The Music Man : Critical Thinking/Official Reviews

[jo]

It might be thoughtful to combine features that dwell on The Music Man as a creative work, without reviewing a particular production ... with subsequent reviews of the Jackman-led revival. In this case, Wall Street Journal offers a discussion of the musical composition by Meredith Willson as a work of art. It recognizes how ahead of its time this classic musical composition is.

We can also include in this thread the official reviews expected to come out after Opening Night.

www.wsj.com/articles/the-music-man-broadway-meredith-wilson-hugh-jackman-sutton-foster-11644276165?st=j2okbsxbi6i97by

The Wall Street Journal Opinion

English Edition

WSJ. Magazine
OPINION COMMENTARY CULTURAL COMMENTARY

The Wholesome Subversiveness of ‘The Music Man’


The show, a revival of which is now in previews on Broadway, was radically innovative in its musical construction when it opened in the 1950s.

By Will Friedwald
Feb. 7, 2022 6:40 pm ET


Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster and the cast of ‘The Music Man’
PHOTO: JOAN MARCUS


Near the end of his short lifetime, the comedian Andy Kaufman performed a routine in which he chanted what seemed like random phrases in rhythm while accompanying himself on conga drums. (Even stranger, Kaufman was apparently doing his laundry at the same time.) For some 14 years, a fuzzy video of this has been available on YouTube, yet virtually nobody in the house seems to realize that the lyrics were from “Rock Island,” the opening number of “The Music Man,” a musical whose Broadway revival, starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, is now in previews and opens Feb. 10.

The creator of “The Music Man,” Meredith Willson, who died in 1984, at age 82 (the same year as Kaufman, at 35), would have appreciated the joke. When the show originally opened on Broadway, it was a popular and critical success, as well as a Tony winner. But most of the critics only applauded the surface “wholesomeness”: “A genial cartoon of American life,” proclaimed the New York Times, adding “as American as apple pie.” Virtually no one noticed that “The Music Man,” in terms of its musical construction, though perhaps not its subject matter, is as radical and innovative a work as has ever hit the Broadway stage.

When Willson and his second wife, Ralina “Rini” Zarova, first performed the score for potential producers in 1952, its working title was “The Silver Triangle.” “The Music Man” is a much better name for a show about a charismatic con artist of a traveling salesman who hoodwinks an entire Iowa town into purchasing instruments and accouterments for a boy’s brass band. Yet the audience is constantly confronted with a subtext that could have been postulated by John Cage : What is music? What is singing? And, no less important, what isn’t?




That opener, “Rock Island,” sets the tone and the tempo, establishing the character of Professor Harold Hill, mostly a cappella and timed very exactingly to the rhythm of a locomotive. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, in the 1933 film “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” had found their own halfway point between speech and singing, and so too had the Gershwin brothers in parts of “Porgy and Bess.” Yet nothing, even Willson’s own experiments with a vocal quintet he called “The Talking People” (which he utilized on many radio programs starting in 1946), quite sounded like “Rock Island.”


“The Music Man,” like “My Fair Lady” from the previous season, found its own brilliant way to empower a nonsinging leading man to shine in a musical comedy. “They don’t want a singer in this show,” Robert Preston, the original Harold Hill, said in an interview in 1957 (quoted in Bill Oates’s biography, “Meredith Willson—America’s Music Man”), adding that his role was essentially “talking in rhythm . . . wouldn’t make sense any other way.”

In the show’s celebrated musical monologue, “Trouble,” Professor Hill becomes, in Preston’s description, “a cross between a gospel preacher and a con man.” In “Piano Lesson,” dialogue is sung and spoken and character delineated to the pitch and tempo of a child doing her keyboard exercises. In “Pickalittle (Talk-a-Little),” henpecking old biddies are musically metamorphosed into prattling chickens. In “The Wells Fargo Wagon” and “Gary, Indiana,” Willson shows how the exaggerated lisp of a 10-year-old boy can be an enhancement rather than an impediment to a vocal performance. “Shipoopi” imbues a nonsense word with contextual significance even while the chorus sings a major scale in solfeggio (“Do-Re-Mi,” two years before “The Sound of Music”) in the background.

And when Willson isn’t challenging our notions regarding the nature of song itself, he’s monkeying with the harmonies. Nearly all the rest of the melodies in the score—including almost everything sung by the leading lady ( Marian Paroo, aka Marian the Librarian, an iconic role originated by the legendary Barbara Cook )—are part of contrapuntal constructions. Marian’s most vulnerable, intimate and feminine aria, “Goodnight, My Someone,” is based on the same chords as Harold’s most extroverted and macho rabble-rouser, “Seventy-Six Trombones.” Likewise, Marian’s tender “My White Knight” is a counterpoint—in both senses of the word—musically and character-wise, to Harold’s chauvinistic “The Sadder-But-Wiser Girl.” Further, “Pick-a-Little” and “Will I Ever Tell You” are the harmonic flip sides of “Goodnight, Ladies” and “ Lida Rose. ”



In its juxtaposition of a straightforward, Americana-driven narrative told with avant-garde techniques, “The Music Man” might be regarded as a song-and-dance equivalent to “Our Town,” even though Willson’s work is hardly taken as seriously as Thornton Wilder’s . That makes it all the more surprising. The candy inside is what you’d expect but the wrapping and packaging are new and different, making “The Music Man” a work that’s completely wholesome yet subversive at the same time.


—Mr. Friedwald writes about music and popular culture for the Journal and is the author of the newly published “Straighten Up and Fly Right: The Life and Music of Nat King Cole. ”

[jo]

Feb 10, 2022 10:35:34 GMT -5 jo said:

The Vogue feature on Hugh Jackman & The Music Man.

Adam Green is also the theatre critic for VOGUE -

in a sense, this is the first published review of the show!

The feature has been divided into 2 parts here - with the 2nd part showing the critic's review of the show.



www.vogue.com/article/hugh-jackman-music-man-broadway

Vogue

Hugh Jackman Is Back on Broadway in The Music Man, And Not a Moment Too Soon
BY ADAM GREEN

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ETHAN JAMES GREEN

February 10, 2022




76 TROMBONES, 1 JACKMAN

Hugh Jackman wearing a Stan vest. Thom Browne shirt. Billy Reid pants. Grooming, Mia Santiago. Set Design, Nicholas Des Jardins. Fashion Editor: Hamish Bowles. Menswear Editor: Michael Philouze.Photographed by Ethan James Green, Vogue, March 2022.


Most of the earth’s citizens know Hugh Jackman as a big-screen action hero and romantic leading man—a movie star like they used to make them. But as he confessed to the audience during his 2011 one-man show Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway, “I kind of like being onstage singing and dancing a little bit more.” Now, Jackman is once again back on Broadway, starring in a bliss-inducing revival of The Music Man, Meredith Willson’s wry and tuneful fable about a traveling flimflam man who meets his Waterloo and the love of his life in small-town Iowa.

As we slog through the winter of our discontent into year three of the pandemic, we need a little Hugh Jackman—not to mention his incandescent costar Sutton Foster—to banish our cares. And this gleamingly produced, unapologetically old-fashioned, feel-good musical comedy is just the ticket. It’s also a role that Jackman has wanted to play for years, and he describes the exhilaration of performing again for a live audience as “like being shot out of a cannon.”

An immediate smash when it opened on Broadway in 1957, The Music Man was a deliberate throwback to a vanished era. Set in 1912, with book, music, and lyrics by Willson, it was the author’s valentine to his home town of Mason City, Iowa (renamed River City in the show), and to the all-American music that he played as a young flutist in John Philip Sousa’s marching band. It follows the exploits of “Professor” Harold Hill (Jackman), a con man posing as a traveling salesman, who drops into town to sell the locals on the idea of a boys’ marching band—along with the necessary uniforms and instruments—by exploiting their optimism, vanity, ignorance, and fear (in this case of the corrupting influence of pool playing). The town’s sharp-tongued, resolutely single librarian and music teacher Marian (Foster) spurns Hill’s advances and sees through his ruse. But they end up falling for each other, and Hill gives up his swindling, vagabond ways to settle down with her and organize the boys into a real, if terrible, marching band.

Willson famously wrote more than 30 drafts of the show over eight years before The Music Man made it to Broadway. But, with such numbers as “Seventy-Six Trombones,” “Ya Got Trouble,” and “Till There Was You,” the show won five Tony Awards, beating out West Side Story for best musical, and making its lead, Robert Preston, a star. Preston went on to reprise the role in a 1962 film version, and the show has since been revived with Dick Van Dyke and Craig Bierko, been turned into a TV movie with Matthew Broderick, and performed, with varying degrees of skill, at countless high schools across the country.



Jackman, when we speak, seems to have studied The Music Man with the exactitude of a Shakespearean scholar, and that may be because he made his stage debut in a production of the show at his all-boys high school in Sydney. (It was a chance, he says, to meet girls.) “I was Salesman Number 2,” Jackman tells me. After a pause, he adds, stoically, “David Anderson was Harold Hill.” I jokingly ask, “Yeah, but where is he now?” and Jackman tells me that he went on to become prime minister of Australia. For a second, largely thanks to his flawless deadpan and my hazy knowledge of Australian politics, I believe him. Whatever Jackman may have lacked vis-à-vis a young David Anderson, by the time he got cast in Trevor Nunn’s 1998 revival of Oklahoma! at London’s Royal National Theatre, he had clearly upped his game. With only leading roles in Melbourne productions of Beauty and the Beast and Sunset Boulevard under his belt, Jackman gave a star-making performance, establishing himself as a one-of-a-kind musical-­theater actor in the classical tradition, who nonetheless felt completely of the moment, with seemingly effortless charisma and a hint of mischief. As The Music Man’s choreographer, Warren Carlyle, recalls: “From the first minute of Oklahoma!, it was clear that he was born to be on the stage. He fills that space like nobody else.”


And yet, Jackman’s musical appearances on the boards have been limited—it turned out that his star quality translated to the screen (and the box office), as he has demonstrated in no uncertain terms, starting with his feral turn as Wolverine in 2000’s X-Men, and its various sequels. He won a 2003 Tony for his high-wattage portrayal of the Australian singer-songwriter Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz and cemented his reputation as the greatest song-and-dance man of his generation with his 2011 one-man show, which he revamped and took on a world tour in 2019. But otherwise, Jackman’s musical comedy career has been largely speculative: He’s been attached to various stage musical projects that never came to pass, notably one about the life of Houdini, and it’s seemed as though every announcement of a new production came with a not-so-veiled hint that Jackman would be its star. Through it all, people kept telling him that Harold Hill was the perfect role for him, and he kept brushing the idea aside. Then, one morning a few years ago, he says, “I woke up and was literally like, Why haven’t I done The Music Man? And so I rang my agent, and he’d just had a call that day about it. And so it sort of felt as if it were meant to be…. Now, I’m a little mad at myself for putting it off so long.”



The Music Man was set to open October 22, 2020, under the aegis of the impresario Scott Rudin, known as much for his impeccable taste and lavish spending as for his volcanic temper. Rudin brought in the director Jerry Zaks, who had staged his smash 2017 revival of Hello, Dolly!, starring Bette Midler, and assembled the rest of that production’s blue-chip creative and design team. If anything related to Broadway could be called a sure thing, this was it. Then came the pandemic, which put the production on indefinite hold. And along the way, Rudin’s allegedly abusive behavior toward assistants was brought to light, and he stepped down as the show’s producer.

Jackman has a reputation as an unabashed family man, so he was happy as a clam riding out the lockdown with his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, and their by-and-large grown children, Oscar and Ava, assembling jigsaw puzzles, baking bread, binge-watching everything from Ken Burns documentaries to The Sopranos. “The best thing about it,” Jackman says, “was getting to have stolen time with my 16- and 21-year-old, who had zero interest in being in a house with me—but they had no choice. Being around them so much and getting to know them better—who they’ve become—was really, really lovely.”


But being Hugh Jackman, of course, the 53-year-old actor meditated and worked out daily, took singing lessons over Skype, and prepared for his role in The Music Man by consulting with a researcher who steered him to books about life in Iowa at the turn of the century and histories of the con men and traveling salesmen of the era. Crucially, he got together three times a week—masked and tested—with Carlyle to work on the show’s choreography. “Honestly, it saved my life,” Carlyle recalls. “And it’s how I built the movement for the entire show—from Hugh outwards. I got to really, really collaborate with him—he was part of every single conversation about every single step.”

