Musical brings joy after bomb threat
The Music Man K (out of 4) Book, music and lyrics by Meredith Willson, story by Willson and Franklin Lacey. Directed and choreographed by Donna Feore. At the Festival Theatre, 55 Queen St., Stratford until Nov. 3. stratfordfestival.ca or 1-800-567-1600
The term “showstopper” is getting a workout at the Stratford Festival this year. Not in a good way at first, when a bomb scare forced the unprecedented cancellation of Monday evening’s season-opening performance of The Tempest.
But director/choreographer Donna Feore and the wonderful company of The Music Man brought all the right meanings back with the signature number “Seventy-Six Trombones,” which earned a sustained midact standing ovation at Tuesday’s premiere. It felt as if the whole festival exhaled at that point, affirming that this kind of joy is what it’s all about.
Meredith Willson’s 1957 musical is justly beloved for its accomplished and varied score, and it’s the music — and the opportunity it affords for fluid staging and eye-popping choreography — that’s at the forefront of this production (Franklin Brasz leads the superb orchestra).
The production is so vivacious and the supporting performances so good that they just about make up for a central weakness: a cryptic performance from Daren A. Herbert as Professor Harold Hill, the titular music man, and a lack of strong connection between Herbert and Danielle Wade as his love interest, the local librarian Marian Paroo.
By leaning into the material’s folksiness, Feore also goes a long way toward selling a story that has, by contemporary standards, some icky elements in terms of its representation of women, men and courtship. The epithet that Mayor Shinn (Steve Ross) throws around about Hill — that he’s a “spellbinder” — sums up Feore’s accomplishment here: the showmanship generates so much goodwill as to almost eclipse the questionable elements.
Feore’s sure hand is evident from the first scene, “Rock Island,” a talk-sung number by salesmen sounding off about Hill’s dodgy tactics. She seats them in a long row and they rock back and forth, simulating the movement of a train, an effect furthered by Michael Walton’s isolation of them onstage in long rectangular beams of light, with motion further signalled by lighting changes outside the windows of Michael Gianfrancesco’s set.
Mark Harapiak as Hill’s nemesis Charlie Cowell (“But you gotta know the territory!”) and the rest of the chorus handle the complex weave of spokenword lyrics with perfect diction.
The thrust of the story is that Hill chances on an unhappy Iowa town and, through his energy and irreverence, liberates it. But if the town were really uptight it might also be boring, so Feore has it bursting with vivacity from the number that introduces it, “Iowa Stubborn,” with everyone decked out in their Fourth of July finest (designed with over-the-top zest by Dana Osborne).
The town’s problems come through in individual characterizations and relationships: the shyness of little Winthrop Paroo (Alexander Elliot, who brings the house down with his rendition of “Gary, Indiana”); the bickering men whom Hill effortlessly turns into a perfect barbershop quartet (George Krissa, Robert Markus, Sayer Roberts and Marcus Nance); the gossipy townswomen sent up in the charming number “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little.” Ross and Blythe Wilson are perfectly matched as the exasperated mayor and his pretentious wife.
As Feore notes in the program, what Willson delivers in many of these numbers is essentially rap (before Hamilton, there was The Music Man) and there are points throughout her staging where she weaves in elements of contemporary movement and physical expression, particularly in her choreography of the 10-strong teen chorus led by the electric Devon Michael Brown as Tommy Djilas and Heather Kosik as his sweetheart Zaneeta, the may- or’s daughter. The level of physical risk in the combination of airborne spins and kicks is quite astonishing.
Marian is a leading member of this community but also somewhat apart from it, the subject of gossip because she convinced a wealthy miser to endow most of the town’s institutions and entrust the contents of its library to her. While her singing sometimes wavers uncertainly between operatic and more conventional musical theatre delivery, Wade is an excellent actor and makes Marian complex and likeable.
Quieter first act scenes in front of the Paroo family home, anchored by Denise Oucharek’s warm performance as the Irish matriarch, offer some nice variation from all the bustle of the big group numbers.
Amidst all this, Herbert’s Harold Hill always seems to be holding back a bit, playing the material at a certain distance, as if he knows something it doesn’t. This could perhaps work as a strategy if the character transformed as the evening goes on, infused by the spirit of the town and Marian’s goodness, but he’s not yet loosening up in the role (perhaps he will as the long run continues).
His dogged pursuit of Marian — following her to work and then to her home — starts to feel a bit creepy, and the spoken scenes between them in the second act are the production’s weakest moments.
But there’s so much else going on that’s captivating, starting and ending with Feore’s total command of the staging. Just the transitions alone — the way in which action is spotlighted on one part of the stage as a set shift happens elsewhere — are physical poetry. By the time the “Wells Fargo Wagon” arrives in the first-act closing number, conveyed in a manner that’s too delicious to spoil, the audience is pretty much giddy and continues so with another barnstormer early in the second act, “Shipoopi,” led by Mark Uhre’s ebullient Marcellus.
Two hours and 40 minutes fly by. I didn’t want this show to end.