‘Catch Me If You Can’ opens eight-performance run

The musical version of "Catch Me If You Can" opens Tuesday at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts.

Jack O’Brien knows a thing or two about turning movies into musicals.

After all, he won a Tony Award a decade ago for directing “Hairspray” — and earned nominations for “The Full Monty” (2000) and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (2005).

O’Brien’s latest, “Catch Me If You Can,” opens an eight-performance run Tuesday at The Smith Center.

It represents a “Hairspray” reunion for O’Brien, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (who wrote the musical score) and choreographer Jerry Mitchell. (“Catch Me’s” librettist, Terrence McNally, worked with O’Brien on “The Full Monty.”)

After all, “if you have a good creative experience, you want to have another one,” O’Brien says in a telephone interview. “When you have a huge success like ‘Hairspray,’ kind of a love fest with all these people, you want the bon temps to rouler on.”

Beyond that, however, “Catch Me If You Can” also meets O’Brien’s exacting standards for movie-into-musical metamorphosis.

“Every producer in the world will rifle through their Netflix stacks” looking for likely adaptations, “but there has to be an element of performance” for the adaptation to work,” he explains. “The characters need another dimension to tell their story. There has to be a reason you think the story you’ve seen on screen is worth examining in a different light.”

By that measure, “Catch Me If You Can” definitely fits the bill.

Inspired by the 2002 movie directed by Steven Spielberg, “Catch Me If You Can” recounts the adventures of teenage runaway Frank Abagnale Jr. (played on screen by Leonardo DiCaprio), whose antics — cashing millions in forged checks while posing as, among other things, an airline pilot, doctor and lawyer — attract the attention of a dogged FBI agent.

The movie, in turn, was inspired by Abagnale’s ghost-written 2000 autobiography of the same name. (Abagnale himself appeared at The Smith Center last month to recount his real-life experiences.)

But there’s a catch for those expecting a direct screen-to-stage translation of “Catch Me If You Can.”

That’s because the musical borrows its narrative style from a venerable TV format that peaked during the “Mad Men” era: the star-driven variety spectacular.

From 1956’s Emmy-winning “An Evening With Fred Astaire” to 1962’s “The Judy Garland Show” (with guests Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin), Barbra Streisand’s “My Name Is Barbra” and “Color Me Barbra” (from 1965 and 1966) and onward through Mitzi Gaynor’s multiple ’70s extravaganzas, the shows featured elaborate staged musical numbers that put the stars in the spotlight.

“Catch Me If You Can” pays tribute to those days in its opening number, “Live in Living Color,” as Frank Jr. (Stephen Anthony) welcomes the audience:

“Live in living color, let me take you for a ride —

Yes, I’m live in living color, so sit back and let me be your TV Guide … ”

Adding to the musical’s variety-show atmosphere: a bevy of chorus girls dubbed the Frank Abagnale Dancers. (Any resemblance to “The Dean Martin Show’s” dancing Golddiggers is, we trust, hardly coincidental.)

Shaiman and Wittman “thought of this as being one of those TV shows,” O’Brien says.

“The boys,” as the director refers to them, had been offered another musical, but when they spotted a published version of the “Catch Me If You Can” screenplay — complete with a picture of DiCaprio, dressed as a pilot and surrounded by “all those stewardesses” — they said, “ ‘That’s the show we want to do.’ ”

O’Brien, however, responded to a different element: the story’s fathers-and-sons theme.

In “Catch Me If You Can,” Frank Jr.’s own father (Dominic Fortuna ) is a charming ne’er-do-well with his own con-man moves.

But FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Merritt David Janes ) emerges as a surrogate father figure to Frank Jr., who in turn “awakens a feeling of parenthood” in Hanratty, the director explains.

When the musical was in its early stages, the creative team met with Spielberg to “get his blessing,” O’Brien says.

“Everything they had to cut out of the movie,” Spielberg wanted in the show, he adds.

But “even Spielberg needed a movie and a half to explain” all the twists and turns of Abagnale’s life — and how a young con man who did prison time wound up designing “the $20 bill that’s in your pocket,” O’Brien says.

“It was tricky for us,” he admits. “We had 15 pounds of story we had to stuff into a 5-pound bag.”

As a result, some things had to go.

Including “one of the best songs,” titled “50 Checks.”

Tom Wopat, who originated the role of Frank Sr., “sang the daylights out of it” during the show’s Seattle tryout, O’Brien recalls. But Frank Sr. stopping a show about Frank Jr. just wouldn’t do.

As for the real Frank Jr., Abagnale “embraced this with almost messianic passion,” O’Brien says, despite the fact “it really wasn’t the story he lived.”

In real life, “he’s not what he is in the musical,” according to the director.

Because he was “very tall and prematurely gray,” Abagnale could convince people he was in his 30s, O’Brien says.

But in the musical, “the audience has to think this kid is in jeopardy,” he adds. “If he looks like he’s 30 years old — it may be true, but it isn’t dramatic. We couldn’t put the real Frank onstage.”

The Frank who’s onstage in “Catch Me If You Can” plays the starring role in “a sophisticated show,” O’Brien says.

In the director’s view, “Catch Me” qualifies as “a thinking show and a feeling show,” he says. “I love that fact that it’s a real story.”

Or at least as real as any based-on-a-movie musical ever gets.

Contact reporter Carol Cling at ccling@
reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272.