"Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' at the Walnut (1st review)

From Don Giovanni to Professor Harold Hill, cads and swindlers have long enjoyed a cherished place in the theater, and not just because they too are actors of a sort. More important from an audience perspective, who among us doesn't yearn to screw our neighbors and retire to Caesar's Palace (not the real one in Rome— the faux joint in New Jersey), there to feast on the ill-gotten benefits of other people's assets?

What's that you say? You'd rather get your kicks by hiking the Appalachian Trail, mastering a Chopin étude or teaching Bosnian orphans to dance? What the hell fun are you?

To put it as gently as possible, Jeffrey Lane and David Yazbek, the creators of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, need to get outside more often. Their musical comedy about a pair of con men fleecing, and being fleeced by, everyone in sight on the Riviera (including each other) is plagued by a fatal flaw that no amount of sprightly performances, witty lyrics, energetic music and lavish sets can camouflage.

Neither Newman nor Redford

When we first encounter Lawrence, the suave seducer of wealthy widows (Paul Schoeffler), and his boorish young protégé/rival Freddie (Ben Dibble), we assume we're back on the familiar turf of Henry Gondorff and Johnny Hooker, the loveable grifters portrayed by Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting. But Gondorff and Hooker were loveable precisely because, deep down, they possessed genuine virtues: a sense of loyalty (to each other and their friends) and justice (their mark, remember, was a ruthless and powerful mobster, not some ditzy dame). Even Professor Harold Hill and the producer Max Bialystock inadvertently brought genuine value to their victims: a different way of perceiving themselves. Even Don Giovanni, for goodness' sake, faced up manfully to his fate once he realized he was doomed to eternal hellfire and damnation.

Lawrence and Freddie, by contrast, possess no redeeming traits whatsoever, and neither do their victims. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is above all a show whose characters lack character. There is simply no one to root for or empathize with here, with the possible exception of one secondary figure: a gullible middle-aged heiress/divorcee (engagingly portrayed by Mary Martello) who finds, if not true love, at least terrific sex with a corrupt French police chief (Fran Prisco). Consequently, the show amounts to little more than a succession of ruses that quickly grow tiresome (and weren't that clever to begin with).

Padded dance interludes

The engaging Paul Schoeffler and the frenetic Ben Dibble as the two protagonists struggle heroically with this thin material. (Schoeffler functioned best when posing as a Viennese psychiatrist/physician, albeit with predictably over-the-top accent and mannerisms.) Jessica Rush, as a blonde and bubbly beauty queen, lights up the stage with her entrance late in the first act, but even her magnetism is soon reduced to cotton candy by the production's smarmy self-congratulatory tone.

These defects are exacerbated by pointless interludes between each scene in which a troupe of not-quite-ready-for-prime-time dancers run and jump around the stage in attempts to parody the preceding scene. In one such number, the dancers carry and peek through empty picture frames, for no apparent reason. In another, after Lawrence (posing as a doctor) whips Freddie (posing as a wheelchair-bound paraplegic) to determine whether Freddie can feel anything below the waist, the audience is subjected to a dance number in which doctors and nurses whip patients in wheelchairs. Mel Brooks might make this idea workable; in the hands of director/choreographer Richard Stafford, it's wretched padding.

Bush whacked

A few of David Yazbek's songs reflect genuine wit. I particularly enjoyed Lawrence's song about the inevitable presence of "mad genetic driftwood" within otherwise respectable families. ("The Bushes of Tex/Were anxious wrecks/Because their son was dim./But look what happened to him.") More typical, though, are lyrics like, "Everywhere I look/It's like a scene from a book."

In any case, wit is the salt of talk, not the food. More than two and a half hours with these cardboard scoundrels left me very hungry indeed.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.