Review: TUCK EVERLASTING, A Hearty And Magical Charmer

Beginning with his choreography assignment in SPAMALOT, and then graduating to director/choreographer of THE DROWSEY CHAPERONE, ELF and the current trio of THE BOOK OF MORMAN, ALADDIN and SOMETHING ROTTEN!, Casey Nicholaw is Broadway's reigning monarch when it comes to delivering fast and funny musical comedy with production numbers that bring in as many big laughs as high kicks.

But in the new musical based on Natalie Babbitt's novel, Tuck Everlasting, Nicholaw offers Broadway audiences something they've never seen from him before; a full interpretive ballet, gentle and sincere in its presentation, that speaks to the beauty of life's balance of sorrow and joy.

As the ballet is what wraps up the story, its narrative won't be described here, but in it Nicholaw and bookwriters Claudia Shear and Tim Federle, composer Chris Miller and orchestrator John Clancy cap the evening with a graceful Thornton Wilder-ish look at love, loss and the unavoidable.

The musical that precedes it is a hearty and magical Americana-style charmer full of poignancy and good humor and very suitable for families.

Set in rural 19th Century New Hampshire, the plot is centered on young Winnie Foster, who lives with her widowed mother (Valerie Wright) and impishly comical Nana (Pippa Pearthree). 11-year-old Sarah Charles Lewis, who can belt it up to the back rows, makes her Broadway debut as Winnie, exuding an immensely likeable and confident presence, paired with good acting chops.

Frustrated that she's not allowed to have any fun because her mother insists on a lengthy grieving period, Winnie runs off into the woods, where she meets 17-year-old Jesse Tuck (an exuberant Andrew Keenan-Bolger), his older brother Miles (Robert Lenzi) and their parents, Mae (Carolee Carmello) and Angus (Michael Park).

Decades ago, the Tucks drank water from an enchanted nearby stream that froze their lives at the ages they were at the time, incapable of dying. While that may sound like a neat proposition at first, it has led them to nomadic lives, unable to be part of a community for any length of time before their secret is discovered. Miles' wife, who did not drink the water, took their child and ran off on him long ago. As for Mae and Angus, they've been finding that a marriage can grow stale when forever really means forever.

Jesse and Winnie do some adventuring, including an encounter at a carnival with a creepy gent billed as the man in the yellow suit (grandly hammy Terrence Mann), and the lonely boy asks his new friend to drink the water when she gets to be his age so they can be together for the rest of their continuous lives.

Will Winnie do it? When the rest of the Tucks find out about Jesse's request, they try to convince her that living forever makes you miss a lot of life. Meanwhile the town's constable (Fred Applegate, displaying pin-point deadpan comic timing) is searching for the missing girl, aided by his bumbling deputy Hugo (Michael Wartella).

Miller's music is an appealing mix primarily based in folk matched with lyricist Nathan Tyson's homespun poetics. A soaring anthem gives Carmello, an outstanding dramatic singer, a moment to thrill with her vocals. Park displays gentle masculinity with his lovely ballad, Mann opens the second act with a fun, slithering bluesy number and Applegate and Wartella strut to a catchy old-fashioned vaudevillian tune "in one" with a follow spot.

Designers Walt Spangler (set), Gregg Barnes (costumes) and Kenneth Posner (lights) provide delightful visuals that are colorful, nostalgic and fanciful. Tuck Everlasting is a real heart-tugger.