The Tender Trap

Think Mad Men meets Zulawski’s Possession by way of Bloodsport.

Max Shulman and Robert Paul Smith’s Broadway comedy, immortalized as a 1955 Technicolor film starring Frank Sinatra and Debbie Reynolds, offers a light-hearted window into mid-century America. In Blue in the Right Way‘s daring 2025 revival, the original’s romantic facade is deconstructed to reveal the suffocating social structures lurking beneath. Director Kevin V. Smith’s staging unfolds as a fevered nightmare of gender performance, featuring the female characters as an ever-present chorus that witnesses and disrupts the male-dominated narrative. The production’s utilization of Jiu-jitsu choreography eroticizes the male form and transforms physical comedy into a seductive power play that exposes the homoerotic undercurrents of the classic buddy comedy. The sinister and layered design of Blue in the Right Way’s award-winning artistic team weaponizes the mid-century American aesthetic to create a startling work of visual performance art from an iconic piece of comedic American pop culture.