Walking into the Winter Garden Theatre, where “The Music Man” has just opened, is like wandering through the perfume counters at Bloomingdale’s: prepare to be spritzed with nostalgia from all sides. There’s the red-white-and-blue Playbill, for a start, and, in place of a curtain, a russet barn façade that parts to reveal backdrops painted in the style of Grant Wood’s Midwestern fantasias—all flat, rolling green hills and overgrown-broccoli trees. (The set was designed, along with the costumes, by Santo Loquasto.) Meredith Willson’s show, which premièred in 1957, takes place in 1912 in a small town in Iowa, an era and a home state that Willson and Wood shared. This new production, directed by Jerry Zaks, works hard to convince us that we, too, have been transported back to our Before Times, when nobody feared contagion, and crowds could flock to Broadway expecting to be pleased. Don’t worry, the show strains to assure us. This sunny American classic has not been “reconsidered.” No bloody heart beats beneath these floorboards. Just look at the names on the marquee: Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, stars synonymous with song-and-dance delight. You are being asked to pay top dollar—up to seven hundred of them, for an orchestra seat—not to be discomfited and provoked but, rather, to be enchanted, elated, and sent home satisfied.
If the show delivered on that promise, all would be well. But—despite the enduring pleasures of Willson’s score, with its genius for drawing out the music of ordinary speech, and the acrobatic efforts made by a whopping forty-two performers, many of them astonishingly accomplished children, who are sent leaping and whirling across the stage in Warren Carlyle’s athletic choreography—the production, which confuses America with Americana, ends up off-key. A classic doesn’t have to be gut-renovated to stay relevant. But it does have to be understood, and Zaks plays willfully naïve where Willson himself was savvy.
Take that small-town past. It’s already fading in “Rock Island,” the show’s opening number, in which a group of travelling salesmen sing-talk at one another in rhythms that chug and hiss along with the train they’re riding on. For years, they’ve extended credit to their customers; now they want cash for their merchandise, because, as one salesman says, business is “differ’nt than it was,” and so is the world. Ever since the Ford Model T came to market, people have wanted to “git up and go” to the city to do their shopping. Who’s going to buy from travelling salesmen, when the cracker barrels and milk pans and hogshead casks they peddle become “obsolete” almost as soon as they’re sold?
Where the salesmen see impending disaster, Professor Harold Hill (Jackman) spies opportunity. Hill is a confidence man, a classic American huckster. He wouldn’t be out of place in Silicon Valley, persuading investors to pour money into a miracle technology that can analyze blood with a single finger prick, or, for that matter, in the White House, selling worthless university degrees and inedible steaks. Hill’s particular scam depends on exploiting two commodities that he knows will never go out of style: fear and vanity. Within five minutes of rolling into River City, he has stirred up a moral panic by denouncing the town’s new pool table, and has convinced the townsfolk to let him lead a marching band for the local boys. His plan: to sell them instruments and spiffy gold-braided uniforms, collect the cash, and then stiff the suppliers, skip town, and leave his customers on the hook. Hill talks fast and he talks sweet. When a huffy group of officials demands to see his credentials, he pulls out a pitch pipe and whips them into a barbershop quartet before they know what’s happening; he disarms the mayor’s snooty wife (the wonderful Jayne Houdyshell) by enlisting the ladies of River City to form a dance troupe and installing her as its leader. (One joy of “The Music Man” is the way it leans into the inherent artificiality of its medium by turning the whole world into a musical.) Only Marian Paroo (Foster), the stern—and eminently single—town librarian and piano teacher, proves impervious to Hill’s charms, but it doesn’t take long for him to spot her Achilles’ heel. Once he takes a special interest in her shy, lisping little brother, Winthrop (Benjamin Pajak), she’s eating out of his hand, along with the rest of River City’s rubes.
