“Connie and Carla,” a motley revamp of “Some Like It Hot,” auditions Nia Vardalos, author of the fluky success “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” and Toni Collette as an always dubious and frequently grotesque masquerade act. Derived from one of the unproduced scripts in the Vardalos inventory, this wheezing showbiz farce serves as ample warning: It’s time to stop the Vardalos bandwagon before another famished, hand-me-down pretext pops into her head and onto the screen.
Lifelong friends devoted to dueting on show tunes since grammar school, Miss Vardalos’ Connie and Miss Collette’s Carla enter as struggling but impossible-to-discourage lounge singers from Chicago. Eyewitnesses to a gangland execution, they flee to Southern California and find more or less overnight esteem while posing as brassy female impersonators at the Handle Bar, a homosexual hangout in West Hollywood.
The switch on the fugitive musicians played so memorably by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon 45 years ago is that two actresses pretend to be men who are transvestite performers. Equivalence seems to be a problem: Connie and Carla are never obliged to pass as plausible-looking guys in the course of any given day. They resort to garish nightclub facades, dominated by thick makeup and billowing fright wigs, during every waking hour.
Both have left boyfriends back in Chicago, regular lugs named Al and Mikey (Nick Sandow and Dash Mihok, respectively), who work at a warehouse. Miss Vardalos seems to have borrowed these token consorts from “Laverne & Shirley.” She also depends on sitcom familiarity for the title characters, whose peril is derived from Billy Wilder but synthesized with farcical behavior from Desilu. Connie and Carla resemble twin Lucy Ricardos as they scamper and screech through absent-minded episodes.
The material panders to absurdly credulous homosexuals. The Handle Bar crowd isn’t clever or observant enough to suspect Connie and Carla of being women. The house drag shows are purported to be so amateurish before the newcomers arrive that they astonish the clientele by actually singing out loud, instead of lip-syncing to Broadway cast recordings. Since the duo also abandons any effort to conceal their real names, concealment itself loses much of its rationale.
It’s not as if serious anxiety stalks the plot. One of the few funny ideas is that a thug pursuing the runaways, Boris McGiver’s Tibor, gets stalled in the Midwest checking out dinner theater revivals of “Mame.” Upon reflection, Tibor’s sojourn probably has funnier possibilities than the L.A. odyssey.
Connie is awarded a new boyfriend: David Duchovny as Jeff, earnestly seeking a reconciliation with his prodigal big brother Robert (Stephen Spinella), who left home to pursue the homosexual life and tends bar at the Handle Bar. The disinclination to upgrade Carla’s romantic prospects leaves Miss Collette with a skimpier heroine’s role, since she gets no love scenes. However, the blandness of Jeff is enough to persuade you that she might be the luckier bimbo. Mr. Duchovny functions as a hovering apology, meant to instruct straights in the etiquette of deference and acceptance.
Debbie Reynolds makes a belated appearance as a self-caricature, blessing the floor show at the Handle Bar. Her approval doesn’t quite excuse the ragged consistency of the musical interludes, which revolve around the co-stars belting fragments of songs from “Oklahoma!,” “Cabaret,” “South Pacific,” “Funny Girl,” “Gypsy,” “A Chorus Line,” “Hair” and “Cats,” etc., etc.
Miss Vardalos and Miss Collette seem to have pipes, but they aren’t precision instruments that cry out for a grateful, song-starved public. Broadway at the Handle Bar is more of an ordeal than a delight.
*1/2
TITLE: “Connie and Carla”
RATING: PG-13 (Frequent sexual innuendo and vulgarity; systematic allusions to homosexuality; fleeting violence and drug allusions.)
CREDITS: Directed by Michael Lembeck. Written by Nia Vardalos. Cinematography by Richard Greatrex. Production design by Jasna Stefanovic. Costume design by Ruth Myers. Choreography by Cynthia Onrubia. Hairstyles by: Donna Bis and Pauline Tremblay. Music by Randy Edelman, with music supervision by Paul Bogaev.
RUNNING TIME: About 100 minutes
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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