When I finally saw Jackman perform on January 6, it was just after a 10-day absence imposed when he tested positive for COVID in late December. His result came soon after his costar, Foster, had tested positive, and just days after previews had begun. (Jackman made a point, following one of his final December performances, of lauding Foster’s understudy, Kathy Voytko, who, he said, had shown up at the theater at noon and had her first rehearsal as Marian at one o’clock.) “I was getting texts from friends in the theater community saying, ‘Careful, this is going around like wildfire,’ ” Jackman wrote me. “So before we had even one case, I knew it was only a matter of time.”

The virus, which had decimated Broadway when it closed theaters in the spring of 2020, was now abruptly shuttering re-opened shows like Jagged Little Pill and Waitress without even allowing for a final performance and forcing others to scramble for last-minute replacements when even understudies were out sick. (As Jackman told the audience during his curtain-call speech the night Foster was out of the show: “The courage, the brilliance, the dedication, the talent. The swings, the understudies—they are the bedrock of Broadway.”)

But on the night of his return, Jackman was back in full, defiant force, giving the musical performance of his career—part Gene Kelly, part Ray Bolger, part Paul Newman circa The Sting. He captures the roguish charm of a swindler and womanizer who loves the game, as well as hints of the melancholy of a man who keeps moving to outrun his loneliness. Sex isn’t a word normally associated with The Music Man, but with Foster, in glorious voice, as his foil—a guarded woman who dreams of a romance she’s not sure exists—the heat and longing between them is palpable. “You put the two of them together,” says Zaks, the show’s director, “then sit back and enjoy the greatest spectator sport, which is watching two people struggle to connect.”

Everything about the production, from the deep bench of sterling performers in the cast (Jayne Houdyshell! Jefferson Mays!) to the burnished glow of Zaks’s staging and the propulsive wit of Carlyle’s choreography, is designed to give pleasure—and succeeds! On the night of the first anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, the audience that I was a part of was grateful—ecstatic, even—to bask for a few hours in the simple and complex joys of musical comedy. “I’m not interested in reconceptualizing the show or finding the dark heart of The Music Man,” Zaks says. “God bless people who want to go that way. But I want to make this the joy machine Meredith Willson intended it to be.”



Still, for Jackman, the show is more resonant than ever. “Our idea of community has been really, really stretched, and as a society, we’ve become more and more pulled apart,” he tells me. “And here you’ve got this protagonist who brings a whole town together—in order to take everyone’s money, true. But even as he’s cheating them, he starts to recognize the better parts of human nature and the better parts of society, bringing them together for real and giving us hope that there is such a thing as community, real community. And who doesn’t want that?”

[jo]

NYTimes --

Review: Even With Hugh Jackman, ‘The Music Man’ Goes Flat

Sutton Foster also stars in this neat, perky, overly cautious Broadway revival of a musical that needs to be more of a con.



The New York Times
Jesse Green
By Jesse Green

Feb. 10, 2022, 10:09 p.m. ET


The Music ManBroadway, Musical2 hours 45 minutesOpen Run
Winter Garden Theater, 1634 Broadway212-239-6200



There comes a moment in the latest Broadway production of Meredith Willson’s “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 on 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 the director Jerry Zaks, the choreographer Warren Carlyle and the 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.

That’s something I’d 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.


Sutton Foster with Kayla Teruel, seated, and Jackman in the show, which is directed by Jerry Zaks.
Sutton Foster with Kayla Teruel, seated, and Jackman in the show, which is directed by Jerry Zaks.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times


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 you’ve 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, Willson’s 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, Marian’s soprano literalizes the idealism at the heart of her character and conflict. Her lilting “Goodnight, My Someone” and Hill’s 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.



Jackman with Benjamin Pajak as Marian’s brother, Winthrop, and Marie Mullen as her mother, Mrs. Paroo.
Jackman with Benjamin Pajak as Marian’s brother, Winthrop, and Marie Mullen as her mother, Mrs. Paroo.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times


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 what’s 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 Loquasto’s 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 Carlyle’s athletic choreography) that it might have come straight from 1957, when “The Music Man” premiered on Broadway. Or even 1912, when it’s set.

I suppose you could argue that an old-fashioned show deserves an old-fashioned staging like the kind that worked for “Dolly” — and it’s 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 what’s 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 mayor’s daughter is no longer the son of “one a’them day laborers south a’town,” presumably because the suggestion of class prejudice is too hot for a comedy to handle in 2022.

Same with the show’s treatment of men’s casual harassment of women. You can’t really remove it from the main story; Hill’s 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 who’s hard to get … but you can win her yet” has become suddenly enlightened as “the boy who’s seen the light … to treat a woman right.”

What world are we in?


Image
Jefferson Mays, center, as the River City mayor, with, from left: Eddie Korbich, Daniel Torres, Nicholas Ward and Phillip Boykin.
Jefferson Mays, center, as the River City mayor, with, from left: Eddie Korbich, Daniel Torres, Nicholas Ward and Phillip Boykin.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
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“The Music Man” can work today. I’ve seen it be thrilling as recently as 2018, in a Stratford Festival production that didn’t 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.” It’s just that if you’re a traveling salesman, you “gotta know the territory.”

No doubt that’s as true for musicals as it was for Uneeda Biscuits. If we’re 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.

But omit too much and what’s 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 mayor’s daughter is no longer the son of “one a’them day laborers south a’town,” presumably because the suggestion of class prejudice is too hot for a comedy to handle in 2022.

Same with the show’s treatment of men’s casual harassment of women. You can’t really remove it from the main story; Hill’s 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 who’s hard to get … but you can win her yet” has become suddenly enlightened as “the boy who’s seen the light … to treat a woman right.”

What world are we in?



Image
Jefferson Mays, center, as the River City mayor, with, from left: Eddie Korbich, Daniel Torres, Nicholas Ward and Phillip Boykin.
Jefferson Mays, center, as the River City mayor, with, from left: Eddie Korbich, Daniel Torres, Nicholas Ward and Phillip Boykin.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times


“The Music Man” can work today. I’ve seen it be thrilling as recently as 2018, in a Stratford Festival production that didn’t 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.” It’s just that if you’re a traveling salesman, you “gotta know the territory.”

No doubt that’s as true for musicals as it was for Uneeda Biscuits. If we’re 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.

[jo]

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‘The Music Man’ Broadway Review: Hugh Jackman & Sutton Foster Step Lively To Old Familiar Tunes
By Greg Evans

Greg Evans
Associate Editor/Broadway Critic

@gregevans5

February 10, 2022 8:04pm

Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster & cast of 'The Music Man'
Joan Marcus

When people who dislike musicals talk about the musicals they dislike, there’s a decent chance they’re talking about musicals like The Music Man – whether they’ve ever actually ever seen The Music Man or not. Meredith Willson’s nostalgic slice of Americana was already proudly old-fashioned when it debuted in 1957, with “Seventy-Six Trombones” leading Broadway down a cornpone path that shows like the moody Carousel or the finger-snapping West Side Story were trying so hard to avoid. Not even The Beatles could make Music Man‘s lilting “Till There Was You” sound cool.

Now, many decades later – and several years after directors Ivo van Hove and Daniel Fish reimagined West Side Story and Oklahoma! in thrilling ways unthinkable when those musicals were young – director Jerry Zaks, producers Barry Diller, David Geffen and Kate Horton and a well-rehearsed cast headed by Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster deliver a high-gloss Music Man as giddily backward-looking as ever.


Hard-hit and laid-up just weeks ago by Omicron, The Music Man, which opened Thursday at a celebrity-packed Winter Garden Theatre, certainly seems to have made a full recovery, at least if cheerful enthusiasm is any indication. (And for the record, producers Diller and Geffen displayed little indication of over-concern about Broadway protocol, sitting maskless in the audience throughout much of the evening.)

At this point, Jackman, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, doesn’t need to prove his song-and-dance chops to anyone – he did that ages ago in The Boy From Oz (2003) and Hugh Jackman, Back On Broadway (2011). But no mind – he does it again. As the lovable con man Professor Harold Hill, Jackman seduces the River City yokels and, if advance box office is any indication, Broadway audiences with his sonorous voice gliding through “Ya Got Trouble,” “Gary, Indiana,” “Marian the Librarian” and, yes, “Seventy-Six Trombones.” If he doesn’t possess the entrancing, otherworldly smarm of the late, great Robert Preston – and he doesn’t – Jackman delivers on both the Broadway necessities and Hollywood charisma to recreate, in his own image, theater’s greatest flim-flam man.

Jackman is matched vocally – outperformed, actually – by Foster, whose singing is so good she very nearly convinces us that Music Man‘s maiden Marian is something more than a remnant of bygone Broadway convention. That’s a tall order.


Watch the 1962 film version again and notice how Shirley Jones offsets that girlish soprano with a steely reserve, as if her voice and her self-protection could crack at any moment under the queasy charms of Preston’s snake-oil attentions. But the days when we equate icy reserve for virtue are long gone, and besides there’s nothing unsettling or dangerous in Jackman’s nice-guy swindler. Marian’s surly-from-the-get-go demeanor and late-in-the-show reversal are no more convincing than the notion of Jackman as a bad-to-the-bone cheat. Try as they might, their chemistry rarely comes over as anything deeper than the pleasant-enough, vaguely campy Grandma Moses-style flats that, in Santo Loquasto’s set design, make an easy signifier of America’s mythical innocence.


Jayne Houdyshell
Julieta Cervantes
Perhaps Zaks is, after all, attempting to modernize the characters, giving Marian an extra layer of grit, Harold a deeper sensitivity. The director is on record as having made cuts to rid the musical of negative Native American stereotypes, and songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman reportedly were recruited to amend the leering nonsense of Act II big, early production number “Shipoopi,” (a futile effort, despite the ensemble’s lively dancing).

But tinkering here and there with the bullheaded Music Man is a losing battle Barring an Oklahoma!-like revision, The Music Man, with its syncopated rhythms and rat-a-tat speak-sing style that, for all their catchy appeal, are not exactly the novelties of yore, will forever rise or fall on an audience’s taste for nostalgia. This, after all, is a musical that makes a repeated gag of likening townswomen to noisy hens (“Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little”).

So, rise or fall? This Music Man does both. The rousing ensemble numbers have their charms, like the unfailing show opener “Rock Island,” with its chug-chug-chugging cadence lurching to and fro with locomotive rhythms (Loquasto’s gorgeous train interior of dark wood and deep green velvets is an early visual high point). Is there another Golden Age (or close enough) musical that so economically and irresistibly sets up its entire premise in one fell swoop?

That premise, if anyone needs reminding, is this: A con man calling himself Professor Harold Hill goes from town to town bilking the townies out of money with various schemes, his latest being music: The professor stirs up fears among the elders about rowdy youngsters and their pool-playing, cigarette-smoking ways (“Ya Got Trouble”), his solution being to fill up those youthful idle hours with marching band practice – and he’ll sell you the instruments and uniforms.


Jefferson Mays (center)
Julieta Cervantes
“Ya Got Trouble,” Hill’s signature song, makes quick and good use of Jackman, who handles the tongue-twisting lyrics with ease, pretty much winning over both of his intended audiences – the River City townsfolk and the Broadway ticket-buyers – with grace and a high-voltage smile.

In short order we meet the Paroo family – Marian, the town librarian; her mother Mrs. Paroo (the wonderful Marie Mullen, a Tony winner for The Beauty Queen of Leenane), and little brother Winthrop (Benjamin Pajak, coming into his own with the crowd pleaser “Gary, Indiana”), a shy boy so self-conscious of his Sylvester the Cat lisp that he ventures barely a word.

Also on the scene is Mayor Shinn (Jefferson Mays), owner of the local billiard hall that Hill claims is the type of good-for-nothing establishment demanding the corrective of some good, old-fashioned Sousa tunes. Shinn’s vainglorious, stagestruck wife Eulalie (the redoubtable Jayne Houdyshell, stealing every scene as the musical’s funniest creation) might make for an even more formidable foe than her husband if her susceptibility to flattery didn’t make her such an easy mark.

You know the rest. Hill bamboozles just about everyone, including a soon-swooning Marian, and is just about to skip town with their cash when love gets in his way. Before the curtain falls, he’ll be offering up his own take of Marian’s lilting “Till There Was You.”

