Catch Me If You Can

Catch Me If You Can begins with a teenager cornered at an airport gate, who talks his way out of being arrested by offering to tell the story properly, with an orchestra. Frank Abagnale Jr. left home at sixteen when his parents' marriage collapsed, and he has spent the years since being other people.

He is an airline pilot who has never flown, a doctor who supervises interns, a lawyer who passed a bar exam by studying for it, and the author of several million dollars of forged cheques. Behind him, patiently, is Carl Hanratty, a bureau agent with no home life and an unglamorous specialism in paper fraud. Their relationship becomes the point: two men who only ever speak by telephone, one running and one following, both alone at Christmas.

The musical has a book by Terrence McNally, music by Marc Shaiman and lyrics by Scott Wittman and Shaiman, adapted from Abagnale's memoir, and it reached the stage in 2011. Shaiman and Wittman had written Hairspray before it, and the score here is a deliberate throwback to 1960s variety television: big band, brass, and a chorus of dancers who appear whenever Frank needs the world to look glamorous.

That framing is the show's structure as much as its style. Frank narrates his own life as a television special, and the numbers stop whenever the truth intrudes far enough to interrupt the arrangement.

It is a comedy that keeps circling something sadder. Every identity Frank invents is a version of the father he watched fail, and the only person who ever comes looking for him is the man paid to.