The Music Man!
I’d love to have a long, rangey conversation about this new revival of The Music Man. I have lots of thoughts, but I’m hesitant to get too detailed here because, one, it’s in previews and anything I comment on could be different by opening night, and, two, most of what I want to talk about are the ways in which it is, or might be, different from what you know from past productions and, especially, from the movie. I’ll say up front: everything you expect and want The Music Man to be, this one is. But I’ll keep my commentary pretty general; I don’t want to color your experience. You need to see this.
So! Here are a few thoughts in no particular order, and we’ll wait till after it opens to get into the weeds:
I loved it so much. I said on Facebook that I was on the edge of my seat the whole time and I was. The preview audience was electric because most of us I would imagine had bought tickets two years ago and waited out the Broadway shutdown and the show was canceled and rescheduled and then canceled again and rescheduled again and then Sutton Foster got sick and then Hugh Jackman got sick. When the curtain went up on that train car, the crowd burst into loud sustained applause. Big entrance applause for the stars, big ovations for nearly every song. It was the most exciting night of theater I can remember, the show feeding the audience and the audience feeding the show.
Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster are wonderful in the lead roles. Jackman’s Harold Hill is, maybe, sunnier than Robert Preston’s, and I would say that Foster plays Marian as earthier, smarter than, say, Barbara Cook or Shirley Jones did. And they look closer in age. The couple seems more evenly matched. Foster finds new, unexpected things in the acting of the book scenes and the songs. My White Night, especially, is a revelation.
But this production is not all about the stars. The production design across the board — stage, costumes, lighting — is gorgeous, thoughtful, at times breathtaking. The sound design and music direction are impeccable. The orchestra and ensemble were crystal clear. And good lord, the supporting cast: Jane Houdyshell, Jefferson Mays, Shuler Hensley, and Marie Mullen are each so great and so funny. They are the heart and soul of it.
The dancing! I had never thought of this show as one where much of the storytelling is accomplished through movement. The ensemble is so tight, every moment so full of heart, and what’s better than a stage packed with kids who can dance their asses off?
Speaking of Marie Mullen. She reads at the older end of the Mrs. Paroo range, which sent me thinking about the family at the center of this story. Marian is maybe early to mid-30s? Winthrop is about 10. Their mother is 60 if she’s a day, so Winthrop is an Irish Catholic miracle baby being raised by his sister who is old enough to be his mother and his mother who is old enough to be his grandmother. And presumably a redeemed conman for a stepbrother/father figure. For all the complaining about how normative these old musicals are, they all seem to be stories about very unconventional families.
I want to talk about Grant Wood (whose paintings are a main scenic element in this production) and how his work, much like The Music Man, is often misunderstood, but misunderstood in exactly the way it is intended to be misunderstood, but I’ll save that conversation for later.