Review: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN Sings and Swings at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Center

If there's one word to describe the musical Catch Me If You Can, it's "slick." This is, after all, the tale of a man (or a man-child, or a child-man) who has obsessively fetishized his ideal of sleek, swinging midcentury manhood. Thankfully, director Justin Fortunato's production of Catch Me is just as slick as its source material, sliding breezily along from vignette to vignette.

Based on the film and memoir of the same name, and inspired by the allegedly true story (recently cast into doubt) of con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr (Brett Barthelemy), Catch Me tells the story of Abagnale's rise from misuderstood kid to teenage swindler, up to being the most notorious counterfeiter and identity thief of the 1960s. The musical is told in a series of stylized vignettes, based on the genre preference of whoever plays the lead in each scene: young Frank prefers TV variety shows, his father (Allan Snyder) likes the Rat Pack, and FBI agent/Javert stand-in Carl Hanratty (Tom Schaller) is a film noir guy. Naturally, in a show as pastiche-heavy as this, only Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, The Kings Of Sixties swing recaptured, could write the score, and it's full of catchy, tuneful songs that stay in your memory even longer than the plot does.

As the show jets from place to place, so does the show's setting, and Johnmichael Bohach's sets and Keith A. Truax's sleek unit set and lighting keeps locations suggested while maintaining that variety-show look. The eleven-piece orchestra sounds much bigger under Robert Neumeyer's baton, and their white-coated presence onstage through the whole show amps up the Vegas sophistication quotient. 

Leading man Brett Barthelemy has big shoes to fill as Frank, giving life to the quick-changing chameleon but also the wounded child at his core. Barthelemy is rubber-faced and quick on his feet, dancing gamely in between assuming identity after identity, each with a new voice and physicality. If Barthelemy leans a little more on the comedic than the dramatic side of Frank's presence, that's okay: the heart of the show is with the grown-ups. Tom Schaller neither looks nor sounds like Tom Hanks, but he captures that pleasantly gruff, cantankerous quality that Hanks brought to Agent Hanratty, earning him the "America's Dad" nickname he carries to this day. Schaller is the sad clown at the show's heart, a man married to his job and nothing else. His dry sense of humor and grouchy energy pays dividends when he leads a cast of FBI agents in a gospel rave-up, or transforms into a narrating film noir detective. 

Allan Snyder, a regular at every Pittsburgh professional theatre, is cool and charming as Frank's father, Frank Senior. Snyder's charisma is pronounced enough that it's almost hard to believe his downslide into dissolution in Act 2, but that's often true of born losers: just like Snyder's portrayal of the failing charmer, you can so often see the winner inside the loser for so long, you're willing to overlook what you're really seeing. Caroline Nicolian has a smaller but memorable role as Frank's femme fatale mother Paula, and she owns the stage during her bossa nova number "Don't Be a Stranger." Finally, Sydney Ciencin's Brenda emerges in the second half of Act 2, one of the later emergences of the female lead in a big musical, but Ciencin's clarion voice rings to the rafters on soul ballad "Fly, Fly Away," enough to make you believe she'd been there the whole time.

Jennifer Verba's choreography is fun and silly in the specific way variety show choreography is known for; the goofy, almost cartoonish abandon of "Don't Break the Rules" fits the show's heightened reality perfectly. There's even a comic "all sing, all dance" curtain call that sends everyone from the chorus girls to the character men shimmying across the stage in unison, to the cheers and laughter of the audience. Catch Me isn't exactly a perfect musical on page or stage; the structure is too episodic and disjointed, leaving it hard to really feel a character arc sustained for the full two hours. But that's on Frank Abagnale and the way he lived his life, not on the show or this company. Lincoln Park's staging is a near-perfect production of a tricky little musical, and (just like the con artist at its center), it hits all the right notes to make you overlook what isn't there.

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