Winnie’s mother offers Carolee Carmello a chance to move from Finding Neverland to this world of Brigadoon in which once you’ve swallowed the magical water, you can join those good folks in Scotland, except they only come alive for one day every hundred years. It’s Granny who seems the more liberated, and she’s played like a pleasant kook by Pippa Pearthree, who’s not above making many a point by thrusting her knitting needles into the air, and at her adversaries, particularly the Man in the Yellow Suit.
The eleven year old central character is Winnie Foster, a fatherless girl whose mother and granny are usually at odds as to how much freedom she’s to be allowed.
Photo by Joan Marcus.Īs played by veteran Terrence Mann, he is a very merry fellow, and Mann is giving a broad performance in the Danny Kaye tradition. Andrew Keenan-Bolger (Jesse Tuck) and Sarah Charles Lewis (Winnie Foster). Their condition is all a big secret until danger lurks, because of its discovery by a circus performer called The Man In The Yellow Suit, who is something of a soothsayer, who claims to be able to tell anyone’s age merely by looking into their eyes. The story, based on a novel by Natalie Babbitt, tells of the Tuck family of four, all destined to live forever because of a drink they’d imbibed from a pond in a forest near their home. All our journalism is independent and is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative.īy clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that third-party cookies will be set.This pretty-as-a picture new musical is by newcomers to the musical theatre, book writers Claudia Shear and Tim Federle, Composer Chris Miller, and lyricist Nathan Tysen. This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and
But it also beautifully illustrates the show’s belief in the quiet splendor of human life, however ephemeral. Yes, it tugs at the heartstrings with a deathless grip. If this seems mushy and unnecessary, the same sentiments inspire a concluding ballet, choreographed by the show’s director Casey Nicholaw, which is a triumph. Winnie is given a dead father, ostensibly to deepen her emotional predicament and there’s a sappy quality in how her pert presence revivifies each of the tired Tucks.
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One of the finer qualities of Babbitt’s book is how free it is of the slushy or mawkish. And there’s a scene on a boat that looks like a country-fried version of Music of the Night.īut the musical’s signal misstep and ultimate salvation is its sentimentality. The costumes for the chorus, by Gregg Barnes, with décolletage and Regency waists for the women and close-fitting britches for the men, appear borrowed from some Jane Austen soft porn. The woodsy set, by Walt Spangler, has tendrils that best resemble a giant order of fettuccine or an experiment in basket-weaving gone terribly awry. Something also seems amiss with the storybook design. The language, with its “hugs” and “OKs” and hopes that 1808 will be “our best year yet!”, is too casually contemporary, but at least the writers earn a laugh when Winnie’s grandma addresses the Man in the Yellow Suit as an “evil banana”. The lyrics can feel generic and so, too, can the book, by Claudia Shear and Tim Federle, both of whom have proved distinct writers with other projects.
This reiteration of desire eventually palls. But too many of the numbers that come after, composed by Chris Miller with lyrics by Nathan Tysen, also fall into the “I Wish” category. This tension surfaces in the musical’s structure, which begins well enough with Live Like This, an “I Wish” song for all of the major characters. Terrence Mann, center: so hammy as to make several surrounding blocks deeply un-Kosher.
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