Some Like It Hot: Amber Ruffin Reimagines the Beloved Film for a Modern Broadway Audience

Ruffin is collaborating with Tony-winning playwright Matthew Lopez to transform Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy into an old-fashioned, big-band romantic comedy.

Amber Ruffin’s energy is contagious, even when she’s calm. And it’s safe to say the effervescent comedian is excited about her latest project. “Buddy, it’s so freaking good,” Ruffin solemnly tells Vanity Fair of the new Broadway musical Some Like It Hot, before laughing and adding, “Yeah, I love it real bad. It’s not a secret.” 

The comedian and author is collaborating with Tony-winning playwright Matthew Lopez to adapt Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy into an old-fashioned, big-band romantic comedy. Even for the vivacious writer of Late Night With Seth Meyers, who also hosts The Amber Ruffin Show and has coauthored two books with her sister, this is no small task. Wilder’s film is widely adored and considered a gem of comedy history, but the specifics of its plot make it a questionable choice for a present-day production. 

Seen in productions from Shakespeare to Monty Python, the theatrical device of a man dressing as a woman is no longer embraced as a punch line to a binary joke. The creative team of the musical Tootsie consulted with GLAAD while crafting the production, and people were invited to attend rehearsals of Mrs. Doubtfire and offer feedback during that musical’s process, but both faced criticism for presenting the gag of “the man in the dress” for laughs. Heightened awareness regarding racial and sexual diversity demands broader representation from writing teams and casting directors, and works are publicly scrutinized if found lacking. 

Wilder’s film would already seem like a challenge for the stage. The crime caper/romantic comedy/buddy movie follows jazz musicians Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) as they’re on the run from the Mob after witnessing a murder. Desperate to escape town alive, the men disguise themselves as women and go on tour with an all-female band featuring the sultry singer Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe). With Joe disguised as Josephine and Jerry as Daphne, a series of mistaken identities and ulterior motives clash, and hilarity ensues. 

Some Like It Hot is widely considered one of film’s best comedies, its accolades leading present-day audiences to look past its problematic writing regarding identity and consent. For Ruffin and Lopez, addressing this was nothing new. Ruffin’s comedy has never shied away from politics regarding race and gender. Lopez’s play The Inheritance, a two-part, seven-hour drama about intertwining generations of gay men, swept theater awards on both sides of the Atlantic, nabbing the Tony for best play and the Olivier Award for best new play. Lopez’s works also include The Legend of Georgia McBride, which chronicles the struggles of an Elvis impersonator turned drag queen, and The Whipping Man, a period drama in which freed slaves and a Confederate soldier share Seder together. 

So Some Like It Hot is coming to Broadway, packed with jazzy numbers by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. The Tony-winning team is familiar with adapting films for the stage, having written the scores for Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and they composed dozens of songs about Monroe for the short-lived TV show Smash. 

Going from writing for TV to working on an adaptation for Broadway is a far cry from the career Ruffin had envisioned as she grew up. 

“I thought I was going to live in Omaha and be a mail carrier and then do theater on the weekends,” Ruffin says. “That was what I thought my life was going to be, and I was thrilled.” 

This may be Ruffin’s Broadway debut, but it’s far from her theatrical one. Before becoming the first Black woman to write for a late-night show in the United States, she performed improv with Boom Chicago in Amsterdam and iO Theater and the Second City in Chicago. Late Night fans are familiar with her skits Amber Says What and Jokes Seth Can’t Tell, and The Amber Ruffin Show frequently showcases musical numbers about everything from police reform to the temperature of Ruffin’s apartment. 

“I spent decades doing writing and performing theater as my full-time job…literally almost 20 years,” Ruffin says. “You step into Broadway so timidly, but really you’ve been at this for a bajillion years.”

Ruffin also cowrote King of Kong: A Musical Parody with Lauren Van Kurin, which took home the prize for best musical at both New York’s and Hollywood’s Fringe Festival, and a production of The Wiz with her revised book will open on Broadway in 2024.  

“Revised” could describe the new Some Like It Hot, but “reimagined” would be more accurate. Lopez only accepted the offer to work on the show after receiving permission to rethink and reimagine the story, and Ruffin joined the team after Lopez suggested that the musical needed a Black woman’s perspective. 