Warren Carlyle’s energetic, song-and-dance choreography blends vaudeville panache, ballet and pre-Depression dance craze, hitting all the right spots at all the right angles. Still, anyone who has seen the thrilling movies of MJ or the boundary-pushing explorations of Flying Over Sunset might be left a bit un-wowed. Like so much else with this Music Man, from Loquasto’s attractive, wheat-colored turn-of-the-century costumes to Brian MacDevitt’s autumn lighting, the dancing is expert – effortless even – yet still and all underwhelming. The Music Man lives up to every expectation except the most crucial one: Surprise.

Imagine if Zaks had really gone for broke and excavated what lies beneath all this bamboozlement. Could there be a better time to examine, even without sacrificing the musical’s light heart, whatever it is that lurks in the corners of an idealized America that so willingly gives itself over to the deceptions of con artists? Imagine if this production had made an honest attempt to figure out why Marian’s sudden (and unconvincing) acceptance of this deceiver is trumpeted as the height of romance?


There are no such moments in this production, though there are some delights. The set at one point opens up to make full use of the large stage to become a rather cavernous town library, an ideal and lovely setting for that most quietly disruptive of all its songs: “Marian the Librarian.” With all the whispered shushing and sneakily elongated phrasing (“libraaarrrrrrian”), the number gives Jackman and the ensemble a chance to display something unanticipated. He and the dancers are soon tossing books into the air, sending hardcovers sailing to be caught by hands across the stage, as if the entire troupe had become a single, collective and expert juggler. When Jackman gleefully spins himself atop a library desk and delivers a delighted “wheeee”, The Music Man frees itself from the confines of its own proficiency and presumptions, and for a moment we’re buying whatever it’s selling.

[jo]

The Wrap --

The Wrap


‘The Music Man’ Broadway Review: Hugh Jackman Leads the Big Parade
But Sutton Foster seems ill at ease in this lush, dance-heavy revival

Thom Geier | February 10, 2022 @ 7:05 PM


music man broadway hugh jackman sutton foster
Photo: Joan Marcus

Hugh Jackman does not get a thunderous ovation on his entrance in the new Broadway revival of Meredith Willson’s ”The Music Man” — he’s on stage through the whole opening number, hidden among the chorus of traveling salesmen riding a train car into River City, Iowa. But when he emerges from the crowd as the con artist/salesman extraordinaire Harold HIll, the applause begins and his natural charisma takes over and kicks everything up a notch.

While this glossy but uneven revival of the 1957 classic, which opened Thursday night at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre, is clearly intended as a star vehicle for the Tony-winning showman, Jackman consistently cedes the spotlight to allow the ensemble to shine. And shine they (mostly) do, particularly in group numbers like “76 Trombones” and “Marian the Librarian” that showcase Warren Carlyle’s often athletic choreography.

Jefferson Mays is appropriately flustered as the tongue-tied mayor of River City; Jayne Houdyshell hams it up as his wife, an easy mark for Hill’s flattery; young Benjamin Pajak is a charmer as the stuttering boy Winthrop; and the accidental barbershop quartet formed by the town elders (Eddie Korbich, Phillip Boykin, Daniel Torres and Nicholas Ward) are scene-stealing delights.



The one major casting misstep may come as a surprise: Two-time Tony winner Sutton Foster, saddled with an unfortunate wig, does not seem to have settled into the role of Marian, the spinster who falls for Hill despite his shortcomings. She plays the role broadly, like a sitcom archetype rather than a character — and you might get whiplash trying to follow her second-act encounter with rival salesman Charlie Cowell (Remy Auberjonois) and then her all-too-rapid reconciliation with Hill. Foster also sings about an octave lower than previous Marians and bizarrely begins the ballad “My White Knight” as if it’s a patter song. She’s on surer vocal footing on “Till There Was You,” belting the number beautifully, and matches Jackson’s dance moves in numbers like “Shipoopi” and a tap finale just before the curtain.

Director Jerry Zaks’ production is a throwback in just about every sense, for good and for bad. There are elaborate sets (by Santo Loquasto, who also did the costumes) with backdrops that suggest the work of Grant Wood — at one point, two chorus members even re-create “American Gothic.” There’s an orchestra of two dozen musicians and a cast of 40 that sometimes seems as crowded upstage as one of those high school productions that accepts everybody who auditions. Disconcertingly, there are also six principals — Tony winners all — who reinforce the glaring lack of diversity in 21st-century Broadway revivals as much as in 1912 Iowa.

There are some acknowledgements of contemporary mores, including a complete rewrite of the Act 2 opener “Shipoopi.” Gone are the lyrics about how a girl who kisses on the first date is “usually a hussy.” Instead, Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman have written new lyrics reframing the song for a fella who must win over his woman: “the boy who’s seen the light…to treat a woman right.”

But for the most part, this is very much “The Music Man” you remember — perhaps from the 1962 movie starring original Broadway star Robert Preston, perhaps from the endless amateur productions that have been mounted worldwide for more than six decades. And while he might not seem very convincing as a huckster, Jackman once again proves to be a ringleader in the best sense: commanding the spotlight when he wants our attention, and then giving his marks the slip and retreating into the shadows to allow other lights to glisten.

[jo]

NYPost --

ENTERTAINMENT

‘The Music Man’ review: Hugh Jackman’s revival is a huge let-down
By Johnny Oleksinski
February 10, 2022 10:33pm Updated

Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster star in "The Music Man" on Broadway.
Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster star in "The Music Man" on Broadway, which opened Feb. 10.
Joan Marcus
The meteoric hype surrounding “The Music Man,” which opened Thursday night on Broadway, has been building now for — somehow — three years.

The musical boasts the same creative team as Bette Midler’s wildly successful “Hello, Dolly!,” and we all hoped it would be the bandleader of Broadway’s post-pandemic return. Adding more sparkle, Hugh Jackman plays the leading man, Harold Hill, and on paper, it’s the role of the celebrated actor’s lifetime.

THEATER REVIEW
THE MUSIC MAN
Running time: 2 and a half hours with one intermission. At the Winter Garden Theatre, 1634 Broadway.

“The Music Man,” I’m sorry to say, does not live up to our oversize expectations. Quite unexpectedly, you leave not raving about Jackman, one of Broadway’s hottest sellers, but the music woman — Sutton Foster, who plays Marian “The Librarian” Paroo. She’s a wonder and the main reason to buy a ticket.

Much has been made of Foster not having the soaring soprano range of Barbara Cook and Shirley Jones, but that doesn’t matter. Hers is as thoughtful, funny, threatening, witty, maternal and romantic a Marian as you’ve ever seen. She never settles for a schoolmarm stereotype and makes 65-year-old lines fresh.

When the actress sublimely sings Meredith Willson’s “Till There Was You,” it’s a victory — for her, for Marian, for us and for a production of an American classic that, up until then, struggles to find an assured identity.

Sometimes the show is dark and moody, determined not to have too much fun with a story about a con artist who wins in the end despite his misdeeds. At others, it’s the “Music Man” of our cringeworthy high school memories — painfully corny when it need not be. The friendly opening night crowd was not sure when to laugh at the jokes, and that’s a major problem for a musical comedy.

Hugh Jackman is starring in "The Music Man" on Broadway.
Hugh Jackman stars in “The Music Man” on Broadway.
Photo by Bruce Glikas/Getty Images

Jackman plays Harold Hill, a traveling salesman who arrives on the train in repressed River City, Iowa, with the aim of swindling the town by forming a kids’ marching band. He’ll overcharge gullible parents for the instruments and uniforms, teach bogus lessons and then hightail it to the next city as soon as folks catch on. Then, whoopsie, he falls in love with hardened Marian.

The role was famously played on Broadway and on screen by Robert Preston, the memory of whom Jackman spends most of his time running away from. When he speak-sings “Trouble” — one of the most rousing tunes in the entire musical theater canon — he changes it up everywhere he can, even if that means sacrificing punch and momentum. “Ya Got Trouble” and, say it ain’t so, “Seventy-Six Trombones” are jarringly ho-hum here. The whole first act meanders to a fizzle.

What Hill is meant to achieve in those big numbers is convincing a bunch of stubborn Midwesterners, with his radiant charm and charisma, to trust and embrace a smooth-talking charlatan. But Jackman’s interpretation is so bizarrely dour — as if he’s judging his own character’s sins for us — that their infatuation makes no sense.



Opening night of ‘The Music Man’ draws stars and pols to Broadway

He and Foster dance Warren Carlyle’s choreography better than any previous pair of actors could’ve. The movement is easy on the eyes (even if Santo Loquasto’s flat, lusterless set is not) but light on storytelling. When Hill arrives, his insurgent energy sparks a fire in River City’s youth and you’d hope to feel their rebellion in the dancing. A lot of it, though, is cute and wiggly.

Jackman and Foster are joined in the musical, directed by Jerry Zaks, by a helluva stacked cast. Tony Award winners (such as Jefferson Mays as Mayor Shinn, Jayne Houdyshell as his rigid wife and Shuler Hensley as Marcellus) utter just a few lines. We leave wanting more from them because we’ve seen how great they can be — like if Laurence Olivier had a short walk-on role in “Young Sheldon.”

In the lead-up to “Music Man,” many friends admitted to me that they just plain don’t like the show. I’d reply that they haven’t yet seen a production that lives up to the wondrous material. The staging at Canada’s Stratford Festival in 2018, for instance, that many New Yorkers saw was an unforgettable triumph.

It’s been 20 years since “The Music Man” last played Broadway. Maybe 20 years from now, an invigorated Harold Hill will hop off the train at Grand Central and show ‘em how it’s done.

[jo]

Hollywood Reporter

Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster in ‘The Music Man’: Theater Review
After being delayed two years by the pandemic and having both its stars briefly sidelined by COVID, the most anticipated Broadway production of the season finally opens.


BY FRANK SCHECK
FEBRUARY 10, 2022 9:12PM

Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster in The Music Man. COURTESY OF JULIETA CERVANTES

For many theatergoers, this review will merely seem superfluous after the above headline. Two of Broadway’s most beloved stars appearing in a great American musical comedy to relieve us of our COVID doldrums. The revival of The Music Man was planned long before the pandemic, but its years-delayed arrival only serves to make it seem more essential for a badly battered Broadway sorely in need of spirit-lifting. The production seems not so much a theatrical enterprise as a public service, if you redefine public service to mean having to pay hundreds of dollars for a seat.


Is it worth it? Apparently so, for the many people who have happily contributed to an advance sale of — if you can believe Vanity Fair — some $50 million.


In a way, the most creative element of this revival originally produced by Scott Rudin (who had to withdraw after he essentially got canceled) is the deal that made it happen. Recreating the formula of his mega-successful revival of Hello, Dolly! starring Bette Midler, Rudin cannily cast the supremely bankable Hugh Jackman in a role seemingly tailor-made for him: the endearing con man Harold Hill, who manages to win over an entire Iowa town through sheer force of will and charisma. Add the adorable, multi-talented Sutton Foster as prim librarian Marian to the mix, and…ka-ching!

Not that the production ever seems to coast on its pedigree. Reuniting after Dolly are director Jerry Zaks, choreographer Warren Carlyle and scenic and costume designer Santo Loquasto, who have done their damnedest to recreate vintage Broadway style. The show features a huge ensemble, who break into elaborate production numbers with the regularity of buses leaving Port Authority. And though the sets, featuring a large red wood wall and many painted backdrops, aren’t particularly lavish, they perfectly evoke the spirit of the summer stock theaters in which many people were probably exposed to The Music Man in the first place.

Unlike, say, the daringly iconoclastic revival of Oklahoma! that played Broadway a few years back, this production of Meredith Willson’s classic musical proudly revels in its old-fashionedness. Why mess with something that isn’t broken, it seems to be asking, especially since we’ve got our stars as our ace in the hole. From his first surprise entrance (at least to those who have never seen the musical before) to his showstopping numbers “Ya Got Trouble” and “Seventy-Six Trombones” to his climactic moment, when he stares directly at the audience with a smile that seems to contain more gleaming teeth than there are stars in heaven, Jackman has the audience in the palm of his hand. And when Sutton finally gets to shed her character’s decorousness and let loose her tremendous dancing chops, there’s definitely no more trouble in River City.


By technical standards, Jackman is neither a great singer nor a particularly accomplished dancer. But he manages to overcome those minor inconveniences through sheer force of will and clearly evident hard work. Unlike Robert Preston, who originated the role in the 1957 Broadway production and triumphantly recreated it in the 1962 film version, he never seems very larcenous. He’s so damn charming and handsome that Marian’s falling for him seems predestined. If his Harold Hill made his sales pitch directly to the audience, half of us would undoubtedly pony up for musical instruments as well.

