Review: "The Music Man"

The joy of live theater, live theater at its best, is to see actors and actresses execute their craft before our eyes, unshielded by the camera or editing or anything else that might interfere with the raw energy of their work. When thespians are doing it well, when it's clear that they love their roles -- the lines they're saying, the stage directions they're following -- it imparts a joy, an infectious joy, onto the audience. 

That kind of infectious joy is very much in abundance at the revival of The Music Man by Meredith Wilson on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theater (if you grew up in NYC in the last 20th century, it will forever be the Cats theater to you).

The Music Man stars Hugh Jackman as the charming con man Harold Hill who descends upon the small town of River City, Iowa. Calling himself "Professor" Harold Hill, he claims to be music genius who wants to form a band of the town's young people to keep  them away from that den of inequity -- the pool hall. His racket is to get the parents of said young'uns to pay for instruments and uniforms ... then skip town with the money. But this time, he plans go awry. He comes to like the people of this town, and falls deeply in love with Marian, the local librarian played by a magnetic Sutton Foster. He inspires this dull conservative town to brighten up, to find its dormant happiness, including Marian's younger brother, the lisping Winthrop, but when the River City townsfolk get wise to him scheme ... well, you just gotta see it to find out.

This much awaited production, which I recently saw after a big COVID-related delay, is like watching Da Vinci paint. It's masters performing at the top of their respective games. The old-timey, 1950s tunes are brought strongly to life by Jackman, Foster, and the excellent supporting cast -- including the always wonderful Jefferson Mays as the befuddled Mayor Shin. You can tell that they love what their doing and that they love that you're watching them do it. There's lots of kids in this show too, and they're all really good as well. 

For a big Broadway show, the sets and costumes are modest and nowhere over-the-top -- this version fully believes that the spectacle of this show is the A+ singing and dancing on display, the pure skills of the performers. The fast moving production has one show-stopping number after another but nothing can top the "Madam, Librarian" sequence where Jackman and the cast twirl around on library carts, dance on tables, and throw books to one another in a sequence that must have been designed by engineers, the technical complexity of it so staggering to behold. 

Jackman and Foster are, at heart, two song-and-dance troupers who clearly love performing on stage more than anything -- you get the sense that they just happen to have massive movie and TV careers on the side that help supplement their income. 

This Music Man is really good -- and let's you know it over and over and over again. I'd tell you to rush out and see it -- if you could find and afford a ticket that is. (We bought ours four years ago so we had a little bit of a head start.)

P.S. My mother attended the show with me and our family and she actually saw the original 1958 version with Robert Preston and Barbara Cooke. How cool is that?