some Like It Hot, for which he was awarded best performance in a musical, was adapted by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond from a story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan. It premiered on Broadway in 1972".
Why people are weary of the cross dressing aspect of the original movie was that it was original in 1959, Billy Wilder saying or not saying what was going on in Berlin in the '30's when he was forced to leave. It is no surprise that people seeing the movie now and in 2018 or 2019 would be bored with it. The movie is the basis for all that came after. Look at it as a piece of movie history and enjoy it in it's context. Both Lemmon and Curtis are so funny in this movie. I will not be seeing the musical. It suffers from what i believe is the curse of the musical for the last 30 years, no originality and bad, boring songs.
Woke? Whatever. Why the right has embraced Elon Musk is a mystery to me. He is about at elite as they come, and an unabashed elitist. Things that the right are supposed to abhor. It shocked me that John Kennedy stated last week that high IQ people hated George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson. What? That is taking elite shaming to a whole new level.
Righties, look up the definition of elite. It is something we should all aspire to, being the smartest and the best. I now that you all like things mediocre, look at your candidates for office this year, but come on.
Your god, Donald Trump loved those bigly guys with degrees from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the Academies.
Just an observation, with much frustration over your deifying Musk, DeSantis and (lord knows why)MTG.
Vicki from Pasadena
I believe the revival of My Fair Lady also changed the ending somehow that was more blatantly impowering for Eliza. (As if she wasn't in total control in the original).
"merely refers to" = explicit motte and bailey construct
MadisonMan, don't know this revival, but believe from original 1914 production of Pygmalion Shaw's ending as written was being softened in performance. Further softened in thirties filming. Softened further in MFL. Sounds like this revival might be closest to Shaw. Copyright expired so you can write your own ending.
"As if she wasn't in total control in the original"
That was kind of the point of George Bernard Shaw's original play, and he writes a commentary to it to that effect. It wasn't so much that she was in complete control, but she was an equal to Professor Higgins, and way out of Freddie's league. Of course My Fair Lady took a few liberties with Pygmalion to sweeten it up, I guess. But it's nearly perfect, like Some Like it Hot is, why they can't just leave stuff alone and write their own new plays, IDK. Probably because it's more important to them to turn entertainment plays into morality plays, one classic at a time.
Woke Camelot
Merlin taught King Arthur well. He establishes the perfect kingdom of Camelot. The best knights in the world at the Round Table,. His tragic flaw is his conservative views on sexuality and gender norms. But when he finds himself a kind, loving wife in Queen Guinevere, alas, she is secretly non-binary, and she soon rebels against the heteronormative and stultifying rules of the castle, but she does take some comfort in the ladies in waiting who accompany her at all times.
Then, along comes a non-binary French knight, Lancelot. At first hated by all, only to please the king, he eventually proves himself superior to all of the straight heterosexual knights with their limited gender awareness, and becomes the King's best friend and is grudgingly recognized by all as the best knight of the Round Table. He also becomes the Queen's lover, no matter how guilty both feel. Alas, Camelot cannot last! For Donald J. Trump-Mordred, the king's treacherous illegitimate son, catches on, and works to undo everything Arthur worked for by exposing the polyamorous relationship that had infected the whole court and had included everybody good-looking except King Arthur.
But there is a happy ending, his well laid plan gang agley: King Arthur realizes that he too is non-binary, and that his "best friend" Lancelot and his queen Guinevere live in a happy throuple, Guinevere is given all royal power and, passes all of the climate laws to save the Earth
"'Tis true! 'tis true! The Queen has made it clear! The climate shall be perfect all the year!"
The happy threesome watch the final dance number from their shared bed, and curtains.
Victoria @ 12:11: Sort of an interesting blend of lecturing, psychological projecting and mischaracterizing by a SoCal lefty.
The part about mediocre candidates from the party of Biden, Harris, Waters, Hobbs, Fetterman, Gascon, Warnock, et al., is a parody of leftist insight.
There is a movie out that is a re-do of Henry V where the war with France is all a big misunderstanding and caused by an evil adviser to the young king and should never have happened. No St Crispen's Day speech: "We few, we happy few.."
Give them enough time and they will re-write all of the art that got us to where we are today. Can't wait for the woke Illiad.