Foster’s name is listed below the title in the program but in letters just as large as Jackman’s, and she deserves the font. Her voice doesn’t have the crystalline beauty of such predecessors as Barbara Cook and Shirley Jones, and many of the songs aren’t really suited for her. But what does it matter, when she can make an audience love her with merely a winsome smile? She also displays a fierce comic edge that makes her a perfect foil for her co-star. When her Marian finally succumbs to Hill’s charms, it seems less like he seduced her than the other way around.

The production features a bounty of riches in the cast, with many of the supporting players seeming almost too qualified for their roles. There are no less than four Tony Award winners among them, including Jefferson Mays and Jayne Houdyshell as the suspicious mayor and his wife, Shuler Hensley as Hill’s accomplice and Marie Mullen as Marian’s mother. The pleasure each of them seems to be taking in doing their broad comic shtick proves infectious. Tyke actor Benjamin Pajak is delightful as Marian’s socially withdrawn little brother, as are the large number of other children in the cast, who sing and dance as if they’ve been treading the boards for decades.

Speaking of dance, there’s so much of it in the show that it might as well be retitled The Dance Man. Many of the songs have been expanded with extended dance sequences that threaten to turn the evening into the theatrical equivalent of cotton candy. Carlyle’s choreography is in most cases more vigorous than memorable, with one notable exception being his wonderfully inventive “Marian the Librarian” number that makes marvelous use of prop books. During the curtain call, Jackman and Sutton perform an energetic tap dance number — for no particular reason, other than that the audience will eat it up.


Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There’s nothing revelatory about this Music Man, and that’s probably just as well. In its determined effort to evoke the musical comedy Broadway of yore and make us feel happy simply to be in a theater again, the show ironically feels urgently timely.

Venue: Winter Garden, New York City
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster, Shuler Hensley, Jefferson Mays, Jayne Houdyshell, Marie Mullen, Remy Auberjonois, Gino Cosculluela, Emma Crow, Benjamin Pajak, Kayla Teruel, Garrett Long, Linda Mugleston, Jessica Sheridan, Rema Webb, Phillip Boykin, Eddie Korbich, Daniel Torres, Nicholas Ward, Lance Roberts, Max Clayton
Book-music-lyrics: Meredith Willson
Story: Meredith Willson, Franklin, Lacey
Director: Jerry Zaks
Choreographer: Warren Carlyle
Orchestrations: Jonathan Tunick
Scenic & costume designer: Santo Loquasto
Lighting designer: Brian MacDevitt
Sound designer: Scott Lehrer
Presented by Barry Diller, David Geffen, Kate Horton, Fictionhouse

MORE FROM THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

[jo]

TimeOut --

The Music Man
Theater, Musicals
Winter Garden Theatre, Midtown West
Until Dec 31, 2022
3 out of 5 stars

Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster in The Music ManPhotograph: Courtesy Julieta CervantesThe Music Man
Buy ticket
Time Out says
3 out of 5 stars
Broadway review by Adam Feldman

For a revival of musical theater’s most famous portrait of a con artist, the new Broadway production of The Music Man seems oddly lacking in confidence. Meredith Willson’s 1957 classic should sweep you up in a happy spell of suspended disbelief—much as its reformable-rascal hero, the fast-talking traveling mountebank who calls himself Professor Harold Hill, does to the easily misled citizens of a small town in 1912 Iowa. And who better to cast such magic, one might think, than Hugh Jackman, a bonafide movie star with real musical-theater chops, who has already played a charming charlatan on film as the sucker-seer P.T. Barnum in The Greatest Showman?


Yet while this Music Man is a solid and professional piece of work, and includes many incidental pleasures, the hoped-for enchantment never arrives. The production has reassembled much of the top-shelf creative team behind the thrilling 2017 Bette Midler revival of Hello, Dolly!, including director Jerry Zaks, choreographer Warren Carlyle and designer Santo Loquasto. And as in Dolly, it has surrounded its star with well-proved talents: Broadway darling Sutton Foster as his local foil, the wary librarian Marian Peroo; Marie Mullen as her excitable Irish mother; Jefferson Mays and Jayne Houdyshell as River City’s malaprop-prone mayor and his fussy wife; a loosey-goosey Shuler Hensley as Hill’s old friend and accomplice. The vehicle is polished; what it lacks is drive.

The production starts strong as a group of salesmen on a train chug through the famous “Rock Island” number, in rhythms that build on the locomotive’s own, lamenting the bad name that Hill has been giving their trade. From then on, however, you start to feel the show coasting in its tracks. Jackson’s first moment to dazzle us comes in the patter song “(Ya Got) Trouble,” in which Hill bamboozles the good but stuffy folks of River City with his big-band theory: that teaching the local youths to play in a marching band (with instruments and uniforms provided by Hill) will halt their supposed slide into juvenile delinquency. This is the big sell, yet Jackson undersells it. In The Music Man’s anchor number, he seems weightless—too likable to take seriously and too patently slick to be believed.



The Music Man | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus

Willson’s score remains delightful, from the gossipy hen-pecking of “Pickalittle (Talk-a-Little)" to several barbershop-quartet bits and the lovely “Till There Was You,” the only song from a musical that the Beatles ever covered. The script and lyrics have been tweaked here and there: the formerly problematic “Shipoopi” now extols the virtues of active consent, and Marian’s “My White Knight” has been expanded by restoring a long and busy introduction that was cut from the original production. Foster speeds through the latter song so fast you’d hardly recognize it as one of The Music Man’s oases of dreamy lyricism. What you get is comedy; what you lose, here and elsewhere, is the contrast of opposites—and attendant sexual chemistry—between Marian and Hill. Foster and Jackman seem to have fun together in the curtain call, tap dancing in matching white bandleader outfits, but their romance is otherwise half-hearted.

The Music Man‘s story of duplicity and redemption could have deeper resonance today than ever, but this incarnation of The Music Man sticks resolutely to the surface. As River City gives itself over to the spirit of “Seventy-Six Trombones,” we are offered a diverting succession of songs and extended dance breaks, especially for the actors playing children. (Little Benjamin Parak is a treasure as Marian’s shy, lisping illegitimate son—sorry, younger brother—Winthrop.) But is that enough to justify the ticket prices that The Music Man, on the basis of its pedigree, currently commands? Or are audiences being slightly conned, in effect if not intent, by a production that overpromises and underdelivers? The show is fine; it hits its marks. But at these prices, the marks might be us.

The Music Man. Winter Garden Theatre (Broadway). Music, lyrics and book by Meredeth Willson. Directed by Jerry Zaks. With Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster, Jefferson Mays, Jayne Houdyshell, Marie Mullen, Shuler Hensley. Running time: 2hrs 25mins. One intermission.

[jo]

Associated Press --

Reviews
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Hugh Jackman
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Arts and entertainment
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Theater

Review: Hugh Jackman steals ‘The Music Man’ on Broadway

By MARK KENNEDY
an hour ago
Hugh Jackman, center left, and Sutton Foster, center right, appear during a performance of "The Music Man" in New York. (Joan Marcus/DKC O&M via AP)
1 of 6
Hugh Jackman, center left, and Sutton Foster, center right, appear during a performance of "The Music Man" in New York. (Joan Marcus/DKC O&M via AP)


NEW YORK (AP) — Hugh Jackman is playing one of musical theater’s greatest con men on Broadway these days but he’s not fooling anyone: He’s the real deal.

As Harold Hill in a glorious and exuberant new revival of “The Music Man,” Jackman is like a coiled spring, effortlessly leaping onto desks, two-stepping with kids, tossing books into the air and pounding out a rhythm on his thighs. He’s even magnetic in a romantic clinch.

“That man is a spellbinder,” someone notes and you’ll have no argument here. “I’m in rare form these days,” Jackman’s Hill at one point boasts. Again, no argument.

But Jackman is but just one astonishing part of the subtly reworked Meredith Wilson musical that opened Thursday night at the Winter Garden Theatre. It overflows with talent, clever ideas and a hard-working multicultural cast.

Sutton Foster somehow channels her inner Carole Burnett to play Hill’s reluctant love interest, showing a gift for physical humor and comic timing in addition to nifty tap dancing and a gorgeous voice. If there ever was a stage match for Jackman, Foster is it.

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This production celebrates the quaint American soul with the simple story about a traveling salesman who in 1912 cons a small Iowa town into forming a band and buying his instruments and uniforms — even though he knows nothing about music. He’s going to fleece them for sure, until he falls for the town librarian.

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Director Jerry Zaks is a master at the romantic, comedic romp and moves things along with a seemingly effortless crispness aided by Santo Loquasto’s lush sets, with balloon-like trees and red wood barns. Zaks goes big with tunes like “Shipoopi” and “Seventy-Six Trombones,” of course, but also knows the power of calming everything down and just letting the song shine, as he does with “Gary, Indiana.”

Choreography by Warren Carlyle is complex and witty and especially shimmers in big numbers like the ambitious “Marian the Librarian” and the train-bound opening “Rock Island.” Wilson’s words are often tricky and slippery — “swindlin’ two-bit thimble rigger” — but the cast isn’t cowed.

In fact, there’s a winking knowingness to the show, a quiet awareness that the tomfoolery is just that and the folks up there are killing it. Jackman sometimes looks out into the audience with a rakish smile for just a second and he and Foster seem to naturally crack each other up.

There are so many actors up there — 21 cast members are making their Broadway debuts — that it seems to rival the number of people in the seats. Jefferson Mays makes the most of his suspicious mayor and Jayne Houdyshell as his wife is able to prompt laughter with just the tilt of her head.

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The script was quaint even in the late ’50s and is still studded with very dated references — like pinch-back suits, Uneeda biscuits and the humor magazine Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang — but it also has been cleverly edited of misogamy and racism. (The “Hairspray” song writers Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman are credited with “additional lyrics”).

“Squeeze her once when she’s isn’t lookin’” in “Shipoopi” becomes the more #MeToo appropriate “Squeeze her once/Tell her she’s good lookin.’” And listening to ragtime in ”(Ya Got) Trouble” that used to provoke a “jungle, animal instinct” now just triggers a “syncopated frenzy.”

You wouldn’t expect this 60-plus year-old chestnut to speak to 2022 but it often does. Like the grifter at its heart, who appears on stage the same week we’ve learned our twice-impeached former president allegedly tried to walk away from the White House with boxes of unauthorized stuff.

It also comes at a time when a wave of new laws and other actions have led to books being removed from schools and libraries around the country. That’s touched on in “The Music Man,” too: “She advocates dirty books,” says a townsperson about the librarian, “Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac.”

“The Music Man” may be a musical theater confection but its reach has been far. You can find in its embrace of quirky small-town characters an ongoing part of Broadway DNA, showing up in recent shows like “Waitress” and “Come From Away.”

The musical’s script has always ended a little abruptly, without a huge rousing number. But at the Winter Garden Theatre, it leads into an impromptu dance party where it feels like every single one of the 76 trombones is rocking out and the performers are just loving the moment. This “The Music Man” starts on a train and feels like a ride you never want to stop. As the conductor says at the beginning: “All aboard!”

___

[jo]

Roger Friedman

THEATER
REVIEWS
Home Theater Review: Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster Light Up Broadway with Boffo “Music Man,”...
Review: Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster Light Up Broadway with Boffo “Music Man,” Star Studded Premiere
■Theater
by Roger Friedman - February 10, 2022 11:21 pm
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Broadway is back!

“The Music Man” revival that opened tonight at the Winter Garden is a crowd pleaser, a bright, lively blockbuster of a show with a Big Movie Star, Hugh Jackman, and a Big Broadway Star, Sutton Foster. The Jerry Zaks directed musical with phenomenal choreography by Warren Carlyle fills the enormous Winter Garden and gives a very intimate feel while at the same time expanding Meredith Wilson’s somewhat thin story until it fills the room.

Barry Diller, media magnate, has become the default producer now that Scott Rudin has been ousted from the Broadway world. Rudin never attended his premieres, and if he did, there was a lot of tension. What a difference tonight. Diller roamed around in his blue velvet tuxedo jacket grinning from ear to ear and shaking hands. He knew he had a hit.

