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?”
