Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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music, book & lyrics by Meredith Willson, directed by Donna Feore
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
May 29-November 3, 2018
Hill: “Never allow the demands of tomorrow to interfere with the pleasures and excitements of today”
Though The Music Man is only the first show to be presented during the Stratford Festival’s opening week this year (due to the unfortunate cancellation of The Tempest yesterday), it’s hard to imagine that any other show at Stratford this season will be as popular. Director and choreographer Donna Feore has turned a musical that is typically about song into one that is just as much about dance. There is certainly much more dance in this Music Man than in Stratford’s previous productions in 2008 and in 1996. So energetic is Feore’s choreography and so enthusiastically is it performed that her extended acrobatic dance sequence to “Seventy-Six Trombones” in Act 1 received the highly unusual reward of a standing ovation in the middle of the show.
While Feore’s choreographic extravaganzas are the prime distinguishing features of this particular Music Man, they are balanced by the excellent singing and acting of the entire cast. The most unusual feature of the production is casting the Black actor Daren A. Herbert as the travelling huckster Professor Harold Hill. In the historical setting of the action, River City, Iowa, 1912, one would likely regard a Black travelling salesman with even more suspicion if not with outright hostility than a White one. Nevertheless, this casting turns out to be a brilliant idea since it lends a tone of modernity to a musical that is otherwise often played as a cheerful wallow in nostalgia. Besides that, it also gives Herbert a chance to shine in one of the most iconic male roles in musicals.
Herbert has a natural charisma which is exactly what the character of Harold Hill needs. Charisma is what helps explain how Hill can almost magically bring out the urge for artistic expression in everyone he meets. Just by suggestion Hill turns four former enemies into a barbershop quartet and a gaggle of biddies into aesthetic dancers. Herbert has a fine voice and precise diction so that in the rapid-fire speaking-to-music of songs like “Ya Got Trouble” the words are absolutely clear. Herbert is also a smooth dancer as he showed so well in The Wild Party in Toronto in 2015. Feore allows him to add slinky urban-style ragtime moves to his delivery to suggest that Hill is a city fella who has made a living out deceiving country hicks.
Quite unlike previous Harold Hills I’ve seen, Feore also allows Herbert to break the fourth wall with impunity, often miming his expressions of consternation or surprise directly to the audience as if in an aside. The winking and nodding may be a bit much, but it does create a bond between Hill and the audience that makes the audience complicit in his deception of the easily misled River City folks. The triple-threat Herbert is also a sensitive actor and he shows us Hill’s confusion as his growing love for Marion Paroo begins to undermine his initial plan of simply loving and leaving the town’s music teacher. Herbert is supercharged as a con artist ready to take in a whole town, but rapidly becomes sympathetic as man who realizes he has been caught in his own trap and is noble enough to face the consequences.
Danielle Wade is a lovely Marion Paroo. She does not quite have the operetta-like soprano needed for the role and her voice tends to become fragile in its upper register. Yet, somehow that very fragility adds to her character of someone who is experiencing the heights of emotion for the first time. Her acting is warmly endearing and Wade makes it completely believable that Marion, as seemingly the only rational person in town, would change from Hill’s enemy to his staunchest supporter when she assesses all the good his schemes have done in giving the citizens a purpose and in bringing out her withdrawn brother’s self-confidence.
As Marion’s mother and brother, Denise Oucharek and Alexander Elliot are absolutely delightful. It would be easy to overdo the role of Marion’s Irish mother, but Oucharek never allows the part to fall into caricature. The young Elliot is a wonder as the depressed young Winthrop, who is brought out of his shell by Hill’s friendliness. Elliot’s amazingly confident, full-voiced rendition of “Gary, Indiana” won a long bout of cheering and applause.
Mark Uhre, who would himself have made a great Harold Hill, is cast instead Marcellus Washburn, Hill’s old friend and in-town assistant. For Uhre, best known as a romantic lead such as Ralph Rackstraw in last year’s H.M.S. Pinafore at Stratford or as Enjolras in Les Misérables in Toronto in 2013, Marcellus is quite a change of pace. He takes on a low-class Midwestern accent and a suspicious, feline style of movement. Playing Marcellus does mean we never hear the ringing tones of his voice, but in his only main number “Shipoopi”, we do get to see his impressive facility at dancing that previous roles have not featured.
In smaller roles, Steven Ross is very funny as the blustering, vocabulary-mangling Mayor Shinn. Blythe Wilson, who just last year played Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls, now has to play the old queen bee of River City, the Mayor’s wife Eulalie. The pity here is that Wilson, who has a lovely voice and is one of the finest music theatre performers in Canada, has to be heard in this show only singing off-key and screeching the name “Balzac”. It is much more amusing when Eulalie is a stout and unattractive, but Wilson is neither. Still, she manages through her skill in acting to mine as much humour as she can from the role.
This production is the first when Mayors Shinn’s daughter’s favourite expression, “Ye gods!” did not get on my nerves. Credit for that is due to Heather Kosik, who makes Zaneeta Shinn a more rounded character than usual and who thus says her favourite expression in a host of different ways. The chorus is filled with unbelievably athletic men but the one who really stands out is Devon Michael Brown as the town’s bad boy Tommy Djilas. No matter what combination of spins, leaps and tumbles Feore throws at him, Brown accomplishes them with fluidity and pleasure as if nothing could be easier. Brown is a real joy to watch and your eye tends to be drawn to him no matter how many performers are dancing on stage.
While Feore’s choreography is the main distinguishing feature of this production as a whole, The Music Man reveals certain limits to Feore’s construction of dance routines that haven’t been quite so visible before. Most notably, Feore is quite content to give the female dancers a fairly routine balletic vocabulary while she is clearly intent on pushing the male dancers’ abilities to the limit where dance crosses over into acrobatics. In classical ballet the women shine in realms of complex footwork and balance, but with Feore both men and women are given these tasks. The most obvious failing of Feore’s choreography in The Music Man is in not providing us with any extended scene of the comic, faux-Isadora Duncan aesthetic dance of the River City women. The scene of the women’s “Grecian urns” and “fountains” provides a respite between all the energetic dances that come before and after it, but here Feore gives us only a static tableau without any of the fey traipsing about that should accompany it.
This is a very handsome production that seems to suit the Festival Theatre stage much better than it did the Avon Theatre in 2008. Michael Gianfrancesco’s clever sets capture the atmosphere of a small Iowa town with a minimum of apparatus while Dana Osborne’s costumes clearly locate us in the 1912 setting, each suiting the individual personalities of the characters no matter how minor. The one prop that should be omitted is a view of the Wells Fargo wagon with horse. This is a case of props for props’ sake and it accomplishes its task of getting the crowd to applaud the scenery, but does not look like a Wells Fargo wagon and ought to be pulled by a thoroughbred not a work horse. After all, the wagon is supposed to get from town to town as speedily as possible.
These are minor points. To a certain extent the audience’s giddy reception of the musical had to do with the relief that after Monday’s bomb threat everything was back to normal. But beyond that, there was wild enthusiasm that the Festival’s third production of The Music Man should have ratcheted up the energy level so high. This is production that revelled in both song and dance and, because of Daren A. Herbert sleek performance as Harold Hill, gives this old chestnut a more contemporary, more self-aware point of view. Buy your tickets now. This will be, no doubt, the hit of the season.
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Daren A. Herbert as Harold Hill with Danielle Wade as Marion Paroo with members of the company; members of the company of The Music Man; Denise Oucharek as Mrs. Paroo, Alexander Elliot as Winthrop and Danielle Wade as Marion Paroo. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca
2018-05-30
The Music Man