Diller also supplied a marching band, like the one the musical is famous for, in full regalia before the show on Broadway playing “76 Trombones.” There was festivity in the air and celebrities galore in the theater starting with Hugh Jackman’s beautiful wife, Deborra Lee Furness, dressed in couture black and white, sensational. Along the way I talked with Anne Hathaway, Seth Meyers. Mariska Hargitay and Peter Hermann, Cynthia Nixon, Rosanna Scotto, Donna Karan, Brenda Vaccaro, high fived with Brian Stokes Mitchell and I shook hands with the new mayor, Eric Adams, who was wearing a purple suit. Anna Wintour waited with a bunch of dowagers to use the main floor handicapped bathroom. Cindy Adams was on the press line talking up everyone. Rex Reed was in the house. Top media execs Ron Meyer and Sir Howard Stringer made the scene. It was like an old fashioned Broadway night.

Celebrity alert: Ryan Reynolds, Jackman’s “arch nemesis” on social media, arrived with director Shawn Levy. You know, Deadpool and Wolverine have a fictional rivalry. But Reynolds came to support hsi real life friend.

“The Music Man” was a smash hit 65 years ago, written — all of it– by Meredith Willson, starring Barbara Cook and Robert Preston, who went on to do the movie. Twenty years ago there was an excellent revival with Craig Bierko and Rebecca Luker as Professor Harold Hill and Marian “The Librarian” Paroo. Now it’s Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster’s turn. They’re stars going in, but boy, do they elevate the whole enterprise. It doesn’t hurt that songs stand up eternally, culminating in “Til There Was You.” Willson only had one other musical to his name, “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.” But “Music Man” was his masterpiece. And remains so.

Jackman runs the show, it’s his show as Harold Hill. He’s deflated physically from playing Wolverine, probably from all the dancing, and the non stop action. He is what you look for in a Broadway leading man, full of charisma and optimism. He beams light from the stage. For me, though, it’s all about Sutton Foster. They’ve even created a big tap dance number at the end of the show just for her (Jackman joins her but it’s spotlight). When Sutton Foster grins you can see it from all over the theater. I was at the back of the orchestra but it was clear to see how much she was enjoying the show.

There’s a terrific supporting cast including Jefferson Mays, Shuler Hensley, Jayne Houdyshell, Marie Mullen and Remy Auberjonois, along with a 12 year old — I think 12 — Benjamin Pajak, who nearly steals the show.

What a glorious night in the theater. Tickets are ridiculously expensive, but by one in the balcony if you must, you’ll see and hear everything. And you’ll leave the theater floating on a cloud.

He missed seeing Andrew Lloyd Webber.

[jo]

Washington Post
Pay Wall

Sounds positive --

[jo]

Newsweek --

CULTURE

Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster Charm in New Broadway Revival of 'Music Man'
BY JOE WESTERFIELD ON 2/11/22 AT 12:53 AM EST

CULTURE
BROADWAY
MUSICAL
MUSICAL THEATER
HUGH JACKMAN

Meredith Willson's The Music Man has always been a show that aims to please, and the latest revival at New York's Winter Garden Theatre succeeds at pleasing on so many levels.

With its folksy hometown humor, a group of whacky townsfolk and a setting that is straight out of a Grant Wood painting peopled by Norman Rockwell characters, Music Man is anything but edgy or hot. What it is, however, is a finely crafted piece of musical theater, with a strong book by Willson and Franklin Lacey, and a set of beautiful songs that have become standards in the Great American Songbook. Music Man also features the most celebrated person to come from Gary, Indiana, Harold Hill (sorry MJ, but I am just reporting the facts). The show may have a reputation in the musical theater for being corny, but this is from Iowa, the buckle of the corn belt. So this corn is good, tasty comfort food.

Music Man, as directed by Jerry Zaks, has a powerhouse cast led by Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. When Jackman takes the stage, the audience virtually levitates. Levitating ovations are pretty rare; I think Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly was the last. (This is a far cry from 2003's Oklahoma! when Jackman was not allowed to come over with the London production because he was not famous enough. A few Marvel movies have changed all that. Now they wouldn't think of opening a show without him.) And just when the audience is ready to return to earth, enter Sutton Foster. Once boy meets girl, boy oh boy do the sparks fly. After that, everything goes swimmingly till the last virtuoso leaves the stage.


In a previous post, I pointed out how it is not often a good idea to conflate the art with the artist, but in this case that might be a good idea. Jackman's shout-out to understudy Kathy Voytko, who took over at the last minute for a sick Foster, and the other swings in the cast was just classy and charming. Harold Hill is a charmer. He has to be for the audience to stay with him as he cons a whole town into buying band equipment. Jackman's Hill oozes with charm. He is matched by Foster, as the moody Marian the librarian who falls under Hill's spell.

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Cast of Music Man Jackman Foster
Hugh Jackman, Benjamin Pajak and Sutton Foster and the cast of the charming new Broadway revival of Meredith Willson's "The Music Man," dance to "Shipoopi."
JOAN MARCUS
It is a testament to a show's power that it attracts some top-shelf talent for nonleading roles and the talent runs deep in this Music Man. Jayne Houdyshell (as Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn), Jefferson Mays (as Mayor Shinn) and Shuler Hensley (as Marcellus Washburn) are all Tony award winners and they all shine in their comic roles.


The quality and range of the songs is amazing. Of course, there are those 76 trombones. But there is plenty more. Opening with "Rock Island," what some call an early rap song set to the rhythm of a train in motion, to the wonderfully choreographed "Marian the Librarian" to the ebullient "Shipoopi," and the touching "Till There Was You." And the Wells Fargo wagon is an entrance worth waiting for. Variety is the spice of life, and the range of music styles here makes this Music Man one spicy show.

Music Man's dancing is across-the-boards fantastic, especially by some of the youngest members of the cast. I would estimate their ages to be under 10, an age when I was barely capable of watching a Broadway musical, let alone performing at such a high level.


Don't underestimate this Music Man's ability to win you over. After two years of pandemic hell, this production offers audiences a glimpse of musical theater heaven.

The Music Man is now playing at the Winter Garden Theatre, 1634 Broadway at 50th Street for more information go to MusicManOnBroadway.com.

[jo]

Slant --


www.slantmagazine.com/theater/the-music-man-review-hugh-jackman/

THEATER
The Music Man Review: Till There Was Hugh

THEATERThe Music Man Review: Till There Was Hugh

This slightly zany production sells the show’s intelligent warmth with a persuasiveness to rival Harold Hill himself.

By Dan Rubins on February 10, 2022

The Music ManPhoto: Joan Marcus


What’s the moment when The Music Man completely entraps the audience, us credulous marks, in its glorious web? In the current Broadway revival of Meredith Willson’s musical, it may be at the same instant that the antihero, conman Harold Hill (Hugh Jackman), mesmerizes the people of River City, Iowa, with his rousing description of a parade of “Seventy-Six Trombones.” There’s plenty to pick at in this production, lots to disconcert purists, but when a town’s worth of kids line up behind Harold, that unflappable Pied Piper, and starts marching, The Music Man insists on being irresistible.

It won’t be a surprise to audiences familiar with director Jerry Zaks’s other recent Broadway revival, the ebullient Hello, Dolly!, that there’s little interest here in wholesale reinvention. Unlike, say, Daniel Fish’s 2019 production of Oklahoma!, which dove into that classic musical’s unplumbed darkness, Zaks’s take on The Music Man doesn’t make any move to subvert the show’s ultimate warm embrace of community or wholesome optimism.

But it’s also, surprisingly, not so traditional. Zaks convincingly leans into the fairy-tale, even mythic, structure of the story. For Harold Hill, an almost legendary figure trapped in the patterns of his own swindling, River City isn’t anyplace special. It’s just another challenge, a supposedly small-minded small town ripe for a shakedown: Harold’s just going through the motions of executing his fine-tuned scam, persuading the locals that he can rescue River City’s faltering morality by leading a boys’ marching band, if only they’ll pay up.




We seem to see River City at first as Harold sees it: a storybook town of gullible sheep easily taken for a ride. In “Seventy-Six Trombones,” the staging shows Harold literally manipulating the kids, in a marionette-like fantasy, as he wins them over. There’s a bit of hocus pocus in this depiction of Harold’s con, as if we’re looking at the outline of his process rather than the details: The River Citizens don’t so much warm to him gradually as snap to attention when he commands it—except, that is, for the shrewd, ostracized piano teacher and librarian Marian Paroo (Sutton Foster), who’s skeptical of Harold’s pitch from the start.

That slight remove also extends to the show’s design. Almost every scene features a Grant Wood painting as a backdrop, and the actors—as in in the 1962 film version of The Music Man—briefly re-enact American Gothic. Wood’s landscapes are idyllic depictions of Midwest landscapes with rolling hills and cartoonishly bulbous trees, and Santo Loquasto’s set design pays constant tribute to that vision. It’s a good artistic fit—Wood’s paintings, like Zaks’s staging, don’t aim for realism—but it’s also limiting, framing the show’s vision of Iowa through one artist’s sanitizing gaze. (The wacky-looking one of George Washington, with a grown man’s head on a boy’s body, cutting down the cherry tree, is simply distracting).

River City never outgrows this artificial aesthetic, and as such undercuts the power of the genuine relationships that grow as the town awakens under Harold Hill’s spell and he learns to care for the specific, real people who live there. There are so many ensemble members—the show has a cast of more than 40—that Zaks and choreographer Warren Carlyle seem to have narrow options for moving them around; grown-ups often stand near the wings watching kids do entertaining leaps center stage. By approaching River City as an archetype in his staging, too, Zaks prevents the town from feeling fully lived-in at the start.



But the people of River City spring to life as Harold effects a series of artistic transformations among them. He converts the squabbling school board (played by Phillip Boykin, Eddie Korbich, Daniel Torres, and Nicholas Ward) into a stellar barbershop quartet, teaching them to hear the harmony in their raised voices. He convinces the mayor’s stuffy, skeptical wife, Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn (played with hammy zeal by Jayne Houdyshell), to see herself as a delicate dancer. And, most movingly, Harold gives Marian’s cripplingly shy little brother, Winthrop (Benjamin Pajak), the confidence to define himself beyond his lisp. Pajak is a sweetly sophisticated young actor, and Winthrop’s caring, goofy relationship with his older sister is at the heart of this Music Man’s most tender moments.

This cast boasts six Tony winners, all endearing: In addition to Jackman, Foster, and Houdyshell, there’s Marie Mullen as Marian’s gregarious mother, Shuler Hensley as Harold’s cantankerous crony (who’s saddled, alas, with delivering a clunkily feminist rewrite of the dance number “Shipoopi”), and Jefferson Mays as the dotty mayor. (The absence of actors of color in more principal roles is a conspicuous disappointment.)

This, though, is a production that often wisely gets out of the way of its two leads. Robert Preston, the original Harold Hill on Broadway in 1957 and in the 1962 film, played the con man with a consistently bombastic charisma, fast-pattering his way to bamboozling his victims. Jackman is more of a chameleon, his tone—and his outfit—morphing as he sizes up his prey. In “Trouble,” he introduces himself with a serpentine hush, planting the seeds of hysteria about the dangers of River City’s new pool table but never making himself the center of attention. By “Seventy-Six Trombones,” decked out in an eye-catching blue suit, he’s become a Barnum, a magnetic force that his audience can’t ignore. And when he shows up to bother “Marian the Librarian,” it’s in the guise of some sort of trickster spirit, devilishly urging a group of quietly reading kids to start chucking their books into the air in a chaotic whirl.




And with an initially amorphous community and a shapeshifting ringleader, it’s Marian who grounds this Music Man. Foster’s Marian is, first and foremost, bracingly funny. In one of her early scenes, as she wearily gives a piano lesson, Marian demonstrates a dry sense of humor that goes over her pupil’s head. She’s clearly amused by her own imagination, which hasn’t yet found its equal in River City. And once she starts sparring with Harold, there’s far more fiery flavor of Beatrice and Benedick, with Foster adding in some bursts of physical comedy as if Marian’s redefining the parameters of just how broad she can be as she meets her match.

Though Foster, who doesn’t share the soaring soprano of past Marians like Barbara Cook or Rebecca Luker, sometimes sings, to invert a lyric from “Seventy-Six Trombones,” a full octave lower than the score, she mostly displays a lovely, gentle mix voice, rich with emotion. The only unforced error is “My White Knight,” a lush ballad which appears here in a patter-heavy version cut down before The Music Man opened on Broadway. Foster too stridently belts the final chorus, but her “Till There Was You” is as sensitive and stirring as I’ve ever heard it sung.

