Catch Me If You Can, which opened last week at the Neil Simon Theater, offers the basic pleasures of a big Broadway musical but not much else. Like Steven Spielberg's 2002 Tom Hanks/Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle of the same name, the show follows the true story of Frank Abagnale, Jr—a very young conman who in the early '60s impersonated a pilot, a doctor and a lawyer while pulling off millions in check fraud. But don't go to the show expecting the rush of pulling off a con, or catching one. Like that other musical currently on the Great White Way in which a young man in the '60s gets places on charm, an essential spark of life just isn't in this one.
Catch Me opens with Abagnale, Jr (Aaron Tveit) finally being caught by the FBI agent who has been chasing him (Norbert Leo Butz). And this being a Broadway musical from the team behind Hairspray (with Terrance McNally on book) Abagnale promptly turns to the audience and tells his tale in flashback and song. Specifically, he sings his story "Live In Living Color," with the help of a big band perched on a moving platform onstage (who we couldn't help but feel for as their platform kept moving up and downstage while they played).
Like the movie, the musical paints Abagnale, Jr's adventures in fraud around the world as a desperate cry from a lovely boy trying to reunite his mommy (Rachel de Benedet) and daddy (Tom Wopat), an angle which can make buying the same boy as a ladykiller a little tricky. While the first act slowly covers Abagnale's check fraud and adventures as a PanAm pilot, the second rushes through his other careers and includes a hard-to-buy romance with a young nurse (Kerry Butler) for good measure.
Tveit, onstage for most of the show, works hard to keep you interested, but his eagerness to please the audience and habit of underlining everything his character does eventually undermines his performance. We were acutely aware of him and not the character he was playing for much of the show. And while we're rarely ones to complain about pretty actors and actresses taking their clothes off, we still aren't sure why he appears shirtless in both acts. Perhaps costumer William Ivey Long spent too much time on making ill-fitting nurses dresses?
Old hands Butz and Wopat, however, both make the most of their roles. Wopat turns the fallen Abagnale, Sr into a sympathetic drunken disaster whom you genuinely pity by the second act, and Butz in particular steals the show with a big, old fashioned number, "The Man Inside the Clues," that should have been the end of Act One, instead of the forgettable Christmas song it currently concludes with.
It isn't that anything in Catch Me is particularly bad. There are a few good numbers by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, Jerry Mitchell's choreography is entertaining if never quite as inventive as you keep thinking it is about to be (leggy girls dancing around big feathers are always fun, but we've also seen them before) and to his credit director Jack O'Brien never lets the action on stage pause long enough for you to think too hard about it. But there is never any real sense of danger to our hero (we already know he'll get caught), nor do we ever really delve into the dark side of his cons (despite Butz bringing it up every once in awhile). A little bit of either would have gone a long way.
