My Variety Review: New Musical 'Trading Places' in Atlanta

After the Great Recession of ’08 — not to mention anxiety about the current economy — will a Reagan-era comedy about insider trading and the glory of greed get the same laughs? Can it sing, too?

In the 1983 movie “Trading Places,” the life of a financial manager is switched with a Philly street hustler when two filthy-rich commodities brokers — brothers Mortimer and Randolph Duke  — make a nature-versus-nurture wager and puppet-master their secret social experiment. The same prince-and-pauper plot outline applies to the latest film-to-musical treatment premiering this month at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, which last launched the joyous “The Prom” to New York — and before that, the less successful “Tuck Everlasting.”

But this screwball switcheroo still has a long way to go before it’s a safe Broadway bet. At this stage, it’s off-balance in its leads, inconsistent in its tone and uneven in its comedy and tunes, while still managing to deliver some fun along the way.

In the film, Eddie Murphy’s brazen con artist stole the spotlight from Dan Aykroyd playing Louis Winthrope III, the preppy  financier brought down to the gutter by the manipulative brothers (played onstage by Marc Kudisch and Lenny Wolpe). But here, Bryce Pinkham — who knows a few things about playing privilege from “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” —  dominates as Louis. He’s delightfully ridiculous, even when given middling material.

Pinkham is also in grand voice and makes delicious sport of Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner’s eclectic but unremarkable tunes, especially the wistful and witty “What Time Is It in Gstaad?”

The role of Billy Ray Valentine — which Murphy played with comic abandon — is now gender flipped to Billie Rae (Aneesa Folds, who was so fine in the improvisatory “Freestyle Love Supreme”). But Folds, with a character that has been softened and sentimentalized, has no opportunity to showcase any comic riffs. With little edge and audaciousness, she …|CONTINUED|