"I believe the revival of My Fair Lady also changed the ending somehow that was more blatantly impowering for Eliza."
That's an interesting one, though, because it's a return to George Bernard Shaw's original ending. Now, it's a fair argument that the musical isn't Shaw, and I can totally see that position. But I had read the Shaw play before I ever saw the musical and found the ending of the musical a bit disconcerting. I was convinced by Shaw's arguments in his afterward about what someone with Eliza's character would actually do.
Is there a Trump version of Godwin's Law?
Because it's the 1920s: He didn't have access to the word "nonbinary" (or "trans").
Yes, the term back then -- "transvestite," was merely descriptive.
That said, changing the end to "you're perfect," while it may replace the humorous with the trite, also makes me think of Rex Harrison singing "Why can't a woman be more like a man?"
Because it's the 1920s: He didn't have access to the word "nonbinary" (or "trans").
State or process of divergence... The transgender spectrum was previously referred to as progressive confusion (PC). The elective abortionists and human rites clinicians were similarly judged and labeled as transhumane.
If people still found "Some Like It Hot" funny, it would be a bad omen for Rachel Levine and Sam Brinton.
I don't see the point of the new musical, but I don't see the point of most musicals. "Cabaret" and "Chicago" already demonstrated that the 1920s could be as decadent and depraved as the 2020s. What else is there to say?
Enigma wrote:
"No sincere *competitor* would want to compete against a class of weaker, slower, smaller people (i.e., biological women) or feel that 'winning' was desired or deserved."
*****************
1000 percent THIS!!
Saying, "You're perfect." totally misunderstands the situation. Everyone knows that nobody is perfect and saying "nobody's perfect" actually reinforces the comedy of the situation that the flawed humans find themselves in. It's funny because it's a messed up situation with messed up people and someone is trying to find a bright spot in that imperfection.
I hope the backers lose their shirts. Or blouses.
victoria said...
Why people are weary of the cross dressing aspect of the original movie was that it was original in 1959, Billy Wilder saying or not saying what was going on in Berlin in the '30's when he was forced to leave. It is no surprise that people seeing the movie now and in 2018 or 2019 would be bored with it. The movie is the basis for all that came after. Look at it as a piece of movie history and enjoy it in it's context. Both Lemmon and Curtis are so funny in this movie. I will not be seeing the musical. It suffers from what i believe is the curse of the musical for the last 30 years, no originality and bad, boring songs.
Woke? Whatever. Why the right has embraced Elon Musk is a mystery to me. He is about at elite as they come, and an unabashed elitist. Things that the right are supposed to abhor. It shocked me that John Kennedy stated last week that high IQ people hated George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson. What? That is taking elite shaming to a whole new level.
Righties, look up the definition of elite. It is something we should all aspire to, being the smartest and the best. I now that you all like things mediocre, look at your candidates for office this year, but come on.
...
Victoria, the right does not hate the elites. We love them. But true elites. Not uneducated-but-credentialed know-nothing blowhards like Obama or Kerry or any other powerful but ignorant leftist.
We love the idea of a Bill Gates (re Microsoft, not currently) or the Apple founders where someone has freedom to create and succeeds or fails based on his own effort. Bill Gates through Microsoft made the world a much more productive place as compared to before when you needed to know to code to access a computer. Yes IIRC it was an idea from Xerox but they discarded it and Gates recognized its potential. The same would be true for Google - a couple of Stanford kids (IIRC) created the world's greatest search tool - if it did not become an instrument for lies and oppression later.
Musk was part of the team that came up with Paypal. He started a car company from scratch. I can't think of another person who did such a thing in the last 100 years. Fisker? That didn't go so well. And now seems to have created the world's most efficient space company.
He seems like a Howard Hughes to me.
And just became the world's greatest advocate for free speech.
What's not to like? He is a successful creator which has always been a hero to the right and an enemy to the left (eg Atlas Shrugged). Obama even said "you didn't build that," meaning however successful someone is, he's not REALLY responsible for his success. That's a leftist attitude. If you're successful it's because of white privilege. If you're unsuccessful it's because the Man is keeping you down. Nothing to do with Chinese kids not going out to parties and studying all day to get A's. It's the Man.
Based on our values, he should be a hero (as of today) to conservatives who believe in rugged individualism and an enemy to leftists who believe in Marxism and determinism.
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