NEW YORK, NY.- There comes a moment in the latest Broadway production of Meredith Willsons The Music Man when high spirits, terrific dancing and big stars align in an extended marvel of showbiz salesmanship.
Unfortunately, that moment is the curtain call.
Until then, the musical, which opened Thursday night at the Winter Garden Theater, only intermittently offers the joys we expect from a classic revival starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster especially one so obviously patterned on the success of another classic revival, Hello, Dolly!, a few seasons back.
The frenzy of love unleashed in that show by Bette Midler, supported by substantially the same creative team including director Jerry Zaks, choreographer Warren Carlyle and set and costume designer Santo Loquasto has gone missing here, despite all the deluxe trimmings and 42 people onstage. Instead we get an extremely neat, generally perky, overly cautious take on a musical that, being about the con game of love and music, needs more danger in the telling.
Thats something Id have thought Jackman would deliver. His previous New York outings, especially in musicals like The Boy From Oz in 2003 and a Back on Broadway concert in 2011, were unbuttoned affairs, sometimes literally, threatening at any moment to spill over the lip of the stage. As such, Harold Hill, the traveling salesman who dupes Iowans into buying instruments for an imaginary band, would seem to be a perfect fit for him or at any rate an impossible fit for anyone else.
But Jackman mostly suppresses his sharky charisma here; this is not a star turn like Dolly Levi or, for that matter, Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz. Instead, he seems to see Hill as a character role: a cool manipulator and traveling horndog who in being unprincipled must also be unlovable.
The result is a smart but strangely inward performance. By turning away from the audience, he not only undersells big numbers like Ya Got Trouble in which Hill spellbinds the citizens of River City into believing that the recent arrival of a pool table will cause juvenile delinquency and that a boys band is the solution but also undersells us.
As the town librarian who sees through him immediately, Foster does not have that problem; her take on Marian is witty and front-facing throughout. She fully commits to the seriousness but also to the size of the comedy, letting it arise from the big internal conflicts of a woman with standards too high for her own happiness. You believe it when her mother (Marie Mullen, lovely) complains in semi-spoken song that not a man alive could hope to measure up to that blend a Paul Bunyan, Saint Pat and Noah Webster youve concocted for yourself outa your Irish imagination, your Iowa stubbornness and your liberry fulla books.
But the casting of Foster introduces a problem even she cannot solve. With its outpouring of musical styles and counterpoint numbers, Willsons score is brilliantly designed to push different worldviews into proximity and sometimes into harmony. Soaring above the more pedestrian sounds of the townspeople with their lowdown dances, thickly harmonized barbershop quartets and crisp civic anthems, Marians soprano literalizes the idealism at the heart of her character and conflict. Her lilting Goodnight, My Someone and Hills raucous Seventy-Six Trombones could not be more oppositional until it turns out they are in fact the same melody, in different octaves and at different tempos.
Though Foster can sing the required notes, she is really a belter, with a mezzo quality to her voice regardless of the pitch. In her high-flung songs she works too hard to force the bloom when whats needed is ease and exuberance. My White Knight, an aria that is usually a rangy highlight of the role, is performed here in a lower key and as fast as possible; it comes off less as a stratospheric dream than a street-level race, making Marian sound, and thus feel, pretty much like everyone else.
Unfortunately, that flatness is endemic to the production. The central element of Loquastos set is a full-width barn wall whose doors occasionally slide open to reveal vignettes played out against drops painted in the style of Grant Wood (another Iowan). But even when the barn disappears completely, the staging feels two-dimensional and so old-fashioned (except for the astonishingly good dancers performing Carlyles athletic choreography) that it might have come straight from 1957, when The Music Man premiered on Broadway. Or even 1912, when its set.
I suppose you could argue that an old-fashioned show deserves an old-fashioned staging like the kind that worked for Dolly and its certainly true that The Music Man, as written, includes some antique elements that give us pause today. This production rightly omits, for instance, the Wa Tan We girls of the local wigwam of Heeawatha and their Indian war dance. Even though such ludicrous appropriations are authentic to the setting, a musical comedy need not be a documentary.
But omit too much and whats left lacks texture. Running shorter than its advertised length, this revival cuts a lot, eliminating even minor details that might cause offense. The boy who is secretly dating the mayors daughter is no longer the son of one athem day laborers south atown, presumably because the suggestion of class prejudice is too hot for a comedy to handle in 2022.
Same with the shows treatment of mens casual harassment of women. You cant really remove it from the main story; Hills modus operandi involves seducing piano teachers and leaving them flat. (At one point he refers to Marian as his commission.) In light of that, it seems foolish merely to change a lyric here or there; in the dopey dance tune Shipoopi, the couplet the girl whos hard to get
but you can win her yet has become suddenly enlightened as the boy whos seen the light
to treat a woman right.
What world are we in?
The Music Man can work today. Ive seen it be thrilling as recently as 2018, in a Stratford Festival production that didnt shy away from the chance it offers to explore class differences and, with a Black Harold Hill, even racial ones. In this production, too a colorblind one some performers manage the trick of making their characters, as Willson requested, valentines to small town folk, not caricatures. Jefferson Mays as the blustery mayor and Jayne Houdyshell as his imperious wife get all the humor out of their roles without diluting the way their ideal of civic culture is just another kind of con.
As, no doubt, is ours; one of the points Willson makes in Rock Island, the spoken-word number that opens the show, is that old products remain sellable even when old packages become obsolete. Its just that if youre a traveling salesman, you gotta know the territory.
No doubt thats as true for musicals as it was for Uneeda Biscuits. If were going to keep selling classic shows, we have to find meaningful new ways to package them. Even for the best salesmen among us, and Jackman is surely that, the territory is changing fast.
The Music Man
At the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; musicmanonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.