Can’t beat the classics: Marriott’s ‘The Music Man’ and Drury Lane’s ‘Guys and Dolls’
The Company. Photo by Liz Lauren.
In the interests of disclosure: Quinn Rigg, a contributor to this site, performs in the ensemble of Marriott’s The Music Man.
This thought only just occurred to me while watching Marriott Theatre’s expert revival of The Music Man: Meredith Willson was writing for an audience that could remember a time when one had to make music for music to happen.
River City, Iowa, likes the notion of music well enough, but for many reasons—prejudice and grief, especially—it had no inclination to actually take it up before Harold Hill rolled into town with his pitch for a children’s marching band. Sure, the “stuck-up” librarian Marian Paroo teaches piano, but every household worth a darn back then just had to have someone who knew the instrument. That is, music is a thing for River City to have, not experience. Of all the people, it takes a syncopated snake-oil salesman to get them out of their rut.
There may always be a certain impulse to re-examine the mores of classic musicals and pipe in some modern sensibility. The Music Man seems to resist this and all for the better. The inadvertent nobility of Harold’s con—music as a force for communal uplift—is all right there in plain sight, and director-choreographer Katie Spelman trusts Willson’s cracker-barrel horse sense implicitly, just as much as she loves his characters as deeply as he does, foibles and all. (Raquel Adorno’s costumes, slowly changing from whites to pastels, are also subtly unsubtle in making this point.)
Aside from casting a real charmer as Harold—and KJ Hippensteel is, hand to Handy, Creatore, and Sousa, a charmer—the big question anyone helming The Music Man must answer is how does a well-oiled machine like Harold get “his foot stuck in the door” in River City, having pulled his con hundreds of times. The answer is to give him a worthy adversary in Marian, and Spelman thankfully answers with Alexandra Silber. Fiercely guarded and protective of her family, her initial curtness is as cutting as a guillotine, but she cottons to the nobility of the con sooner than others and without sacrificing her backbone.
There are bells ringing out there somewhere, that’s for certain, but it takes some listening, is all. Some things, you don’t have to hold in your hands to have.
The Music Man runs through Jun. 2 at 10 Marriott Dr., Lincolnshire, IL 60069. For tickets or more information, please call (847) 634-0200 or visit marriotttheatre.com.
The Company. Photo by Brett Beiner.
While you may not know the name Damon Runyon, you probably would recognize Runyon-talk if you heard it. Small-time hoods talking with nutty grandiloquence, as if they swallowed a thesaurus and the collected works of Emily Post—that was Runyon’s gift to comedy.
It’s that talk that makes Drury Lane’s Guys and Dolls, inspired by Runyon’s characters and milieu, a neat double feature with Marriott’s Music Man—between these two shows, the Broadway musical has seldom heard talk as colorful as what Willson or Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows concocted, the latter two ably abetted by Frank Loesser’s immortal dese-dem-dose meditation on the battle of the sexes.
And like at Marriott, director-choreographer Dan Knechtges knows well enough to let these guys be guys and its dolls be dolls. Pepe Nufrio as smoothy Sky Masterson and Erica Stephan as sin-hatin’ Sister Sarah Brown are a plausible odd couple, while Jackson Evans as the anything-but-smooth, out-of-his-depth shnook Nathan Detroit and Alanna Lovely as the hotsy-totsy Adelaide are as delightfully broad as their Noo Yawk squaks. But, as Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Nkrumah Gatling probably commits a perfect crime in stealing the show.
And with ace music direction by Roberta Duchak and Christopher Sargent, it just about makes you wanna leap up and shout “Hallelujah, top-notch musical comedy,” and never mind that boat you’re rocking.
Guys and Dolls runs through Jun. 9 at 100 Drury Ln, Oakbrook Terrace, IL 60181. For tickets or more information, please call (630) 530-0111 or visit drurylanetheatre.com.
For more reviews on these or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.