‘The Music Man’ Broadway Review: Hugh Jackman & Sutton Foster Step Lively To Old Familiar Tunes
deadline.comWhen people who dislike musicals talk about the musicals they dislike, there’s a decent chance they’re talking about musicals like The Music Man – whether they’ve ever actually ever seen The Music Man or not.
Meredith Willson’s nostalgic slice of Americana was already proudly old-fashioned when it debuted in 1957, with “Seventy-Six Trombones” leading Broadway down a cornpone path that shows like the moody Carousel or the finger-snapping West Side Story were trying so hard to avoid.
Not even The Beatles could make Music Man‘s lilting “Till There Was You” sound cool.Now, many decades later – and several years after directors Ivo van Hove and Daniel Fish reimagined West Side Story and Oklahoma!
in thrilling ways unthinkable when those musicals were young – director Jerry Zaks, producers Barry Diller, David Geffen and Kate Horton and a well-rehearsed cast headed by Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster deliver a high-gloss Music Man as giddily backward-looking as ever.Hard-hit and laid-up just weeks ago by Omicron, The Music Man, which opened Thursday at a celebrity-packed Winter Garden Theatre, certainly seems to have made a full recovery, at least if cheerful enthusiasm is any indication. (And for the record, producers Diller and Geffen displayed little indication of over-concern about Broadway protocol, sitting maskless in the audience throughout much of the evening.)At this point, Jackman, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, doesn’t need to prove his song-and-dance chops to anyone – he did that ages ago in The Boy From Oz (2003) and Hugh Jackman, Back On Broadway (2011).
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