Fans of the Billy Wilder classic film Some Like It Hot will find plenty that's familiar in the plot of the Tony-winning Broadway musical adaptation, which just opened Thursday in its first American tour at SF's Orpheum Theater. But the story of two musicians going on the lam in drag to escape a Chicago gangster takes a few modern twists.

[Contains spoilers!]

In 1959, Some Like It Hot made a splash in movie theaters, arriving as the notorious Hays Code was fading into obscurity, and featuring two main, male characters cross-dressing through much of the film not for sexual reasons, but for comedy — disguising themselves after they accidentally witness a mob hit.

Updating the story for a 21st Century audience steeped in a cultural moment that's fairly obsessed with gender identity was no doubt a challenge. And book writers Amber Ruffin and Matthew Lopez remained faithful to the original outlines of the plot, with one significant exception.

For those unfamiliar, the story centers on musicians Joe (Matt Loehr) and Jerry (Tavis Kordell), who land a lucrative gig at a mob-owned nightclub only to find themselves inadvertantly witnessing a murder by the club owner and his goons. They run off, having heard about a gig in which an all-female band is heading on the road to California, and disguised as women they join the band, which just happens to need "girls" who play saxophone and upright bass, their instruments.

All of this is in line with the original screenplay plot, but the musical adds a major helping of tap dancing — starting with the opening number "What Are You Thirsty For?" by band leader and undergound club manager Sweet Sue (Tarra Conner Jones), and continuing with Joe and Jerry's first tap number in which they're auditioning for another club, "You Can't Have Me (If You Don't Have Him)".

Joe and Jerry become Josephine and Daphne, and quickly, Joe/Josephine falls in love with the singer in the all-girl band, Sugar Cane — the part originally played by Marilyn Monroe, here played by the very sweet-voiced Leandra Ellis-Gaston. The three become a tap trio on the road, and they arrive at San Diego's Hotel Del Coronado as a full-fledged band with dancers. It's here that the wealthy owner of the hotel, Osgood (Edward Juvier), falls immediately in love with Daphne.

While Daphne's/Jack Lemmon's reveal that he's a man at the end of the 1959 film is a sort of light-hearted punchline, with the Osgood character famously saying "Nobody's perfect" in response, the reveal here is very different. Jerry/Daphne essentially "comes out" to his friend Joe as non-binary, in not so many words, and as newly liberated to understand he can be both Jerry and Daphne at once — the character is played ably here by a young non-binary performer, Kordell, and was played on Broadway by J Harrison Ghee, another nonbinary actor, who won the Tony for the role.

And in trying to "come out" to Osgood, as it were, the script handles this with delicacy and deftness. Osgood suggest he already knows Daphne's "secret" and doesn't care. And, he adds, "The world reacts to what it sees, and in my experience the world doesn’t have very good eyesight." It's a line that will no doubt draw cheers from Bay Area audiences every night, as it did on opening night.

But lest you think that Wilder's gleeful, gender-bending rom-com was turned into some didactic tale about identity, I'll say this is anything but. Daphne sums up her revelation with the lovely Act II number "You Coulda Knocked Me Over With a Feather," and then more screwball comedy and insane tap numbers ensue.

The entire chase scene around the hotel, in fact, after Joe and Jerry are inevitably discovered by the mobster Spats Columbo, is a mad-cap, breathless, completely chaotic, all-cast tap number and door-slamming farce — a testament if there ever was one to the insane talents of director and choreographer Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon, Mean Girls, Spamalot).

The mugging by the actors, and all the tapping, can at times feel like too much, and that is part of the point. Some Like It Hot is a musical in an old style that takes pains not to take itself too seriously, and to keep the mood as jolly and jokey as possible.

The talents behind the score are Marc Shaiman (Hairspray, Smash, Mary Poppins Returns) and co-lyricist Scott Wittman, who have littered the show with hummable melodies and delightful 1930s-esque band numbers.

It's the quality of the performances, particularly those by supporting players Ellis-Gaston as Sugar and Juvier as Osgood, that stand out the most in what is mostly an ensemble affair, and my god does this show put everyone through their paces, dancing- and singing-wise.

Kudos to Ruffin and Lopez, and to Nicholaw, for striking the right balance between old and new, and adapting this story in a way that still lets us laugh and never makes us cringe.

'Some Like It Hot' plays through January 26. Find tickets here.

Top image:  Tarra Conner Jones (Sweet Sue) and the First National Touring Company of 'Some Like It Hot.' Photo by Matthew Murphy.