The Music Man | This Week in New York

Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster turn up the glitz in Music Man revival (photo by Joan Marcus)

THE MUSIC MAN
Winter Garden Theatre
1634 Broadway between 50th & 51st Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 15, $99-$599
musicmanonbroadway.com

In my decidedly unfavorable review of the 2017 revival of Hello, Dolly! starring Bette Midler, I wrote, “The new production of Hello, Dolly!, which is breaking house records at the Shubert Theatre, is everything that is wrong with Broadway. . . . Through it all, there’s Bette, who never really inhabits the role but plays herself playing the character while basking in the unending attention, the love bursting forth from the audience at her every knowing smirk; the Shubert practically explodes when she emerges in her glittering red dress for the title song, but it’s Bette who’s being celebrated, not Dolly.”

Unfortunately, the same can be said about the third Broadway revival of Meredith Willson’s 1957 smash The Music Man, continuing through November 6 at the Winter Garden. The star attraction is the beloved Hugh Jackman, but he is trapped as Hugh Jackman playing Professor Harold Hill, a con artist who has arrived in River City, Iowa, to sell the townspeople costumes and instruments for a band that will never be. The Grammy-, Emmy-, and Tony-winning Jackman, who follows such previous Hills as Robert Preston, Eddie Albert, Forrest Tucker, Bert Parks, Van Johnson, Dick Van Dyke, Craig Bierko, and Matthew Broderick, is as charming as ever, but he never fully embodies the character, and the fault lies in part with the audience, who won’t allow him to, and four-time Tony-winning director Jerry Zaks and Tony-winning choreographer Warren Carlyle, the duo who performed the same tasks on Midler’s Hello, Dolly! As with that production, which won four Tonys, many of the scenes don’t move the narrative along but instead are excuses to meander off track with showy, too long set pieces that are only fun for a while before we need to get back to the story.

The cast of The Music Man jumps for joy in Broadway revival at the Winter Garden (photo by Joan Marcus)

Tony winner Sutton Foster fares better as Marian Paroo, whose previous portrayers range from Barbara Cook and Shirley Jones to Rebecca Luker and Meg Bussert, but since we all know what is going to happen between Hill the snake oil salesman and Marian the adorable librarian, Zaks and Carlyle don’t focus properly on the chemistry between them that is necessary to propel the plot, even as basic as it is. Meanwhile, the cast features a slew of Tony winners in small roles, including Shuler Hensley as Marcellus Washburn, Jefferson Mays as Mayor Shinn, Jayne Houdyshell as Mrs. Shinn, and Marie Mullen as Mrs. Paroo, but it’s yet more window dressing; for example, Mays, one of New York City’s most consistently entertaining actors, can’t rise above the more dated material, as nearly all of the mayor’s jokes fall flatter than an out-of-tune trombone.

All the songs are here — “Rock Island,” “(Ya Got) Trouble,” “Seventy-Six Trombones,” “Pickalittle (Talk-a-Little),” “Marian the Librarian,” “Shipoopi,” “Till There Was You” — but the only one you’re likely to be humming on your way out is “Seventy-Six Trombones,” and only because it seems that it never ends. Santo Loquasto’s ever-changing set and colorful costumes get lost in the razzle-dazzle.

Born and raised in Iowa, Willson also wrote the musicals The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Here’s Love, and 1491, the holiday classic “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” several symphonies, and three memoirs. If he were alive to write a fourth book, maybe even he would agree that there’s big-time trouble in River City.

Jim Brochu looks back at his long life in musical theater in CHARACTER MAN (photo by Carol Rosegg)

30th Street Theatre at Urban Stages
359 West 30th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through April 6, $35
212-868-4444
www.jimbrochu.com
www.urbanstages.org

Award-winning actor and playwright Jim Brochu pays tribute to the Broadway character actors of old in his charming one-man show, Character Man. Brochu, who won a Drama Desk Award for his previous solo presentation, Zero Hour, in which he portrayed Zero Mostel, this time tells his own story, about growing up in the theater surrounded by such character actors as Jack Gilford, Lou Jacobi, Jack Albertson, George S. Irving, Barney Martin, Jack Klugman, Robert Preston, and his mentor and longtime friend, two-time Tony winner Davy Burns. As Brochu shares intimate tales of his childhood and career, with a focus on his relationship with his father — including how Joan Crawford almost became his stepmother — old photos and video appear on three screens hanging from the ceiling. Brochu moves across the small stage, relaxing in a red theater seat (that matches his tie and pocket square), sitting at a dressing-room makeup table, or walking to the back, where he mimics selling orange drink at the Alvin Theatre, his first job in show business. Each vignette features a related Broadway tune accompanied by Carl Haan on piano, among them “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, “(Ya Got) Trouble” from The Music Man, the haughty “The Butler’s Song” from the ill-fated So Long, 174th Street, and, perhaps most appropriately, “Mr. Cellophane” from Chicago, in which he sings, “And even without clucking like a hen / Everyone gets noticed, now and then / Unless, of course, that personage should be / Invisible, inconsequential me!” Such is the character man’s fate, never to be the famous star, although Brochu has crafted a witty and poignant little musical memoir that deservedly puts him front and center. Character Man continues at Urban Stages through March 30; there will be post-show spotlights the next three Wednesdays, looking at David Burns with Sondra Lee and Lee Roy Reams on March 12, Jack Gilford and Zero Mostel with Joe Gilford and Josh Mostel on March 19, and current character actors with Richard Kind and Tony Sheldon on March 26.