Review: 'Tootsie's' A Crowd-Pleaser, But With A Caveat

"Tootsie" is that rare musical that's actually funny. REALLY funny. 

It's packed with zingy one-liners as when counseling is suggested to the struggling, neurotic actress Sandy and she replies, "I tried. I just didn’t think a therapist should say ‘Wow’ that many times during a first session." The show also has snappy, comic songs that sparkle with fresh rhymes ("I know what's gonna happen/I'll try to go to bed/With fear of failure flappin'/Like a fruit bat in my head"). And then, there's also the strong, physical comedy. What's not to love?

Well, for starters, the plot.

The 1982 movie with Dustin Hoffman is a beloved classic, but that was a different time, and this new musical is not a faithful re-creation of the movie. Instead, this Michael Dorsey (Santino Fontana) is a bit more of a jerk. When his constant carping means that no director wants to hire him, he decides to audition for a part in a (terrible) musical that his friend Sandy is also going out for. He throws on a wig and a dress and voila! He's a better woman as the slightly frumpy Dorothy Michaels than all the other auditioning women, and so gets the role.

Then in rehearsal, he's his same, complaining self. But I guess because the whining is coming from a woman and "Tootsie" seems to presuppose that women are listened to more closely (WHAT??), Dorsey is able to finagle it so that he becomes the lead. In the process, he pulls a fast one on his love interest, Julie (an earnest Lilli Cooper) and also fixes the show, turning it into a hit. 

When things go wrong, he's sorry. But, and here's the important part, he's sorry for the wrong things. For example, he apologizes to Sandy for taking a role away from her. But that's not the problem. We saw she wasn't going to get it, and anyway, actors are professionals, they compete against each other all the time. The problem was that he was dismissive of her and her concerns, engaged in a lot of eye-rolling, and then stood her up when they had dinner plans.

Book writer Robert Horn tries to make all this gender nonsense okay. At the end, Michael babbles some pablum about how he learned that women have it tough, but we actually never see him experiencing that toughness. We only see his life getting easier once he puts on a dress.

This story, at its heart, is about a workplace where a man pretends to be a woman and then sails to success, presumably because it's so hard and unfair to be a man. But in the past few years, woman after woman has stood up to say that their lives are examples of the opposite.

Of course, this is a musical. It's a comedy. It's not meant to be realistic, right? That's true, but it's not the only issue with the show: The ballads are droopy, the choreography is particularly uninspired. For the most part, however, it's a solid musical and it's funny. And in the end, it's likely that is all it will take to win over the crowd.

"Tootsie" with music and lyrics by David Yazbek and a book by Robert Horn, at the Marquis Theatre in an open run.