The familiar rap on flawed Broadway musicals usually goes something like this: “Well, the score is great…but the book has problems.”
Enter “Tootsie,” red sequins ablaze, a new musical adapted from the popular 1982 movie starring Dustin Hoffman as a luckless actor who finds stardom in a wig and a girdle. In this exception-that-proves-the-rule, the book, by Robert Horn, ranks among the flat-out funniest written for a new musical in the past decade, with Horn not only drawing on the clever original story by Don McGuire and the great Larry Gelbart, but spritzing it with considerable doses of his own fresh wit. I haven’t laughed as much or as hard at a Broadway musical since — I can’t remember, to be honest.
Review — Tootsie — BN+ — Bill Murray — Reg Rogers — David Yazbek — Lilli Cooper — Santino Fontana — Robert Horn — The Band's Visit — Sarah Stiles — Michael Dorsey — Dorothy Michaels — Michael McGrath — The Full Monty — Dustin Hoffman — Don McGuire — Larry Gelbart — Dirty Rotten Scoundrels — Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown — Hand to God — Teri Garr
