playbill vip

“How do you know what you’ve been told to believe in your whole life is real - What is the truth?”

My first year of English teaching a genuinely curious student brought my well-planned lesson to a grinding halt with these two questions. It was the first time I ever threw my plan for the day out the window and tried something different. As I told my students that day, there are few more perplexingly human questions than this one: What is true?

We might think our modern experience is the most complicated when it comes to deciphering what is true and what is not from the infinite streams of information we can access, but the thread of this “chat” starts with the ancient Greek philosophers and is present in all the ages of great human innovation and thinking. Are we even capable of arriving at 100% empirical “truth”? 

What I love about theater, and musical theater specifically, is we don’t get too bogged down in the details when it comes to “truth” - we know you’ll have to suspend your disbelief at some point, tonight, maybe right about the time the FBI agents start dancing. Our truth focuses more on the telling of the story and doing it in the most entertaining way possible.

You can’t ask for a more unreliable narrator than Frank Abagnale Jr., from the 1980 release of his autobiography, Catch Me If You Can, to the 2002 film of the same name, to the 2011 Broadway musical, there is no agent or expert that has been able to get Abagnale to come clean about the truth vs. fiction in his life story. Even as recently as September 2022, when Abagnale was invited to accept an award for ethics (of all things) at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, he still skillfully evades anyone who seeks definitive truth from him. Luckily for us, the pop culture version of Abagnale’s adventures is delightfully entertaining and unfolds before your eyes tonight. “Live in Living Color” our Frank and this cast of merry players will entertain you with a jet-setting cat and mouse chase and of course, everything ends happily ever after.

So what is the larger lesson to be taken from this musical about a preternatural con-man? For all of Frank’s lies, it is his relationships that empower him. His father gets him going, his love for Brenda keeps him moving, and in the end, it is the unsuspected friendship with Agent Hanratty that saves Frank from himself.

What awesome truths these are to know - the people that we love bring the color to our world; love can have the best of intentions and sometimes gets it wrong; love can keep us going, and love can reel us in when we go too far. It may not be the “God’s honest truth,” but it’s one heck of a story.

Ms. Denton, for the Creative Team