8/17/2023 0 Comments Tuck everlasting musical![]() ![]() ![]() The concept of mortality is scrubbed so vigorously of sad connotations that it winds up smelling like fresh laundry. Tuck Everlasting, overly solicitous of the young ones’ sensitivities, only dares approach such ideas in quotation marks. Its terrific special effects prime the audience, young and old, for both. Matilda is scary and emotionally complex, replete with physical menace and spiritual hunger. A better recipe might have begun by studying the musicalization (rather than just the success) of Dahl’s Matilda to see how a family musical can aim higher than its demographic. The homogenization feels deliberate, as if bits of Wicked, Brigadoon, and Carousel had been dumped into a blender with skim milk to produce a smoothie that’s way too thin. Is there an opening number that introduces all of the main characters as well as the theme? Check: “Live Like This.” Is there a second number that establishes the heroine’s dream and dilemma? Check: “Good Girl Winnie Foster.” Is there a third number that expands the focus and brings on the antagonist? Check: “Join the Parade.” And though each song, by the young team of Chris Miller and Nathan Tysen, does its job exactly to specifications - and with nary an off-rhyme the whole evening - there is something more dutiful than passionate about Tuck Everlasting. But the more Shear and Federle clarify the material the more ordinary and threadbare it seems, a problem that Casey Nicholaw’s staging (he is both director and choreographer) mostly exacerbates in its dogged adherence to the conventions of Broadway storytelling. The Man in the Yellow Suit, for instance, is now a carny instead of a lone wolf, so that Winnie and Jesse can have a night of fun and the show can have a (wan) Act One production number. The musical’s book, by Claudia Shear and Tim Federle, unkinks some of those knots and adds plenty of stageable business besides. ![]() Enter Winnie at 10 - er, 11.īabbitt resorts to a lot of odd plotting to bring this Möbius strip of a story to some sort of climax and resolution there’s a creepy character - the Man in the Yellow Suit - who hopes to profit from the Tucks’ secret, as well as a murder and a belabored jailbreak. And younger son Jesse, at 17, despairs of finding romantic companionship at all. Older son Miles, stuck at 21, has married a civilian, not understanding that he would thereby live to see his wife and child die. As a result, the permanently fortyish parents, Mae and Angus, are stuck in an affectionate but endless marital rut he doesn’t just snore but snores forever. This blessing turned out to be, in part, a curse, exempting them from the natural cycle of decay but also from the recompense of joy. That’s a shame, because the tale itself, set in the late 1800s, is promising enough: Winnie, on the lam from her stultifying home, discovers a family, the Tucks, who many decades earlier drank from a hidden forest spring that gave them eternal life. Instead of dusting its tale with sprightly wit, Babbitt nearly drowns it in sticky, honeyed prose. To begin with, that novel, by Natalie Babbitt, is a poor cousin to the classic “magic” fictions of Edward Eager, E. Those nostalgic for their seventh-grade enthusiasms may love it I found it to be a musical for the child in someone else. But whether the work of so many talented people in effecting the adaptation has added anything of value beyond that one year is another matter this is, almost until the end, a ruthlessly by-the-book treatment of a high-concept, low-wattage fairy tale. So perhaps we should be grateful that Winnie, the heroine of the 1975 “young adult” fantasy novel Tuck Everlasting, has been bumped up from 10 to 11 for the musical adaptation that just opened on Broadway: She is that much more bearable. The age of a show’s protagonist often provides a clue to the age of the audience the show is pitched to: Patrick in American Psycho is 27 Jenna in Waitress is “in her thirties” the character Frank Langella plays in The Father is 80 going on dead. From Tuck Everlasting, at the Broadhurst. ![]()
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