CATCH ME IF YOU CAN is based on the book and hit 2002 DreamWorks film of the same name directed by Stephen Spielberg with screenplay by Jeff Nathanson and book by Frank Abagnale, Jr.
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN captures the astonishing true story of Frank Abagnale, Jr., a world-class con artist who passed himself off as a doctor, a lawyer, and a jet pilot-all before the age of 21. With straight-arrow FBI agent Carl Hanratty on Frank's trail, we're off on a jet-setting, cat-and-mouse chase, as a jazzy, swinging-sixties score keeps this adventure in constant motion. In the end, Agent Hanratty learns he and Frank aren't so very different after all, and Frank finds out what happens when love catches up to a man on the run.
Given the way that style, racy and uninhibited though it may be, pervades so much of O'Brien's production, it makes it much harder to buy in emotionally to the themes that the musical brings up more successfully in Act 2. Frankly, the show gets caught between worlds. It doesn't want to fully embrace the caustic 'Chicago'-style edge -- aside from Mitchell's choreographic pastiche, Shaiman's varied score has a typically romantic heart, and the lead actor, Tveit, is more rooted in sweetness and charm than edge. The show also has a powerful and very traditional 11 o'clock number for Kerry Butler, who plays Frank's eventual love, nurse Brenda Strong. But Butler's vocal emotions, rich and strong as they surely feel in this terrific Shaiman melody, 'Fly, Fly Away,' seem as curiously out of place as her uncertain performance, mostly because we never see the two youngsters actually falling in love.
Under Jack O'Brien's impersonal direction, the talented cast works hard to make an impression. As Frank, Aaron Tveit has stage presence, sings powerfully, and dances with pizzazz, but he's unpersuasive as a teenager and misses the character's vulnerability. The role of Hanratty has been retooled to fit Norbert Leo Butz's wonderfully shlumpy eccentricity, and the actor brings all his formidable musical comedy skills to bear on it, but even the heroic Butz can't transcend the synthetic material. As Frank's downward-spiraling father, Tom Wopat sounds the evening's sole notes of genuine humanity but can't finesse a final exit of extreme bathos. In the too little, too late role of Brenda, a young nurse Frank falls for, Kerry Butler offers her trademark ditziness and is saddled with the painfully pointless 'Fly, Fly Away,' a misguided attempt at a late-Act 2 showstopper.
2005 | New York |
Reading New York |
2007 | New York |
Reading New York |
2011 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
2012 | US Tour |
National Tour US Tour |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2011 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Actor in a Musical | Norbert Leo Butz |
2011 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical | Tom Wopat |
2011 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical | Kerry Butler |
2011 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Lyrics | Marc Shaiman |
2011 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Lyrics | Scott Wittman |
2011 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Music | Marc Shaiman |
2011 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Orchestrations | Larry Blank |
2011 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Orchestrations | Marc Shaiman |
2011 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Actor in a Musical | Norbert Leo Butz |
2011 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Actor in a Musical | Aaron Tveit |
2011 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding New Score | 0 |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Stephanie P. McClelland |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | The 5th Avenue Theatre |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Joan Stein/Jon Murray |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Joseph & Matthew Deitch/Cathy Chernoff |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Amuse Inc. |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Loraine Boyle |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Rodney Rigby |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Rainerio J. Reyes |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Barry Feirstein |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Jamie deRoy |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Paula Herold/Kate Lear |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Margo Lion |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Stacey Mindich |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Yasuhiro Kawana |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Scott and Brian Zeilinger |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | The Rialto Group |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | The Araca Group |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Michael Watt |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Barbara & Buddy Freitag |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Jay & Cindy Gutterman/Pittsburgh |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Elizabeth Williams |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Johnny Roscoe Productions/Van Dean |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Fakston Productions/Solshay Productions |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Patty Baker/Richard Winkler |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Nederlander Presentations, Inc. |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Warren Trepp |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Musical | Remmel T. Dickinson |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Orchestrations | Larry Blank |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Orchestrations | Marc Shaiman |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical | Norbert Leo Butz |
2011 | Tony Awards | Best Sound Design of a Musical | Steve Canyon Kennedy |
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