NEW YORK — For a primer in how nervous Broadway has become of old-fashioned love and sex, once its bread and butter, you need only head over to the Winter Garden Theatre to see Hugh Jackman, shorn of all of his menace and much of his usual rakish charm in “The Music Man.”
And if Jackman, the omnisexual, omni-talented embodiment of projected audience fantasies and once “Wolverine” for goodness sake, can’t break through Broadway’s palpable lack of confidence in its own classic musical material, well, it’s a tough day in River City.
Meredith Willson’s masterful 1957 show about a con man who thrives in a small Iowa town in 1912 still has art to impart. Willson was a true poet of the Rialto and, despite its reputation as a wholesome, old-fashioned show, “The Music Man” actually was a feast of experimentation. Most musicals struggle to justify why their characters suddenly burst into song: Willson found music and rhythm in everything from the clatter of a train carrying salesman on the Rock Island Railroad, to the sound of a librarian stamping books in a reading room, to the deliciously frantic lyrical juxtaposition of prosaic Midwestern towns whose wacky names had never shown up before on Broadway. Dubuque. Moline. Iowa City. They all somehow sing here. What other musical has ever coined anything like “Shipoopi?”
And instead of the usual hero, Willson came up with Harold Hill, a slimy sleaze merchant who is trying to take the town’s cash as it buys band instruments for its kids. Hill’s a no-good seducer until the final moments of the show when, as he puts it, he gets his “foot stuck in the door” due to the persistent challenge of Marian the librarian, played here by Sutton Foster. Even then, Willson suggests the future will be tough for both of them. That’s especially acute in this production, directed by Jerry Zaks, since you never see the pair fall in love.
That’s because Foster starts out invulnerably furious at the very idea of Hill and then runs out of time to show us her character’s change of heart. The material, of course, is asking her to suspend her usual judgment and fall in love — and not love in the reading-room sense of the word, either. Marian discovers sex for the first time; her longed for White Knight had better be good in the hay. And she has Hugh Jackman for her motivation. You’d think she could not go wrong. But somehow, the stalks of corn refuse to smolder. Heck, it’s the core of the show! What else you gonna do in a River City after you’ve picked a little and talked a little?
The revival has cut itself off at the knees over worries about how it will go down in today’s less-then-permissive environment. Jackman seems so reluctant to fill out the role of the seducer in chief that, in some of the scenes, he almost retreats into the scenery. That’s a pity. Especially since the design, by Santo Loquasto, also seems unsure of what it wants to say about River City: eye-popping as they can be, the visuals range from romantic realism to stylized topography to overhead panoramas to even a backdrop with fake people. They’re cool, but they don’t help with the production’s lack of clear, resolute purpose.
Certainly, all of the performers are profoundly accomplished professionals, including Jefferson Mays and Jane Houdyshell (as the mayor of the town and his wife) to the excellent Shuler Hensley as Hill’s sidekick. The revival, which is choreographed by Warren Carlyle, is at is best when it showcases the kids in the cast, boffo young dancers led by Emma Crow and Gino Cosculluela, galloping around the stage in a joyous manifestation of the show’s central premises: underneath all of that stodgy Iowa social convention lies a free and sensual people, trying to break out of its collective shell.
Which brings me to one of Willson’s other themes: the ease with which a worthless huckster like Hill could scare and seduce an entire small town by appealing mostly to their fears and, in especially craven fashion, to their love of their own family.
Is there not a metaphor in there for rural America over the last few years? Here’s how Jackman could have justified his character’s actions and existence. But in this production, he just seems like a fundamentally decent guy who has slightly lost its way. That just can’t fully drive a show far more complex than the usual romantic musical.
The production still works in places. Zaks’ shows invariably honor the family and touch the heart, as this one especially does where the kids are involved. Very few humans have the luminous musical-theater technique of Foster, on full display here. The production always feels rich, full and a big night out. Most family audiences visiting New York will have a happy time in the presence of genuine theatrical stars.
And there is one brilliant and fully effective piece of staging: the opening ensemble number, “Rock Island,” set on the train filled with hard-working salesmen who hate the man who has given them all a bad name. Jackman then appears with a warm, gentle, apologetic smile and you immediately worry where the evening is going.
———