This production of The Music Man, far more than most, also allows Marian to assert herself through dance. Both Foster (a Tony winner for the dance-heavy Thoroughly Modern Millie and Anything Goes) and Jackman (ditto for The Boy from Oz) are bona fide Broadway hoofers, and they work hard (mostly successfully) to ground their lively choreography in their characters. Marian sticks her tongue out at Winthrop as she suddenly cuts loose while dancing the “Shipoopi” as if to say, “Surprise!” (A curtain-call tap duet is a wholly unnecessary delight.)




The Music Man has long had the misfortune of being both overexposed and underappreciated, a mainstay of school and amateur productions that doesn’t consistently let audiences in on the sophistication and emotional honesty of Meredith Willson’s score and storytelling. (Hearing that score played by a 24-piece orchestra at the Winter Garden Theatre under the baton of Patrick Vaccariello is especially gratifying here.) But there’s nothing simplistic about The Music Man, and this slightly zany production, deeply felt and deeply funny, sells the show’s intelligent warmth with a persuasiveness to rival Harold Hill himself.

The Music Man is now running at the Winter Garden Theatre.

[jo]

Theatrely --

THE MUSIC MAN Stirs Up Good Trouble — Review
BROADWAY
Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster, and the company of The Music Man | Photo: Julieta Cervantes

ByJuan A. RamirezonFebruary 10, 2022 10:40 PM
Category:
Reviews
If there is one thing Hugh Jackman is going to do, it’s flash a million-dollar smile and win you over. A true song-and-dance man whose eagerness to please has long enamored audiences, he is almost impossibly perfect for the role of Harold Hill, an entrancing con man who descends upon 1912 River City, Iowa ready to sell its unsuspecting townspeople on dreams of a marching band glory and moral purity. Perfectly channeling his innate charisma into this all-American huckster, the Australian actor sets his eyes on a musical theatre prize and, unlike his character, wins it fair and square.

The word for his performance is ‘jaunty,’ and it is a trait not many leading men are either allowed to, or able to, display so delightfully. But Jackman excels, and does so handsomely. Often required to lead, not just the production, but the cast through many, many ensemble numbers, he is as believable a leader as they come. His stage presence is magnetic, with his confident voice and almost frighteningly on-point moves a perfect match for his leading lady.

If there is one thing Sutton Foster is going to do, it’s gleam a charming grin and win you over. That’s why, as Marian Paroo, the fussy librarian whose well-worn skepticism gives way to the possibility of love, Foster is not an obvious choice, but an inspired one nonetheless. She spends much of the first act fretting over her distaste for her town’s narrow-mindedness and their sudden hero’s sketchy background, but Foster’s unstoppable inner light makes her Marian one to root for, if only because we see what’s inside.


The company of The Music Man | Photo: Julieta Cervantes
Many complain that Foster, whose sweet, reliable voice does not soar to the operatic heights of previous Marians like Barbara Cook and Rebecca Luker, is miscast. Her keys have been lowered, yes, but in a theatrical landscape where cookie-cutter sopranos dip in and out of Disney and Andrew Lloyd-Weber productions with the forgettable ease of an overheard whistle, Foster’s vocal personality turns the character into one of her signature, lovable dorks.

It’s a good thing these two leads radiate enough star wattage to power the gargantuan Winter Garden Theatre, where the second Broadway revival of Meredith Willson’s 1957 musical opened tonight, because the work itself is anything but electric. Though unfair to compare it to another classic which premiered seven years later, The Music Man scans today as a bargain bin Hello, Dolly!: a paean to the American hustle too enamored by its own size to land any worthwhile remarks about the highs and lows of that same scrappy optimism.

Co-authored by Franklin Lacey, the show’s first act is mostly to blame. Less a compelling invitation to a story than a collection of barbershop quartets and generic group numbers, it lets the plot’s witty setup wilt as its most interesting characters vanish into nonstop parades. This is where choreographer Warren Carlyle fails. Despite having previously mastered the art of ensemble-heavy productions, as in the recent Dolly revival, his work here is often slapdash and cluttered, leaving the sizable cast near-collision throughout most of the large set pieces. His work on the smaller dances, however rare in this pageant-heavy show, is frequently splendid and Jackman nails each beat. Quick-footed and with laser-sharp precision, he proves himself an old-school triple threat.


Hugh Jackman and the company of The Music Man | Photo: Julieta Cervantes
The second act, the one with actual scenes and dramatic stakes, is a vast improvement. This is in no small part due to Jackman and Foster sharing a series of lovely moments as their characters are drawn closer to each other’s polarities. The two have a warm, unforced chemistry, and their characters’ changes of heart are convincing and affecting. This is also when a rival traveling salesman arrives to kick the plot into motion, threatening to take down Hill’s goodwill.

And this is where director Jerry Zaks fails: though also an alum of the latest Dolly revival, the strength of these latter scenes lead to questions of why the material is being staged in the first place. A strong back-half does not a successful revival make, and with little contemporary intervention or nods to why this show would resonate today, the production largely fails to prove itself. Not that a Music Man heavy on Trump allusions is what anyone would have wanted—and I’m sure that pitfall is one into which thousands of productions have fallen since 2016—but the production, however entertaining, lacks a necessary backbone.

There is still enough sizzle to fire up admiration for it, especially in Santo Loquasto’s gorgeous costumes and scenic designs. Yet another graduate of the Dolly revival—to say it looms large over the production would be a deceit not even Harold Hill could pull off—his backdrops lift directly from Grant Wood, another famous Iowan whose paintings of rural Americana are etched into the national consciousness.


Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster, and the company of The Music Man | Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, with Marie Mullen a great companion to Foster as her mother, Mrs. Paroo, and Shuler Hensley earning honest laughs as an old partner in crime of Hill’s. Jefferson Mays is, as always, comedy gold as the dim-witted Mayor Shinn and, as his wife, Jayne Houdyshell brings down the house with the most exact of gestures, as only Jane Houdyshell can. The large, large ensemble is agile, athletic, and committed to the dance-heavy material, and believably presents a tight-knit community.

That might not come as such a surprise, given how long the pandemic-delayed production spent in rehearsal, and then in previews. Everything onstage is pure Broadway gold, fine-tuned to the gods and played to the back of the house. If only an enterprising huckster with ambitions greater than his reach had waltzed backstage, to whip the auto-piloting creative team into a frenzy, perhaps this revival would have been worth all that trouble in River City.

The Music Man is in performance at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

[jo]

NY Daily News --

BROADWAY
ENTERTAINMENT
BROADWAY REVIEW: A ‘Music Man,’ scared of its own trombones
By CHRIS JONES
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |
FEB 11, 2022 AT 8:37 AM



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.

Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster, and the cast of "The Music Man."
Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster, and the cast of "The Music Man." (Joan Marcus)
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.

Sutton Foster in "The Music Man."
Sutton Foster in "The Music Man." (Julieta Cervantes)
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.

Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster in THE MUSIC MAN. photo by Julieta Cervantes
Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster in THE MUSIC MAN. photo by Julieta Cervantes (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)
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 choereographed 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 cast of "The Music Man."
The cast of "The Music Man." (Julieta Cervantes)
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.

[jo]

[jo]

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FEBRUARY 11, 2022 12:54 PM

THE MUSIC MAN: THE WELLS FARGO WAGON DELIVERS THE CON ARTIST WE NEED
By Jesse Oxfeld
★★★★★


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Hugh Jackman, spellbinder, in The Music Man. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)
Hugh Jackman, spellbinder, in The Music Man. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)
Sometimes, a con man has a heart of gold.

Once upon a time—and oh how long ago it was!—then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo went on TV every afternoon to counterprogram the White House and present the case that a New York asshole can just as easily be a force for good.

Now, and more happily, Hugh Jackman is bringing Professor Harold Hill’s showmanship and Think System to Broadway, where he beguilingly fulfills a similar task by showing that a spellbinder can sometimes hoodwink his marks into the best versions of themselves, that charm and smarm can be employed to fleece but not embitter us, and that sometimes mass delusion can make us all better, happier people.

[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]

The proudly old-fashioned new production of The Music Man that opened at the Winter Garden Theatre last night is proof that trouble isn’t the only word to start with a T, capital or otherwise.

Terrific comes to mind. And, curiously enough, timely.

This revival has been in the works seemingly forever. Scott Rudin’s name is no longer associated with it, but it remains very much a Rudin production: big stars, big production, big marketing. Music Man signage went up on the gargantuan Winter Garden marquee very early in the pandemic—the previous tenant, Beetlejuice, closed in the Halcyon early-March days of 2020—and its advertising has been, Rudinishly, everywhere. Did we realize two years ago just how necessary we’d find a reminder that a flimflam artist can be fun? (I suppose we did, but who remembers two years ago.) Now, post-January 6, post-“legitimate political discourse,” with a post-vaccine never-ending virus and a post-stare decisis Supreme Court, it’s lovely to be reminded of an easier time, a simpler time, a time when the grifts were merely monetary, not existential.

So let’s look back, it says, and let’s have fun.

This Music Man is about a traveling salesman and con artist who comes to a small Iowa city in 1912 to work his scam of selling musical instruments but along the way falls for the town, and especially its librarian, and in the end changes everyone for the better, himself very much included.

The charming Jackman plays the salesman, who goes by Prof. Hill, and the beloved (if somewhat underutilized) Sutton Foster is the librarian, Marion. They are aided by a supporting cast of Broadway greats nearly sufficient to staff a mansion on The Gilded Age. (When you’ve got Jefferson Mays as the consistently befuddled Mayor Shinn and Jayne Houdyshell as his hilariously preening wife, Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn, plus Shuler Hensley as Hill’s good-natured henchman, who even needs a movie-star leading man?) And arguably even better is the ensemble of teen and kid singers and dancers enlisted as the children of River City, especially the winsome Benjamin Pajak as young Winthrop and the fleet-footed Gino Cosculluela as the misunderstood ruffian Tommy Djilas, both in their Broadway debuts.

It is directed by Jerry Zaks and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, and it works very much in the tradition of their last smash-hit partnership, Rudin’s 2020 Hello, Dolly. It is a blockbuster staging of a blockbuster classic, this one with a let’s-put-on-a-show patina that echoes its smalltown 1912 setting. (Santo Loquasto’s homespun, painted-on-board sets would fit nicely into the River City High School Gymnasium.) Zaks is in his element, and he milks the material for all its worth; Carlyle’s high-stepped, big-smiled, occasionally acrobatic dances feel nearly pulled from MGM Technicolor.

There is even a small, simple, hilarious bit of shoestring staging leading into “Wells Fargo Wagon” that brings the house down.

Watching the show, you’re reminded quickly of what a near-perfect script Meredith Willson created for his 1958 classic. It’s smoothly, efficiently crafted, and it’s both sweetly and cleverly funny. His score ranges from the soaring ballad “Till There Was You” to the brassy show-stopper “Seventy-Six Trombones,” with other, smaller sweet numbers along the way, like “Goodnight, My Someone” and “Gary, Indiana.” The are also so many goofily loveable patter songs that it’s a surprise one show can contain them all: “Iowa Stubborn,” “Marian the Librarian,” “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little,” even the controversial “Shipoopi,” here rewritten for a more contemporary dating sensibility and neither noticeably better nor worse for it.

But all those wonderful novelty songs aside (and I confess a weakness for novelty songs), the reason The Music Man works so well—any Music Man, but especially this delightfully cast and staged version—is because of that heart of gold. It’s about a changing world—the iconic, trainbound opening number “Rock City” is ultimately a lament for a disappearing smalltown America, for a time when you had to know the territory—and an argument for the power of shared dreams, and shared joy. Harold Hill never really teaches the kids to play music, but, by the final scene, everyone is so enthralled to the dream that they’re thrilled by their kids’ feeble attempts.

It’s a scam with a happy ending—which, grant, is perhaps as likely as a boys band that never learns to play music. But, still, we can dream, too. Especially when that gream delivers, finally, a Sutton tap-dance number in its curtain call.

The Music Man opened February 10, 2022, at the Winter Garden Theatre. Tickets and information: musicmanonbroadway.com


Jesse Oxfeld was the theater critic of The New York Observer from 2009 to 2014. He has also written about theater for Entertainment Weekly, New York magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Forward, The Times of London, and other publications. Twitter: @joxfeld. Email:

[jo]

Best-est review ever

[jo]

Variety!

It's a love letter of a review! How warmhearted and evocative!

