‘The Sting’: Ragtime and Con Men, This Time in Tap Shoes

MILLBURN, N.J. — A musical is a con game. It’s fakery and flimflam, a well-lit hustle. When it works, it’s the best kind of swindle — the kind where the marks don’t even know they’ve been played.

The trickery on display in “The Sting,” the adaptation of the 1974 best picture winner now at Paper Mill Playhouse here, isn’t yet so smooth. As directed by John Rando, it’s a jaunty entertainment — any work that leans so heavily on Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” had better be. But its seductions come and go, a dance here, a ragtime riff there, another twist in the corkscrew plot.

That plot is more or less the same as in George Roy Hill’s film, itself loosely based on David Maurer’s “The Big Con,” probably the greatest page turner the field of linguistics has ever produced. A caper flick best remembered for its ragtime score, it ventured an excuse, if any were needed, to have Paul Newman and Robert Redford team up again after “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

Reviewing the movie in The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote that it “looks and sounds like a musical comedy from which the songs have been removed.” Enter the “Urinetown” composers Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis and “The Drowsy Chaperone” book writer Bob Martin. Harry Connick Jr., who plays the Newman role, also added his own music and lyrics.

On Beowulf Boritt’s set, receding prosceniums that resemble the trestles of an elevated train, a trombone blurts and Luther (Kevyn Morrow), a practiced hoaxer, sidles on, promising us “a down and dirty chronicle/of deception, betrayal and more.” Then we’re thrust into a Joliet alley circa 1936, in the midst of a rip-off that’s soon to go wrong.

When Luther goes to the big racket in the sky, the junior grifter Johnny Hooker (J. Harrison Ghee) flees to Chicago and apprentices himself to Henry Gondorff (Connick), once the king of cons and now a whorehouse drunk. Together they scheme to rook Doyle Lonnegan (Tom Hewitt), a man crookeder than both of them, and mean, too. (We know this because he wears a mustache and a mink collar and he golfs, the dirty rat.)

Let’s get this out of the way: Harry Connick Jr. is no Paul Newman. Luckily he’s not trying to be Paul Newman. Less luckily he’s not trying to be anyone except Harry Connick Jr. (And maybe sometimes Frank Sinatra.) At the piano, he doesn’t so much tickle the ivories as mash them, like a guy making a sloppy pass, but oh boy does it work. And if Ghee (a replacement Lola in “Kinky Boots”) doesn’t have Redford’s one-of-a-kind sunshine, he is as velvety and pleasing as the felt on a new fedora.

Martin’s book, charming and largely faithful, makes a few improvements on the film. Reworking Hooker as African-American sets up the con even more effectively, and the prejudice he faces, casual and otherwise, puts us on his side. The cathouse madam Billie (played with authority and delight by Kate Shindle) has more to do than before. The show offers oomph to Billie’s relationship with Gondorff and to Hooker’s flirtation with a diner waitress, Loretta (Janet Dacal), the kind of frail who just happens to tuck herself in for the night in a satin teddy and gartered stockings.

Yes, “The Sting” has the same casual sexism as some other recent Paper Mill shows — “Honeymoon in Vegas,” “A Bronx Tale.” (Both made it to Broadway — with “A Bronx Tale” still playing.) All the women are for hire. So are most of the men. But the men aren’t asked to keep traipsing across the stage in lingerie.

The songs are likable enough, never revelatory. You can spot the rhymes from the next town over. Thankfully there’s Warren Carlyle’s blissful choreography, especially the hotfoot, slip-sliding tap numbers. Often a musical will make you wait to break out the tap shoes, but here the characters are scuffling, shuffling, riffing and winging from the first scene. Nothing they say, or sing, yet compares.

The heroes of “The Sting” may be playing for big money, but the stakes in the musical never feel especially high. It’s worth wondering, too, if this is the right show for right now. When honesty and integrity seem in such short supply, are a pair of con artists, however adorable, really who we want to cheer for?

Then again, the movie won best picture amid the Watergate scandal, so … maybe?

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“The Sting" runs through April 29 at the Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, New Jersey; 973-376-4343, papermill.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.