‘Scoundrels’ opens on Broadway

“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” the new musical about two con men on the Riviera that premiered at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego last summer, drew mixed reviews from its Broadway opening Thursday.

The New York Times and Variety said nay, but Newsday, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal said yay, while USA Today and the Associated Press were ambivalent.

Most of the reviews duly noted the similarities to “The Producers,” another musical about con men. “But if you are going to court comparison with giants, you had better be prepared to stand tall,” wrote Ben Brantley in the New York Times. “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” directed by Jack O’Brien and starring John Lithgow and Norbert Leo Butz, “somehow never straightens out of a queasy slouch.”

Linda Winer of Newsday emphatically disagreed, calling the show “sweet-natured yet droll, dorky but gorgeous, wholesome yet raunchy and somehow sophisticated.”

--Don Shirley