I can absolutely understand how some Broadway buffs were unable to tolerate the new TV-Movie of The Music Man starring Matthew Broderick as Professor Harold Hill. Robert Preston's mesmerizing performance was captured in a fine motion picture, and it can be tough to wrap your brain around another interpretation. And though you want to be open to new interpretations, some versions are so embedded in our souls that…well, I found myself physically unable to listen to the new version of My Fair Lady with arrangements that sounded quite unlike the original. Better or worse, it makes no never mind; it's just that some things comfort with their familiarity, and even an improvement can be jarring. Just because it's different. That isn't what went wrong here.
I've seen The Music Man many times on stage and long since stopped saying, "Well, he's no Robert Preston" about each new Professor Hill. I figure, if that's going to be the criteria, we might as well stop doing this show altogether. But I've liked other renditions and I was prepared to like Matthew Broderick, at least in a different way. I tried — but ultimately, he lacked the charismatic charm and the devilish con-man twinkle that the part seems to demand. He didn't even seem to have much going on behind his eyes. I never got the feeling that his Harold Hill was up to anything beyond what came out of his mouth, or that he changed one bit when he decided to go straight.
Still, you have Broderick's likeability with that bulletproof script and those wonderful songs, many of them nicely staged. Then add in the rest of the cast, especially Kristen Chenoweth, who played Marian the Librarian with a lot more ice and spunk than usual, and Molly Shannon as the mayor's wife, and I didn't have such a bad time. If it does well and prompts more musicals on TV, it will have been well worth doing. Maybe they can even do some where Matthew Broderick is a bit more appropriately cast — because he really is wonderful. Just not in this.