Heading up the Huntington cast is film and TV actor Michael T. Weiss, who follows his explosive turn in Burn This with a rakishly commanding Valmont who seems ready to pounce — if not on a woman, then on a nuance. Tasha Lawrence is a resplendent Merteuil who, though her inflections are somewhat lower-crust, conveys the turn of the Marquise’s heart from malignant delight to adamancy. And Yvonne Woods’s Tourvel communicates both the starch of her high lace collar and the heat beneath.
After time spent with the unsaintly manipulators of Sartre and Choderlos, any take on Little Women would radiate more innocence than The Exonerated — there’s nothing smarmy about Marmee. In Little Women — The Broadway Musical (at the Opera House through January 22), that bulwark of a matriarch is played by lush mezzo Maureen McGovern reprising her Tony-nominated turn in the 2005 Broadway production of this warbling take on Louisa May Alcott’s enduring novel about growing up March in mid-19th-century Concord. The other talent on view is Kate Fisher, flouncing up a melodramatic storm as aspiring pulp-fictionist Jo, whose “blood and guts” writings get her less far than her immortalizing account of the sisters March: pretty matron-in-the-making Meg, doomed sweetheart Beth, artsy peacock Amy, and her own swashbuckling tomboy self, all cleaving in genteel poverty to Marmee as absent dad comforts the souls of Union forces.
For aficionados of Alcott’s novel for whom several film and television adaptations, Marian De Forest’s stage version, and an opera are not enough, Little Women — The Broadway Musical is probably required viewing. With the possible exception of the demise of the title character in Charlotte’s Web, is there heartbreak in youth literature that trumps Beth’s deathbed scene (here rendered as intimations of mortality while kite-flying on Cape Cod)? But you will have to bring the sentimental depth of Little Women with you. The characters in the new musical (with book by Allan Knee, music by Jason Howland, and lyrics by Mindi Dickstein) are broad, their transitions are abrupt, and Howland’s music is so generic that the cast, under the direction of Susan H. Schulman, has to work to sell it. Only the jingly “Off to Massachusetts” has any period feel. McGovern has the best song, the hope-dipped anthem of mourning, “Days of Plenty,” and sell it she does. You can also buy all manner of memorabilia in the lobby.
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