THE MUSIC MAN
Music and Lyrics by Meredith Willson
Book by Meredith Willson and Franklin Lacey
Directed by Jerry Zaks
Starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster
Winter Garden Theatre
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
Since anywhere you sit in the Winter Garden Theatre these days will cost you upwards of $190 through $480 for “popular” seating and for a premium location up to $3,040 (I kid you not), the big question has to be: Will attending the new revival of The Music Man buy you several hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of happy?
Well, subjectively speaking, nothing short of a time catapult getting you to that same theatre in 1971 to see the original production of Follies is worth that kind of dough (and I saw that production; twice; for $2 and $4 respectively) but for a more objective assessment, let’s examine the show on its own terms, as if it were charging the Follies $10 top.
Despite being a rock solid show on many levels, The Music Man is not among the very small group of almost foolproof classics. You have to get the tone right; as importantly, you have to cast Harold Hill impeccably. And Robert Preston casts a long shadow. He was absolutely charming and absolutely a rogue and you absolutely trusted him through you absolutely knew better. More than this—and I can’t stress it enough—he was utterly real. And his character survived as the contradictory con man center of a storytelling universe whose denizens prized authenticity, because by design, all except his opposite number, leading lady Marian the librarian, were riffs on a single note. And as soon as Hill understood the note he was dealing with, he played it. (And of course he would, in the end, bring all those notes together.) In the 2000 revival, Craig Bierko kind of channeled Robert Preston (word and a few video clips suggest that his replacements, Robert Sean Leonard and Eric McCormack managed the balance as well)…but the two revivals previous to that were enough to make you underestimate the material. Dick van Dyke is charming as can be, but had not an ounce of rogue in his 1980 turn as Harold Hill. And at the New York City Opera in 1988, you could believe Bob Gunton as a rogue, but he was charmless. Even grim. As was the production, which has a certain glancing relevance here.
I’m going to (blithely) assume that 70 years on, everybody reading this knows at least the general outline of the show, so I’ll skip over synopsis and just get to the hearts of the matter. That’s hearts, plural.
Which I say because The Music Man circa 2022 is a distinctly bifurcated affair.
Let’s start with the two leads.
Hugh Jackman is unbelievably gifted. He can sing, dance, act, and with the best of them. But what he isn’t is a smoothie. There’s a reason why he’s the iconic Wolverine in the Marvel Universe. He’s edged. He’s a sharpie. He sings with a nice, strong, clear baritone; but it’s not a smooth baritone. It’s a little reedy; it has vibrancy but not gravitas. And it doesn’t vary much. When he croons “Marian”, he sounds pretty much as a he did when he was selling “Trouble”. They should be starkly different songs showcasing starkly different colors, but in this Music Man they seem to be doing the same work. Preston insinuated himself into the scene and he was indistinguishable from Harold Hill; he basically was Harold Hill. Mr. Jackman enters, forthrightly…and it’s an unbelievably gifted man playing Harold Hill. For virtually all of Act One, I could see the divide between the the actor and the character..
Sutton Foster is as unbelievably gifted as her co-star. Much has been made of the fact that she’s an alto belter and not, as the role was originally written, a soprano. It was composer-lyricist-librettist Meredith Willson’s idea that the soprano tessitura would set Marian off from all the other River City folk. And as simple an idea as it seems, it’s a good one. More importantly, it sets her off from Harold Hill. But belter vs soprano is not really the issue so much as timbre. You can have a sweet-sounding alto (Penny Fuller) or at the very least one who can soften the edge (Bernadette Peters); but Ms. Foster isn’t one of those. She has a wonderful instrument, but it cuts through the theatre, in its own very different way just as edged as the voice of her leading man. It may have been director Jerry Zaks’ intention that by having the show’s two most prominent voices have a similar quality, the musical subtext would be that they belong together…but Willson’s original conception has already taken care of solving that equation. As I say, each of the other characters has that one note upon which to play whatever variations are available to them. It’s Harold and Marian, whoever, who are allowed the rainbow of musical colors. And if his is the voice of insinuation while hers is the voice of purity…well that’s the thrill of opposites attracting. And waiting for that culmination, which happens in the song “Till There Was You”, is what creates the romantic (and gently implied sexual) tension. Kind of along this line, Ms. Foster is also a genuinely inspired comedienne; she knows just how to shade a moment or a line reading to get a big laugh. Problem is, the show pays for a number of those laughs in a further loss of verisimilitude, because, while I wouldn’t go as far as saying there’s the same kind of divide between actor and character in Ms. Foster that exists in Mr. Jackman, what’s showcased disproportionately is her technique. I rarely found myself thinking, Yeah, that’s Marion. But I often found myself thinking, Oh, that’s an interesting spin on Marion.
That said, the romantic tension that isn’t there has, I think, far less to do with Jackman and Foster not having the fabled personal chemistry than not having the perhaps less fabled musical chemistry of contrast, which I think in this show may well provide the rest.
And speaking of technique. Another thing very much on display is the director’s technique, reflecting a similar schism between director and material. Zaks is nobody’s fool, he gets comedy and he connects to the material enough to deliver a coherent and respectable iteration of The Music Man; but I’m not so sure he connects to its heart. For one example of many: there’s what I have to assume was his directive of how Warren Carlyle’s choreography should realize “Trouble”. When Harold Hill is selling the town on its need for a boys’ band as a moralizing influence to avoid certain social decline…well, they ought to appear worried about it, oughtn’t they? But in this staging, they’re about as happy to be in the thrall of Harold as can be. True, the number is exhilarating, in a major key, and chock full of call-and-response goodness…but the trick to The Music Man is the balance of opposites; and the worry of the River City Iowans is right there in the music. It’s as if the idea never occurred to the current team that worry can have its own exciting energy and needn’t be a synonym for depression. Act One is peppered with such little balance-thwarting misfires.
That said, here’s where things get complicated. For a critic at least, who likes his pronouncements to be uncluttered and uncomplicated.
In Act Two, possibly because the proportionately calmer material doesn’t allow for the aim to be quite as off, possibly because Harold and Marion are established and more open with each other—or possibly because something alchemical happened that just made Zaks and company straighten out their path—the show finds its heart. In an iconic, definitive way: no. But competently, touchingly and satisfyingly enough. I’m not so sure they could have worked backwards from that, to solve Act One to match…but you wonder what might have happened if the notion of doing so had early enough occurred.
The A-List supporting cast is just fine, the musical direction is as sharp as you’d hope, and the WOKE-ing of the lyrics to “Shipoopi” is absurd. Meredith Willson was a writer of the early-mid 1950s writing about Iowa in 1912. My belief is that there shouldn’t be as much running scared from the reality of popular art always reflecting its era…and there should be more faith in audiences, collectively, having the perspicacity to take that in stride. Especially with a classic that everybody knows. It’s the running away that quashes understanding via discussion. There is so much more to be said about things like that but…fodder for another essay.
This essay is about helping you decide whether The Music Man will be worth—to you—what you’ll pay for it. And of course I can’t know that.
But you now know what to expect.
Which is all you need to know.