As I make my way into the Shubert Theatre, I am preparing for a knockout musical.

As Daphne says in her eleventh-hour number, “You Coulda Knocked Me Over With A Feather.” For me, “Some Like it Hot” struggled to knock me over. I doubt a hundred feathers would have been able to.

I continue to be frustrated with how disappointed I was with almost all the substance of this production. I have been anxious to get to the show since it opened nearly a year ago, and I am glad to have finally checked it off my list, but I will not be back.

If you are unfamiliar with the plot, “Some Like it Hot” is based on a 1959 film of the same name. Joe and Jerry, two Chicago musicians, witness a mafia murder and escape by dressing as women and joining an all-female jazz band heading west to California. Christian Borle plays Joe/Josephine and J. Harrison Ghee plays Jerry/Daphne.

The Tony-winning star of the show, J. Harrison Ghee, is in the middle of a temporary leave of absence due to a recent surgery. Their understudy, DeMarius Copes, and Kevin Del Aguila, who plays hotel owner Osgood, were by far the highlights of this production.

I was surprised to see Aguila’s name when this year’s Tony nominees were announced, but he absolutely deserved the recognition. His rendition of “Fly, Mariposa, Fly,” which is essential the number in which Osgood and Daphne fall in love, was the only moment of the show when I was emotionally invested. 

I enjoyed their performances enough to overlook, just as the show does, the fact that a genderfluid person of color in 1930s America would not have had as easy a life of Daphne appears to.

Christian Borle, whom I adored as the original Emmett Forrest in “Legally Blonde” and Orin Scrivello in off-Broadway’s “Little Shop of Horrors,” did very little for me. I struggled to buy into his chemistry with the gorgeous Adrianna Hicks, who plays Sugar, the band’s lead singer.

I must give props to the show’s incredible choreography, which was conceived by Broadway veteran Casey Nicholaw. The show is very tap-heavy, and the minutes long gangster chase in the final minutes of the show are likely to be all I remember.

My biggest issue with the production is that it feels frozen in an old-school Broadway format. This is to be expected as it is a flashy, two-and-a-half-hour, big-budget musical based on a hit film from the 1950s. But for me, a frequent Broadway patron who is becoming fonder of intermission free shows, I felt the show dragging on.

I never know how to fully process feeling let down by a show I really wanted to love. The production won four Tony Awards, so clearly many agree that the show is hot. But I feel like a more appropriate name would have been “Some Like it Lukewarm.”

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