If there’s one thing “The Music Man” should be, it’s delirious, infectious fun. But, for all Zaks’s busy stagings, his production feels oddly stiff and buttoned up. Carlyle’s choreography dazzles at first, then dulls with repetition. The texture of Willson’s material is woven from his dual threads of affection and skepticism for the place he comes from, but Zaks has shaved away any pesky specificity and left us to wallow in the broad. River City’s buffoonish Mayor Shinn (Jefferson Mays, full of red-faced comic bluster) is furious that his eldest daughter is going steady with the town hooligan, Tommy Djilas (Gino Cosculluela). But why does this strapping young man who dances like an angel and never tries so much as to kiss his sweetheart’s little finger pose such a threat? The answer is in Willson’s script. Tommy, whose surname suggests Eastern European origins, is the son of “one a’them day laborers south’a town,” and the mayor wants nothing to do with his kind. But Zaks has cut this line. It’s as if the show’s producers had done a sensitivity read, striking anything that might offend—because a contemporary audience would be shocked, shocked to find prejudice and suspicion in such an all-American story!—not understanding that that telling moment of ugliness is crucial to Willson’s portrait of his small-minded community.
The most awkward case in point is “Shipoopi,” which was originally written as a catchy full-cast number in praise of slut-shaming. Obviously a song that opens with the lyrics “A woman who’ll kiss on the very first date / Is usually a hussy” and goes on to encourage the men it addresses to “squeeze her once when she isn’t lookin’ ” (“she will never get sore if you beg her pardon”) is ripe for reconsideration. The song begs to be ironized—think of the possibilities of a staging that played against the lyrics, letting the girls get the upper hand. Instead, it’s been lobotomized, turned by rewrite men Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman into a preachy ode to nice boys who respect women. “The girl who’s hard to get” is now “the girl you can’t forget”; there’s stuff about “the boy who’s seen the light” and knows to “treat a woman right.” It’s bland and bloodless, in the way that coverups always are. A few scenes later, the mayor yells at his wife, who has defied him in public, to sit down. Guess no one told him that we’re doing a new “Shipoopi” now.
This sanitizing spirit puts Jackman and Foster, who carry the weight of the show, in a strange position. Hill is a master manipulator, of women in particular. His strategy involves wooing local music teachers so that they’ll lend professional credence to his band scam. But Jackman seems to hold himself at arm’s length from Hill’s sleaziness, which, like Hill’s charm, is linked to his appetites—for risk, for money, for women, and, ultimately, for love. Jackman has oodles of charisma and vigor; his well-fitted britches remind us that Professor Hill shares a training regimen with Wolverine, and he does a lewd little groin-shimmy with his boater hat in the manner of Michael Jackson, that other music man from Gary, Indiana. But his charm never comes fully alive. The performance is sweet, mostly zestless, and sometimes downright discordant, as in Jackman’s weirdly funereal rendition of “Seventy-Six Trombones.” He’s genuinely adorable with the kids—everybody’s fun uncle—but, as a cynical lover ambushed by his own capacity for real feeling, he remains abstract.
It’s Foster, with her spunky toughness and her lovely, rich belting voice, who shines the brightest, particularly in the second act, when she’s allowed to move past Marian’s tight-laced primness and let deliciously loose. Exiting the stage after revealing her true feelings, Marian tosses Hill a salty look that could stop a heart at the back of the house. She shares a trajectory with the missionary Sarah Brown in “Guys and Dolls,” another rectitude-obsessed spinster who blooms after falling for the bad boy. The problem here is that Zaks doesn’t show us why Marian—who dreams, in her big Act I ballad, “My White Knight,” of “a modest man, a quiet man / a straightforward and honest man”—would pin all her hopes, by the start of Act II, on a bloviating crook she sees right through. Marian wants a lover who will be “more int’rested in me / than he is in himself / and more int’rested in us / than in me,” but Jackman’s Hill, for all his interest in little Winthrop, doesn’t fit that bill. He seems genuinely surprised that his charms have worked on this tough cookie, and why—or whether—his feelings for her have gone from manipulative to sincere remains a mystery. When the two are finally allowed to enjoy themselves together, strutting around in band-leader costumes complete with funny feathered caps, sparks fly. The moment arrives just before the curtain call: a carefree coda that comes too late.
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