Sweet Smell of Success offers a brilliant, inspired cityscape set (once again) by the incomparable Bob Crowley with superlative lighting by the great illuminator Natasha Katz (once again), good songs by Marvin Hamlisch and Craig Carnelia, a book by John Guare, Broadway dancing at its best by a top-level ensemble imaginatively choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, the powerful John Lithgow filling the stage with his energy and presence - all snappily directed by the ever-innovative Nicholas Hytner.
But the show is off-kilter. Something turns in your stomach because of the content. The two leading men, a reprehensible columnist (Lithgow) and a self-serving rat of a press agent (Brian d'Arcy James) have no redeeming features, and we can identify with neither as the decent people in the show are squashed like bugs. Lithgow is the protagonist, and he's such an attractive performer that being unable to identify with him because he's so rotten gives a feeling of unbalance, especially when he gets to do a vaudeville number near the end as vile acts he set in motion take place.
Is Sweet Smell a good show? Definitely. Did I have a good time? For much of it. Did I leave the theater with a satisfying catharsis? No -- with an ironic, unfulfilled sense of injustice.
