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

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.

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.

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?

“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.

The Music Man
At the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; musicmanonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.