Review: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Musical

There's something uninspiring about the way this show was created. Composer and lyricist David Yazbek was looking down MGM's list of films that the studio were willing to have adapted into a musical. By coincidence, so was book writer Jeffrey Lane. The result became a Broadway hit in 2005 and now here it is, an entertaining musical based on the popular but, let's face it, hardly adored 1988 comedy starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin about two con men working the French Riviera.

It's a show put together with great skill by director and choreographer Jerry Mitchell. And it ticks all the boxes that Yazbek and Lane doubtless thought it capable of when they were perusing what Lane calls "the list of properties." But it never quite rids itself of the sense that its creators loved its viability rather more than its characters.

Robert Lindsay as Lawrence (the Caine role) is an English super suave swindler of rich women on the Cote d'Azur. Comedian Rufus Hound is Freddy, a vulgar American small-time con man. Both are underwritten by Lane's book. Of their past we learn that Freddy has been alone since he was 15 and according to one of Yazbek's witty songs, in which Freddy imagines life with lots of money, every day would be a barmitvah. So maybe he's Jewish too. Although to me, reliving a barmitzvah on a daily basis would be pure purgatory.

But as you would expect from some of Broadway's top talent, there are superbly delivered set pieces. The best of these arrives early on when the chorus morphs into a Texan hoedown as gun-toting heiress Jolene (a terrific Lizzy Connolly) bullies Lawrence towards a shotgun wedding.