In an effort to be thoroughly modern as well as thoroughly old-fashioned, Thoroughly Modern Millie turns out to be thoroughly rancid. After a slate of dreadful musicals this season (By Jeeves and Sweet Smell of Success among them), here comes yet another, and the worst part is it didn't have to be. Based upon a 1967 film by George Roy Hill that hardly needed reviving in any capacity, Millie could have taken that picture's best assets and thrown away what doesn't quite work (something The Full Monty did so wonderfully). Instead it piles on the cuteness until it reaches an almost unbearable point. It almost dares you not to have sheer contempt for it.
The problems begin with the very introduction of title character Millie Dillmount (Sutton Foster), a Kansas gal thrust into the big city in the Roaring Twenties. She finds herself out of sorts with the hustle and bustle of New York. For some reason, the musical never truly defines who Millie is or what her real desires are, so it merely plants her there, singing about a modern life that the character hasn't even yet deserved. She has a meet-cute with a handsome, scrappy man about town, Jimmy (Gavin Creel), and before long has found boarding in a sketchy girls home run by the even sketchier Mrs. Meers (Harriet Harris), who puts on a Chinese accent and clothing to disguise her true intentions: selling off the unsuspecting girls to white slavery, with the aid of a pair of Chinese henchman (Ken Leung and Francis Jue), whom we comprehend through subtitles above the stage. Meanwhile, Millie needs to occupy her time, so she lands a job for the chiseled Trevor Graydon (Marc Kudisch, doing a lot with very little) and hopes that will lead to her marrying him as well, even though she develops a soft spot for Jimmy, who introduces her to the swanky side of metropolitan life. Millie meets the saucy Muzzy Van Hossmere (Sheryl Lee Ralph), a smooth chanteuse who dispels nuggets of wisdom between numbers, and look! There's the Gershwins! And Dorothy Parker! What fun!
If the creators of Millie went for camp, it might have enlivened the proceedings, but no such luck. Everything continues to build to a frantic pace, except that nothing that happens is worth all the trouble. Even with two and a half hours to fill, director Michael Mayer rushes events and ruins all that is exciting about the musical form. The production is as shallow as a puddle, and the most disconcerting factor is that the makers do not even seem to care. In this musical's world, loud and brash rules, and character development and a beating heart take a backseat to complete hubris.
This is, of course, when the play isn't patently insulting. The staging of the Mrs. Meers character and her cronies is so insensitive, you'd think you were actually watching the play in the year it's set, and that is no compliment. Mayer and company seem to believe deep down that watching two Asian men sing in Chinese is high comedy for only that reason, indicating the one and only level the show contains. It just wants to entertain without ever doing anything else, but they don't understand that a good musical must go another step beyond that; otherwise, you may as well fill the house with a pack of dogs and call it a day.
And the gamble of casting the relatively untested Sutton Foster in the lead role is a disastrous one. She is a competent singer, but a supremely unrelaxed performer, with hardly the amount of bouncy charisma needed for such a role. Half the time she appears uncomfortable (especially when she has to flash her wide smile, which seems more forced than anything), like an understudy with a case of stage fright. (Funnily enough, Foster was an original understudy in the L.A. production who got the gig, and the performance still feels as such.) She disappears into the chorus of several scenes with the other actresses, and that should not be the case. Millie needed to be sexy, salty, and totally captivating, but Foster cannot register as any of those. She seems like a guest in her own show.
Other actors fare better, though all are working with wafer-thin material. Creel shows promise as the young suitor, Kudisch is fun as Millie's suave dog of a boss, and Ralph (despite her poor costumes) has all the natural sass that Foster is missing desperately. But the talented Harriet Harris cannot salvage the silliness of her caricatured role, and her Chinese affectations are so broad they cease to be funny. (The Vineyard Theatre's Swimming With Watermelons handled this type of thing with more wit and sympathy, and was often as raucous as this production, except twice as fun.)
It seems shocking that Jeanine Tesori (Violet) composed new music for such a frivolous show, but the music, while usually only serviceable, has glimmers of invention. I happened to like Mrs. Meers' gravelly solo "They Don't Know," but Mayer obviously didn't know himself how to make it at all interesting. An astute helmer of plays (Side Man, Stupid Kids), Mayer has yet to successfully stage a musical, though Millie is definitely his most slapdash yet. The scene transitions range from awkward to insipid, and imagination is in short supply. One scene that should have been positively spirit-lifting (an interlude on an elevator that only operates by tapping feet) is embarrassingly flat and without any charm, much like the show itself. The typically smashing David Gallo has designed an array of eyesore scenery, and Martin Pakledinaz's costumes are a veritable bacchanal of green and purple travesty; again, with no sense of the camp value they could have had. Rob Ashford's choreography is no more inventive than having actors shuffle around like goofballs; it more often plays out like one of the humorous backstage vignettes in 42nd Street.
Millie's surprising success on Broadway points to the sad realization that audiences will drink the sand if there's no water available. But one must not forget that sand will make you choke, and Thoroughly Modern Millie seems primed to make one do just that, with its incessant, cloying desire to make you like it. The undiscerning will see such a viewpoint as snobbish and yet another example of an overanalytical critic who won't settle into enjoying anything. But it's much easier to settle into something that doesn't maul you. Millie just can't seem to keep her mitts off of you, whether you like it or not.
