"Catch Me If You Can' on national tour

Frank Abagnale Jr. was a con man of the "'60s who passed bad checks while impersonating a pilot, a physician and a lawyer. His career has already been chronicled in the 2002 Steven Spielberg film, Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks.

The creators of the stage musical of the same name found a clever way to differentiate their show from Spielberg's film. They opened with Abagnale Jr. being apprehended in an airport by the FBI agent who's been on his trail for years (shades of Javert in Les Misérables). Abagnale, true to the film and his real life, tries to talk his way out of it— in other words, to sing-and-dance his way out of trouble.

A spotlight hits him, and the character introduces a musical extravaganza starring himself, with the Frank Abagnale Orchestra on stage and a bevy of Frank Abagnale Dancers in revealing costumes. The rest of the show re-creates the look of a 1960s TV musical, and the songs are based on that decade's pop music.

When capture seems inevitable, Abagnale silences the orchestra, directs the lighting man to turn off his spot and tells the audience to go home — a device taken from Stephen Schwartz's 1972 musical Pippin.

Father-son relationship

Despite these good (if unoriginal) ideas, Catch Me If You Can, the musical, suffered a short Broadway run in 2011; consequently, this road production has been somewhat re-imagined. There's less mugging and less visible over-reactions to lines like "a doctor?" or "a lawyer?" I saw an attempt to create a father-son relationship between the hunter and the hunted. The result was cute entertainment but nothing memorable.

Perhaps Abagnale's story wasn't meant to be a musical. The most interesting moments occur when Abagnale is cornered in a hotel room with Hanratty, the FBI man, and bluffs his way out, and when Abagnale visits the rich Louisiana family of his new girlfriend and tries to impress them. Both of these scenes make their impact with spoken words and no help from song.

The score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman is nowhere close to the tunefulness of their Hairspray. In that earlier hit, the plot revolved around a rock-music TV show, and all the songs imitated that genre. Here, the style is less specific. The script mentions Mitch Miller and Dean Martin, but the lounge-like soft rock score never offers anything resembling their styles.

Harold Hill's secret

By contrast, many classic Broadway musicals had flimsy plots but worked because of their songs. The Music Man— also a story about a con man— had a brilliant score by Meredith Willson, as well as another important distinction: Professor Harold Hill's scam to sell musical instruments was simple and didn't require excessive explanation. Frank Abagnale's intricate activities had to be spelled out with lengthy elucidation— no easy feat when sung against a noisy orchestral background.

As Abagnale, Stephen Anthony looked very young (the real Abagnale was a teenage con man), and he sang suavely, with nice high notes. As nemesis Hanratty, Merritt David Janes came across as a doltish bumbler (not that Norbert Leo Butz on Broadway was any better). The conflict between cop and criminal lost balance without the charm of a Tom Hanks as Hanratty.