“I remember watching the movie again, thinking, I don’t think I’m going to do this,” Lopez recalls. “And then I [thought], Well, I would do it if the show could almost in some ways be…not a rejection, but a complete rethinking, and a complete reimagining of what the movie is as a musical.” 

As the writers “ping-ponged” the script back and forth via email throughout lockdown, neither Lopez nor Ruffin was interested in simply moving the movie to the stage. The cultural landscape of 2022 demanded a new approach to Wilder’s story in which depictions of cross-dressing, gender identity, and informed consent were reevaluated. Flippant jokes about wearing dresses have been replaced with frenzied urgency as the men donning them fear for their lives. Gone is the subplot in which Joe, disguised as a millionaire, seduces Sugar Kane with a lie about being impotent. This Joe, played by two-time Tony winner Christian Borle, “accidentally” breaks a bottle of Champagne so that Sugar won’t over-imbibe with him. But there’s no preaching; above all else, Some Like It Hot is entertaining. (Ruffin and Lopez have affectionately nicknamed the show “Idiots in Trouble.”) 

“It’s certainly daunting when you look at what the movie was and then think about the fact that it’s 2022,” Ruffin says. “There’s a big old gap in there, but that’s a delight, and being able to close that gap is a thrill. It’s the thought of someone bringing their granddad to this show, and that movie is his favorite, and that favorite can be something that his grandchild can also like and be proud of.” 

There is much for both generations to enjoy. The musical takes place in the 1930s during Prohibition. Both Jerry and Sugar Kane are Black, and Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators travel cross-country to California, not Florida, because, as Lopez and Ruffin’s book clearly states, that would not be possible at the time.

“In writing this comedy, we had to be really truthful,” Ruffin says. “A lot of minorities and all women traveling through America at this time…we had to tell the truth. It wouldn’t have been perfect at every turn, so we did have to be more honest about what was happening to these women. It couldn’t possibly have gone down this trouble-free.” 

Played by Adrianna Hicks, last seen on Broadway as Catherine of Aragon in Six, this Sugar Kane is distinctly different from the bruised bombshell Monroe created, who “always got the fuzzy end of the lollipop.” Hicks’s Sugar is no victim. She may regret moments in her past, but she owns them, and she’s planning for her future—which she hopes will land her on the silver screen in Hollywood. 

“It’s always dicey to write a Black character that’s not in a Black show, because you wonder how honest you can be while dodging every stereotype,” Ruffin says. “It was scary at first, but then I personally realized that the rest of the show is so honest that she can be exactly who she is. She can be flawed, and it’s fine. She can be a Black woman who is late, and it’s fine. We made this show honest in that there’s a lot of safety where people can be regular people instead of shining beacons of good examples of Black America.” 

The character of Jerry/Daphne, played by nonbinary Black actor J. Harrison Ghee, is also opened up. Their relationship with themselves and their identity is deepened, as is their romance with impassioned suitor Osgood (Kevin Del Aguila), who falls for Daphne at first sight. Their courtship, a few brief moments in the film, is a moving scene of honest connection. 

Finding that harmony—between earnest honesty and zany comedy, honoring the source material and reshaping it for today’s theatergoers—was a balancing act for the Ruffin-Lopez writing team, which strove to fit meaningful dialogue between chaotic chase scenes packed with tap dancing and romantic ballroom duets performed by ensembles in tuxedos and sparkling gowns.  

“We knew that this show could never feel like ‘eat your vegetables.’ It always had to operate as a musical comedy. How do we make something that’s honest but that’s entertainment?” Lopez asks. “Sometimes we would veer—it got too honest and it stopped being fun, and then sometimes it got too much fun and it just sort of defied the logic. A lot of it was just trying to strike the balance.” 

That effort hasn’t curtailed Ruffin’s excitement about the show. Accustomed to being the one singing and dancing, she easily admits to longing to join the cast members in their performance.  

“You’ve got to stop Amber from jumping on that stage,” Lopez warns. 

“I’m too fast. I cannot be stopped,” Ruffin says. “I’m singing it all the time. I am in the show in my mind. I’m just sitting further away from the stage than everyone else.”