Theater review: 'Scoundrels' is all about sweaty Butz

Norbert Leo Butz is a flailing freakout. A spastic, sweat-drenched, over-caffeinated monkey of a man with the kinetic comic sensibilities of John Belushi, Robin Williams and Jack Black rolled into a guy who's seen too many episodes of "The Man Show."

It's hard to imagine the stage musical adaptation of "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" without him. Thank heavens we don't have to: Butz, who starred in the original Broadway production, joined the initial stint of the first national tour, including a week-long stint at Tempe's Gammage Auditorium.

Butz, who nabbed a Tony last year for his role in "Scoundrels," is not only the star of the show, he's the glue for a light-hearted musical that would likely otherwise be quite a yawner.

The songs certainly don't help matters. Less than a third of them, courtesy "The Full Monty" songman David Yazbeck, are interesting at all -- and that's only because Butz flops and mugs and hams it up from within them ("Great Big Stuff," "Love is My Legs").

The rest are either lame filler, lyrically insipid (points for rhyming "Oklahoma" with "melanoma," though) or outright examples of when not to toss in a musical number ("All About Ruprecht," "Here I Am").

At least the non-singing parts are pretty smart. Jeffrey Lane's book struggles with staying faithful to the 1989 film (a Steve Martin vehicle in Butz's role) from which "Scoundrels" came, while cleverly tweaking his version to fit the realm of ironically self-referential contemporary musical theater, a la "Urinetown." (It says something that even an usher in the audience appears to be dragged into the story early on.)

Stripped of the songs, "Scoundrels" would be a hilarious comedy, to be sure. But Lane knows there's a certain wacky, almost reckless, freedom to musicals that doesn't come easy for straight plays. And he plays the wackiness to the hilt.

The "Scoundrels" plot, for those who don't recall: Two con artists meet in the French Riviera. One (played by "Urinetown's" Tom Hewitt) is a suave older gentleman, while the other (Butz) is an eager, if not exactly bright or halfway classy, young striver in the game of parting women from their charitable income. An apprenticeship forms but what starts as a kind of con-artist finishing school quickly turns into a competition to see who can bag the visiting "American soap queen" (Laura Marie Duncan) and fleece her dirty. A farce ensues.

Co-stars Hewitt and Duncan are in fine form here -- he's suave to a T, snapping his magic fingers like the Fonz; she's somewhere between Suzanne Somers and Marlo Thomas, and cute as heck. And supporting players Hollis Resnik and Drew McVety, who create the show's only real romance, are wonderful.

But they're all just backdrops for Butz and his sarcastic one-liners, Benny Hill-worthy muggings to the audience and floppings around the stage like it's his own private padded room.

"Scoundrels" may not have the big-budget wow-factor of "Wicked," the musical that immediately preceded this one at Gammage, and it's certainly a bawdier time at the theater. (I stopped counting the S-bombs about four in.) But for all the show's deficiencies, Butz's performance alone is worth the price of admission.

Even if it does inspire one to take a calming drag off an asthma inhaler on the way back out into the lobby.

>> "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" runs 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 13, through Friday, Sept. 15; 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 16; 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 17; at Gammage Auditorium, Mill Avenue and Apache Boulevard, Tempe $20-$76. (480) 784-4444. Grade: B