Thank you, Variety!

SWITCH EDITION BETWEENU.S. EDITION
Variety

LEGIT
REVIEWS
Feb 11, 2022 10:16am PT
‘The Music Man’ Review: Hugh Jackman Shines in Smashing Broadway Revival

By Marilyn Stasio


The Music Man review Hugh Jackman
Joan Marcus

Hugh Jackman dazzles as Professor Harold Hill, the charismatic con man who fires up an entire Midwestern town, in this abso-tootin’-lutely smashing revival of Meredith Willson’s adorably corny 1957 musical “The Music Man.”

Tired of COVID and lockdowns and dining in street gutters? Yearning for the pre-pandemic days when masks were something you only wore to Mardi Gras parties? Then grab your coat, get out of the house and lose your cares at this totally enchanting show. Trust me — it will give you new life.

Willson’s gem of a musical gets a fresh shine from director Jerry Zaks’ great-big-Broadway-show treatment. The cast is huge and hugely talented, the sets and costumes are an eyeful, and the stage effects are cleverly inventive. Take the highly anticipated arrival in River City, Iowa, of the Wells Fargo Wagon, a hometown spectacle which introduces us to that legendary con man, Harold Hill, in the irresistible flesh. Like the show itself, the scene is vintage Broadway, but gussied up in grand, glorious style.



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As embodied by Jackman, Harold Hill is the fabled stranger who boldly bursts into town and bowls over its innocent citizens with his captivating but heartless charms. The winsome book, written by Willson (who also penned both music and lyrics) with a story co-written by Franklin Lacey, reveals Harold’s scam: to con the gullible townsfolk of River City into shelling out their hard-earned cash for musical instruments they can’t play — on the promise that this fraudulent “music man” will teach them. (Cue “Seventy-Six Trombones,” which raises the roof.)

As the story (and the immortal ditty “Ya Got Trouble”) goes, Harold convinces these rubes that sin — in the form of the popular pool hall — will corrupt their idyllic town. To save their souls, Harold will graciously sell the town a bunch of musical instruments so they can outwit the devil by forming their own marching band.

It’s a role made for Jackman, a song-and-dance man who can also act up a storm and — wonder of wonders — play a convincing lover. This is also a heavy dance show (the huge cast is a big hint) and it’s great to see a leading man who can keep pace with the dance ensemble.

Only Marian Paroo, the local librarian and music teacher, can save the besotted town from its infatuation with Harold. A true hometown honey in Sutton Foster’s captivating performance, this modest heroine is vibrant and charming in “Marian the Librarian” but Foster’s take on “Goodnight, My Someone” will melt your heart.

Marian is clear-eyed enough to see through Harold’s wily spiel. But if he should win her heart, will she have the gumption to expose him for the scoundrel that he is? (We know he’s a cad, because he brags about it in “The Sadder but Wiser Girl,” a killer of a song that Jackman attacks with unabashed relish.) Not to give away the plot, but “Till There Was You,” the gorgeous duel sung by Foster and Jackman, pretty much settles the matter.


That leaves us with the locals, whose characterizations are genuinely warm and affectionate and thankfully free of condescension. Quaint as it sounds, Willson did not write this show with tongue in cheek. He genuinely loved Mason City, the little Iowa town where he grew up. This musical is his heartfelt love letter to his hometown and to the folks who lived by its staunch Midwestern values back in the early days of the 20th century when he was still a country lad.

“Innocent, that was the adjective for Iowa,” Willson once said. “I didn’t have to make anything up for ‘The Music Man.’ All I had to do was remember.” What he remembered were the county fairs and the Sunday church picnics and the occasional fast-talking traveling salesmen, like those slick-suited drummers — and occasional charming scoundrels like Harold Hill — who ride the rails from town to town on the Rock Island railroad line, bringing a bit of excitement to Mason City, Iowa. “Rock Island,” which opens the show, is wonderfully staged (on a train, of course) and performed with verve by Remy Auberjonois and his salesmen cronies.

The immense cast makes it feel as if an entire town were on stage, especially in the full-scale dance numbers. The sheer scope of it all validates the strong presence of cute little children in adorable costumes. Although often deadly to theatrical norms, these kids are little dynamos and really well directed. (No child handlers are credited in the program, but I’ll bet that life backstage is pretty lively.)

Tops among this disciplined gang is Benjamin Pajak, who is a little marvel as Winthrop Paroo, Marian’s kid brother. Even in a great big show like this, Zaks clears the room for a quiet and very sweet fishing scene beautifully underplayed by Pajak and Jackman.

The secondary characters are played by performers who wear their hearts on their sleeves, but refrain from patronizing the locals as yokels. Jefferson Mays is a fine comic blusterer as Mayor Shinn, but even a kiddo like Kayla Teruel, who plays one of Marian’s music students adorably named Amaryllis, owns the stage for her brief turn in “Piano Lesson.”

Warren Carlyle, a choreographer who revels in period dance (“Kiss Me, Kate”), knows what to do with this enormous cast. More gratifying still, he’s respectful of Willson’s old-fashioned values. The lavishly staged dances are so very robust, so very upbeat, so very American, they perfectly capture the energy, the innocence and the hope of this pre-war generation.

Santo Loquasto, wise in the ways of big mainstream musicals, designed the uncluttered sets and divine period costumes. And though his costumes are meticulously detailed (love the pointy-toed shoes!), they also work for dancing.

The designer outdoes himself on dressing Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn, the sheriff’s stagestruck wife played like a trouper by Jayne Houdyshell. Smitten with the razzle-dazzle showbiz style that Professor Hill has introduced to her sleepy town, the silly old dear fancies herself a diva and swans around in the designer’s most outlandish costumes (The flounces! The feathers! The shoes!) without losing her dignity.

Flounces, feathers and fancy shoes are a distinct theme of these amusing costumes. They’re faithful to the slim lines and bustled bottoms of the turn-of-the-century period, but the fabrics are rich and gorgeously patterned, and the shoes (not much heel but lethally pointed) are out of this world.

One last word, and it’s about the children: By all means, take your kids. You’ll be raising a brand new generation of theater lovers.

[JH4HJ]

The reviews sound quite good, not that WE had any doubts. NY Times had some interesting nits to pick. Even without the critics' approval, I'm sure Hugh can continue in this role for as long as he would like to do so.

Good on Hugh! Good on them all!



Congratulations to the whole cast and crew!

It's a wonderful (early) Valentine for Broadway.

[jo]

observer.com/2022/02/the-music-man-hugh-jackman-dazzles-in-the-perfect-role/

Looks like this will compete with the Variety review for space at the lobby of the Winter Garden

‘The Music Man’: Hugh Jackman Dazzles in the Perfect Role

"I know of no contemporary performer who meets the standards of his electrifying talent,"
says Rex Reed.

By Rex Reed • 02/11/22 4:29pm


Hugh Jackman performs onstage during the opening night curtain call for “The Music Man” at Winter Garden Theatre on February 10, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic) (Photo by Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic)

After a two-year nap, the New York theater awoke to the sound of 76 trombones this week, just in time to jam the mobs into the Winter Garden Theatre and welcome Hugh Jackman back to Broadway. Yes, it’s a great occasion—the star-spangled return of Meredith Willson’s legendary musical The Music Man—and the screaming ovations every night drown out the sound of traffic all the way to Times Square.

There is nothing Hugh Jackman can’t do onstage—and in The Music Man he pretty much does it all—frontwards, backwards, and upside down. He’s made his fortune in so many stupid Wolverine movies I’m surprised people with taste, intelligence and knowledge remember what he’s capable of with a tube of greasepaint and a follow spot. Movies make money to fill the bank account, but Broadway makes magic to feed the soul. This is one movie star who knows the difference. A lot of seasoned pros shine like polished new pennies in The Music Man ( it’s one of the biggest musical casts New York has applauded in years) but this boy from Oz is a sexy, funny, heart-stopping, toe-tapping, foot-stomping one-man extravaganza who proves it, and sends his audience over the moon, screaming for more.


Sooner or later, he had to get around to Prof. Harold Hill. It’s a perfect role for Jackman. He’s the charming con man who travels the Midwest in 1912, dropping into town long enough to rip off the men, seduce the ladies, and hop the next freight train before the sheriff arrives. This time, he lands in River City, Iowa on the Fourth of July in the guise of a musical prodigy and professional conductor whose goal is to convince the local citizens their young people need to form their own colorful marching band, sell them musical instruments and expensive costumes, and promise to teach them how to play. His secret? He has no papers, no experience, he can’t play a single note, he doesn’t know a piano from a piccolo, and he’s got to wrap up his business and fleece and flee before he’s found by the cops who have already reached the city limits. But in River City, everything turns upside down. He takes the town by storm—and the audience, too. He gets his money, charms the dowagers and even the mean-spirited mayor, and falls in love with Marian, the skeptical town librarian (Sutton Foster). By the time the game is up, the whole town has fallen for him and all is forgiven in time for a happy grand finale with everyone marching across the stage to a standing ovation, Mr. Jackman conducting like John Philip Sousa, and ace director Jerry Zaks pulling it all together like Barnum, Bailey, and all of the Ringling Brothers put together.

This is the kind of corn that never grows stale, and the book, music and lyrics (all by Meredith Willson) are as fresh and filling as they were when the show premiered in 1957 and have been in every incarnation since. What’s different is the star himself. He sails through the tongue-twisting pace of “Trouble” (“starts with T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool”). He jumps and leaps like a kangaroo on “76 Trombones” and “Shpoopi”. He wears his neatly pressed period suits that cling to him like the hands of hundreds of women (and men) who dream of such things. He grinds his hips to the people in the front row and the high-price orchestra seats go berserk. In Warren Carlyle’s Bob Fosse-inspired hip-hoppy choreography, he fills the stage with so much agile, non-stop movement and music you don’t know what to look at or listen to first. It just hits you at the same time, like Independence Day fireworks. On both the original and the reprise of “76 Trombones” he gives new meaning to the phrase “shake your booty.”

Any caveats? You bet. As wonderful as he is, Mr. Jackman did not make me forget Robert Preston, who originated the role and played it to perfection for years, on stage and screen. I also missed little Ronny Howard, who played the kid who lisped his way through the rousing “Gary, Indiana” and “Wells Fargo Wagon” numbers in the movie with so much aplomb (pint-sized Benjamin Pajak does just fine in the role, however). Most of all, I missed the legendary Barbara Cook as Marian the Librarian. Sutton Foster has a strong soprano and a lovely resigned quality, but she’s no Barbara Cook. Still, there’s so much entertainment here that any reservation, no matter how small, seems regrettably churlish. I know of no contemporary performer who meets the standards of his electrifying talent.

[jo]

One of Theatermania reviews --

www.theatermania.com/broadway/reviews/review-hugh-jackman-is-starring-in-the-music-man_93352.html

[jo]

Vulture --

THEATER REVIEW FEB. 11, 2022
The Music Man Finally Marches In, Looking Backward
By Helen Shaw

From The Music Man, at the Winter Garden. Photo: Joan Marcus

The Music Man wants you to know that the old ways are best. For the production now on Broadway, every detail has been retrogressed to the days of yore, from the typeface on the playbills to the red-white-and-blue title cards outside to the heavy reliance on Star Quality. This ain’t one-a-them newfangled, updated, anti-nostalgia versions of a classic. Instead, you can set yourself down at the Winter Garden where it is 1957’s version of 1912 again. You won’t need to trouble yourself with anything beyond the sweetness of Meredith Willson’s con-man-redemption musical, itself a tribute to both Willson’s own Iowa upbringing and his flute-playing years with John Philip Sousa’s band.


Certainly it feels like a glitzy, age-of-musicals move to cast Sutton Foster and Hugh Jackman; it’s increasingly rare to see a pair of stage stars of this megawattage sing and dance together. Their celebrity and undeniable presence seem to have overcome any little concerns about fissures between the performers and their characters — there are places where Foster’s mezzo strains in the high stuff and Jackman goes sour. But director Jerry Zaks solves that by bringing ’em front and center, to stand (or dance) on the stage lip and radiate Golden Age glamour. Every t that stands for trouble has been crossed, every choice feels rose-colored and flannel-cozy. The young, talented, dance-mad company spins and leaps with all the vigor of a remembered childhood. A teeny-tiny clockwork horse even gallops onstage right out of our shared deep memory. There’s only one single solitary thing that feels modern in River City, and that’s the ticket prices. I hate to tell you, but these folks are asking you to part with nearly $700 to sit up close. Don’t do it, neighbors! That’s flimflam, that’s roguery. That’s grift.



