Dirty Rotten Scoundrels Tickets

About The Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

The first, a small-time crook named Freddy Benson, swindles women by waking their compassion with fabricated stories about his grandmother's failing health. The other is suave, sophisticated con artist Lawrence Jameson, who also makes his living by talking rich ladies out of their money, but on a much grander scale. After a fateful meeting on a train, they unsuccessfully attempt to work together only to find that this small French town isn't big enough for the two of them.

Rather than work together, they agree on a settlement: the first one to extract $50,000 from a young female target wins, and the other must leave town. A hilarious battle of cons ensues, bringing out the best and worst in each man, along with a fun, unexpected twist that will keep audiences laughing, humming and guessing to the end!

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels reunites members of the creative team who brought the comedy The Full Monty to Broadway a few seasons back with such stunning results: composer/lyricist David Yazbek, director Jack O'Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell. Add in a company led by two-time Tony winner John Lithgow and featuring favorites like Norbert Leo Butz, Sherie Rene Scott, Joanna Gleason and Gregory Jbara and you've got a sure-to-be surefire Broadway hit!

The musical came about after movie company MGM (through its MGM On Stage initiative) invited writers, directors and producers to consider its catalog of titles for musicalization. Lane, Yazbek and producer Marty Bell had all independently inquired about the 1988 Frank Oz-directed "Dirty Rotten" film, which had a screenplay by Dale Launer and Stanley Shapiro & Paul Henning. MGM's Darcie Denkert and Dean Stolber got the parties together.

"Separately — we didn't know each other — we all wanted to do the same piece," Marty Bell explained. "So we all got together to talk about it. I didn't think it would work out, I thought I'd want to get my own people, but they had such a great take on it that we started together. As soon as Jeffrey wrote his first draft I felt like I'd found the musical comedy book writer I've been looking for 20 years."

Lane (TV's "Mad About You" and "The Murder of Mary Phagan") said he was attracted to "the whole idea of a con, the whole idea of theatre being a con — the fantasy that a person creates."

"I've always been fascinated by con men because they have to be really smart about people and able to look right into a person's heart and see what that person wants, and yet never reveal themselves," Lane said.

Fans of composer-lyricist David Yazbek's score for his freshman Broadway effort, The Full Monty, will be happy to know that with Dirty Rotten he continues his knack for spinning playful, comic lyrics while drawing on many musical sources.

"I tried to stay away from French music — I can't stand it, that accordion stuff," Yazbek told Playbill On-Line. "There's a continental flavor to the score — y'know, a string section — but there's also room for funk and that kind of stuff. When it was time for something festive and summery, I came up with this samba. There are a couple of really old fashioned ballads. When I say old-fashioned, I mean really old-fashioned — like, '40s and '50s."

Yazbek explained, "These characters, some of them, are ultra rich, ultra — in the Broadway way — witty, so I was able to have fun with trying to do Noel Cowardy kind of stuff. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do the show: Just the idea that I could do really craft-laden lyrics, but also have kind of a crass, low-brow thing going on."

He agreed that the canvas of Dirty Rotten is much broader than his previous Broadway show. "In Full Monty, pain and anger was at the bottom of everything in the story," Yazbek said. "In this, it's sort of slyness and wit at the bottom of everything."

Around the time of Full Monty in 2000-2001, Yazbek, then known for his alternative pop music, said he wasn't sure if theatre-writing was in his future. Was he being coy?