‘The Music Man’: It’s Still a Joy to Get in Line

An enjoyable production of “The Music Man,” which opened Thursday night at the Neil Simon Theatre, has the ability to send the most jaded and revival-clobbered audience out onto the street grinning, humming, marching, practicing their Grecian urn poses--you name it. Meredith Willson’s 1957 masterwork is a slice of Americana without an ounce of sanctimony to it. It’s Americana that doesn’t make you feel like emigrating.

This confident if hard-sell revival has a soft center in Craig Bierko’s Harold Hill. Even so, director-choreographer Susan Stroman’s production has plenty else in its corner pocket. Chiefly, it has Marian the librarian as played by Rebecca Luker. She graces Willson’s ballads with butterscotch soprano as thrilling as that of the show’s original ’57 Marian, Barbara Cook. Luker’s plaintive, straight-ahead way with the book scenes keeps things grounded. Even when Stroman’s staging tends to push, Luker doesn’t, and you’re grateful.

The word “great” means next to nothing now, thanks to flagrant overuse, yet “The Music Man” (original title: “The Silver Triangle”) is one of the five or six greats in American musical theater. It is unassumingly, charmingly great. It may, in fact, be more charming than ever today, in this slippery era of con men peddling dot-coms more so than boys’ band instruments.

Stroman, whose hit dance piece “Contact” has already made her this season’s queen of a diminished but still breathing Broadway, saves her best flourish for last here. In the finale, after Harold Hill has wriggled out of his fix and into the arms of Marian, he leads the ensemble on trombone, one of two dozen blaring away on, naturally, “76 Trombones.” Luker’s Marian tootles on the flute, while each supporting player gets their moment, including anvil salesman Charlie Cowell (Ralph Byers), who plays an actual anvil chorus. Then an enormous American flag unfurls in the background.

Shameless. Wonderful.

The rest of the show can’t possibly match it. In fact, it shouldn’t try, and sometimes it does. Stroman’s choreography in “Marian the Librarian,” for example, is wild enough to suggest something perilously close to “West Side Story.”

The show’s new arrangements and orchestrations cute things up for the worse. The look is mostly undistinguished: Thomas Lynch’s scenery comes straight out of Civic Light Opera-land, or Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A., and lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski’s reliance on the color chartreuse is hard on the eyes. (Luckily, costume designer William Ivey Long’s contributions are splendid.)

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A relative unknown, Bierko has the stuff required by the legendary role originated by a not-yet-legendary Robert Preston. Lately as a guest on “Ally McBeal” and, earlier, menacing Geena Davis in “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” the tall, gangly Bierko is a virtual Preston sound-alike. He’s not consciously copying Preston, at least flagrantly; his resonant speaking, patter and singing voices simply combine for a sound much like Preston’s.

Beyond the voice, though, he’s only pretty good. You want more, and less. Bierko tends to pull the same five or six faces and poses over and over. The innocent hands-on-hips pose is followed by the downward-turned-jaw-jut, spiced by a double-take. Bierko works hard, but Harold Hill is an act of sustained romantic salesmanship. What’s with all the smirking? His demeanor never relaxes, even when Harold’s is supposed to.

Stroman has fiddled with the material, to mixed results. She relocates the Act 2 opener, “Shipoopi” (nicely spearheaded by Max Casella’s sidekick, Marcellus), to near the end of the act, rendering meaningless some dialogue about Harold and Marian dancing together. On the plus side, Stroman locates some ways and means of heightening small moments. When Marian’s shy preteen brother Winthrop (Michael Phelan) sings his portion of “Wells Fargo Wagon,” it’s not a show-stopping moment surrounded by the whole town. Rather, it’s a private revelation sung to his widowed mother, Mrs. Paroo (Katherine McGrath). Nice. Nice, too, is Stroman’s handling of the lead-in to “Pick-a-Little,” wherein the chicken-like movements of the local blue-noses are wittily suggested, rather than caricatured.

Between encounters, you forget how distinctive and funny “The Music Man” is. It’s moving as a love story only because it’s funny first. Willson’s libretto takes exceptional care in finding a baroque argot for each character. As Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn, wife of Paul Benedict’s Babbitty mayor of River City, Ruth Williamson slays throughout. “Isn’t it exciting, Eulalie?” crows a townswoman about the band. “Oh, I couldn’t say. I could not say. Oh no. I could not say, at this time,” replies a supremely reticent Williamson.

Those who like the tone and feel of the 1962 movie version may buy into Stroman’s staging all the way, i.e., a little further than I could. I wouldn’t have minded a gentler touch. The material is brash, but it’s also an evocation of 1912 small-town Iowa in the summertime.

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There’s some sadness to it, plus more than a little vinegar. The central character, after all, is a charismatic jerk, until he’s not. With Bierko, the “not” part never quite arrives.

So without a memorable Harold Hill, how can any “Music Man” win you over? Answer: Never underestimate the talents of Luker, Williamson, Casella and others, including a barbershop quartet led by Blake Hammond, the long-lost cousin of Stubby Kaye. And never underestimate the material.

Back in 1948, author Willson wrote about growing up in Mason City, Iowa. “A small-town kid . . . gets to go to sleep every night with a train whistle way off--even the engine shoof-shoof-shoofing sounds pretty clear at night in a small town.

“If I ever write another symphony, I’d like to take a crack at something that would include all the promises of the train whistle and engine shoofing. The promises and dreams are in many ways more wonderful than the fulfillments.”

Instead of a symphony, Willson wrote that train into the opening of “The Music Man.” He made good on his promise.

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* “The Music Man,” Neil Simon Theatre, 25 W. 52nd St., New York. $20-$85. (800) 755-4000.