Although I have known this show for most of my life, I admit I’ve never entirely understood why Harold Hill is supposed to be such a crook. In Willson’s story, the salesman “Professor” Hill tricks entire towns into believing he can shape their boys into a brass band though he doesn’t know anything about music himself. He orders them cornets and trombones and uniforms via the Wells Fargo wagon, but he’s a tin-ear and a fumble-fingers himself, so he can’t actually teach them any music. Instead, he introduces the Think Method, which requires no practice, and which Marian the librarian slash town music teacher sees right through. But — shouldn’t she step up? Hill does actually deliver the items they order; it’s not a swindle. And Why is no one showing these kids how to play an instrument seems like an odd problem for Marian to feel so helpless about. I played the clarinet quite poorly in the fifth grade. I promise you, I did not get angry at the man who rented it to me for not showing me how to change the reed. I had a town music teacher for that.

But anyway, Hill’s a rapscallion, happy to snow the townspeople like Mayor Shinn (Jefferson Mays, apoplectic) and his wife, Eulalie (Jayne Houdyshell, majestic), with a combination of flattery and distraction. Hill manages to divert some suspicious town fathers by coaxing them into becoming a barbershop quartet, at which point the bliss of straight-tone mixing overwhelms all their good midwestern sense. Hill’s genius with children lets him Pied Piper them immediately, whispering in their ears to engineer a hilarious book-throwing library jamboree (a coup for choreographer Warren Carlyle), and kindest with the lisping 10-year-old Winthrop Paroo (Benjamin Pajak), the librarian’s shy little brother. Hill is irresistible: Everyone turns to follow him — in Carlyle’s cakewalk, on the street, whenever he enters a room — but Marian notices that he turns to check on Winthrop, and so she falls in love.

When we say a theater is like a barn, we are not usually paying that theater a compliment. The enormous Winter Garden stage foreshortens weirdly if you sit upstairs, but it looms if you’re in the orchestra. Set designer Santo Loquasto steers into the skid: The front drop for The Music Man is the side of a barn — instead of a velvet curtain, a giant red wooden wall keeps the stage hidden before the show. Behind these boards is a copy of Grant Wood’s Midwest, literally. Huge versions of his paintings like The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere or Parson Weems’ Fable make this Iowa seem airless and still, all the trees clipped round and smooth, the hills as neat as rolled socks in a drawer.

More has been smoothed besides. All Willson’s looking backwards did peer into a few awkward corners of his Iowa upbringing, and where those memories have grown too offensive, cuts and elisions have been made. Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman have delivered a kinder, gentler version of the charm song “Shipoopi,” which used to be about girls who put out. Shuler Hensley (strangely unnerved and overloud) now shouts “Shipoopi! Shipoopi! The boy who’s seen the light. Shipoopi! Shipoopi! To treat a woman right!” instead of the slightly more assault-y lyrics of the original. There has been progress, but that progress has happened in a song called “Shipoopi.”



As cheeseball and predictable as The Music Man might be, it will still surprise you. It’s impossible to grow jaded to Willson’s opening “Rock Island,” the best curtain-raiser in the business, with its train car full of salesmen, making the accelerating chugga-chugga of the train with just their rhythmic speak-singing. “Cash for the merchandise, cash for the buttonhooks — cash for the cotton goods, cash for the hard goods …” they say-sing as they pull out of a siding, a green Iowa sliding past their windows. Willson found a dozen startling ways in and out of songs, whether it was through contrapuntal echoes (the march “Seventy-Six Trombones” and Marian’s lovelorn “Goodnight, My Someone” share a melody) or a piano exercise that turns into a full-blown song, or his fondness for barbershop. In the first hour and a half, the show barely gives Jackman a minute to doff his straw boater before he’s tearing into another dance-and-speak about how risky pool is to young people, or whatever pitter-patter guff Willson has shaped into a song for him. The velocity of those inventions in the first act is undeniably thrilling — the train is moving at speed, the governor is off.

In Willson’s more laborious second act, there are pockets of emptiness in this production, longueurs when finally Carlyle’s splendiferously go-big choreography starts to wear thin, the lovey-dovey ballads start to seem a little much. The shift to more conventional songs does not serve Jackman in particular — as the show goes on, Foster’s voice grows stronger and richer, but Jackman’s tone narrows to a pinched, unlovely sound. He does though, finally turn to his scene partner. He has twinkled, and hoofed, and flung himself around a library set; he has tap-danced, and winked, and clambered all over a Wells Fargo wagon. In other words, he has spent the first act seducing us. In the second, he turns at last to Marian, and you see the effect of the full Hugh Jackman spotlight, which has been beaming out at a thousand seats, when it is focused on one face.

Stars have their own style of stardom: Jackman’s is always Jackman’s. When his character, Harold Hill, lets something slip, Jackman lets us see that he, Hugh, the magnetic movie idol, catches it — he makes visible how hard he has to work to keep up with the astonishing dancers around him, or he breaks character just a smidge (I’ve seen it twice, and this seems to be a pattern), a sparkling con that dazzles and flatters the audience. Foster, though, has the other kind of star quality: gravity as opposed to shine. She’s so physically precise! She drops a shoulder, it’s enough to button a scene. She drops her voice? She can turn anything into a joke. Funny, wry, deep, kind, her Marian Paroo draws our sympathy until the whole show rotates around her. To see if those $700 seats were really so important, just before the opening I bought a cheap(er) seat and sat in the balcony. I wish it weren’t so, but some parts of the show do get lost up there in the thinner air. Foster, though, is a true musical-theater miracle — she only gets bigger and brighter as you get farther away.

The Music Man is at the Winter Garden Theatre.

[jo]

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Review: 'The Music Man' knocks it out of the park
Hugh Jackman's character, Professor Harold Hill, is a spellbinder.

Peter Travers
ByPeter Travers

12 February 2022, 02:31
• 5 min read

PHOTO: Actors dance as they pose for photos with the cast of Broadway show The Music Man across the street from the Winter Garden in New York City, Feb. 8, 2022.
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Carlo Allegri/Reuters


Actors dance as they pose for photos with the cast of Broadway show The Music Man acr...Read More
Sound the trombones—all 76 of them. A blazing Hugh Jackman lights up Broadway in a long-awaited, COVID-delayed revival of “The Music Man” that’s a sure cure for your pandemic blues. Jackman blew the roof off on opening night and there’s no chance he’ll be slowing down.

His character, Professor Harold Hill, is a spellbinder. But he’s also a con artist, traveling across the Midwest by train in the early 20th century to hit on the ladies and bamboozle folks into shelling out for musical instruments and band uniforms for their kids and then running off.

PHOTO: Actors pose for photos with the cast of Broadway show The Music Man across the street from the Winter Garden in New York City, Feb. 8, 2022.
Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Carlo Allegri/Reuters



Jackman scored big on screen in 2017’s “The Greatest Showman,” playing P.T. Barnum, a scammer who believed there’s a sucker born every minute. Harold Hill is spun from the same cloth. There’s an art to playing a villain you’re meant to love. And Jackman is a virtuoso at it.

A lot of movie stars submit to short runs on Broadway as if they’re doing us a favor. Not the legend that is Wolverine. Jackman looks like he’d rather be on stage than anywhere else on earth. His eyes shine with a joy that’s contagious. He won a Tony for playing fellow Aussie Peter Allen in the 2003 musical bio "The Boy from Oz." Start engraving his name on another one.

But even Jackman must stand in the long shadow of the late Robert Preston, who created the title role on stage in 1957 and on screen in 1962. Jackman honors Preston by not trying to imitate him, soft-selling Preston’s full-charge into "Ya Got Trouble" and "76 Trombones." You might miss the hustle but Jackman’s stealth charm approach pays off handsomely.

How is the show itself? The Meredith Wilson score remains one of the glories of musical theater. From its opening chorus of salesmen singing to the rhythms of a chugging train to barbershop quartets and yearning ballads, the music offers new discoveries on each hearing. Do you know why "The Music Man" beat "West Side Story" for the 1957 Tony? Listen up.



It’s hard getting around the fact that River City, Iowa, where Hill pulls his latest scam, is blindingly white. So cheers to the diverse, colorblind casting and kinetic direction from Jerry Zaks, who staged the smash 2017 reboot of “Hello, Dolly” starring Bette Midler.

It’s not unfair to label both shows as old-fashioned. But neither is old-hat. The trick is not to update them with modern references but to play them for real with a relatable humor and heart. In those departments, “The Music Man” knocks it out of the park.

Jackman also has a dynamite partner in Sutton Foster (“Younger”), who aces the role of Marian Paroo, the librarian who refuses to fall for Hill’s fraudulent games, that is, until she falls for him. Her version of “Till There Was You,” the show’s hit ballad, is meltingly lovely. But she also imbues the role with a strong backbone and a comic zing.

And, surprise, Jackman and Foster don’t just rely on acting and singing. The stars dance their butts off, throwing themselves into Warren Carlyle’s choreography with high-stepping abandon. “Marian the Librarian,” the exuberant number in which Harold invades Marian’s place of business to break down her romantic resistance, is a showstopping sensation.

Not everything works on that level. Cuts to the text result in characters rushing past each other on stage with little time to register. A few songs don’t sit well on the star voices. It happens. And the big wowser ending with the whole cast in band uniforms falls curiously flat.

But “The Music Man” hasn’t survived for 65 years by accident. It’s family entertainment that’s built to last. Jackman and Foster prove that for a new generation as they send this exhilarating blast from the past rocketing into musical-comedy heaven.

[jo]

Written from an audience point of view --

THEATERREVIEWSFROMMYSEAT

Theater reviews and more

ABOUT THIS REVIEWER - POSTED ONFEBRUARY 11, 2022 BY JOE
The Music Man


The Music Man
Despite COVID which delayed the revival of The Music Man for a few years, the big old Broadway musical is back. The great opening number set in a railway coach beautifully sets the tone for what is to follow. This show has boundless energy, old fashioned optimism and star wattage.

Hugh Jackman plays Harold Hill, the conman who comes to River City, Iowa to cause a little “Trouble.” His plan is to sell musical instruments and lessons to the town’s children, pocket some fast cash and skedaddle away. Along the way he encounters a pretty librarian and you know that the road these two have been traveling may forever be changed.

Mr. Jackman is the musical’s song and dance man in every respect. The show is framed around him (possibly more than ever) and he commands the stage. Not only is he the show’s titular lead, he is also center stage for the ensemble dancing. There are not many Broadway stars who could execute this level of performance within the silly charms of a vintage period piece.

“Marion the Librarian” is possibly the pinnacle moment. Harold visits the library in an attempt to woo the uninterested Marion. Warren Carlyle’s choreography is a rollicking treat, filled with movement and verve. The kids are a joy to watch and it’s not hard to see Marion thawing out in the process. All of the ensemble numbers are thrilling and the faces of the large cast confirm that analysis.

Director Jerry Zaks keeps the somewhat dated plot moving along. The tone is always sweet even when people are being mean in that oversized blowhard way. The show is oddly current in its reference to “dirty books” by “Chaucer, Rabelais and Balzac.” In America’s current scary obsession with book banning, the reference makes you laugh but it also makes you cringe. These conservative windbags are not fictional characters of Broadway shows but real demons intent on destroying free speech and intellectual discourse. (We all know who said, “I love the uneducated”.)

Thank goodness “The Wells Fargo Wagon” is coming to town at the end of the first act. We are gathered for a big Broadway entertainment and the show must and, indeed, goes on. It has to be said that the energy level in the audience was notably high at intermission. A grand time was being had.

In the role of Winthrop, Marion’s shy stuttering younger brother, Benjamin Pajak holds his own with these two theater superstars. The impact of Harold on his psyche feels organically developed in their relationship. What at first may be considered a ploy to get to Marion coalesces into a bigger display of the latent goodness possible in all of humanity.

When Marion sings the gorgeous ballad “Till There Was You” I took a quick glance at the audience. All eyes were locked in and no one moved. Regardless of whether she has a different voice than previous Marions, her characterization deftly created the requisite magic. Combining that presence with an athletically inclined Harold Hill and you have a Music Man where everyone should want to join the band. Big fun, right here in (next to the Hudson) River City.

The Music Man is playing at the Winter Garden Theatre, one of the best houses on Broadway for a show for of this scope and size.