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Stage

A gentle success

By MARTY CLEAR
Published March 8, 2006

TAMPA - Trying to adapt a well-known and almost universally beloved novel into a Broadway musical takes some courage. It's an endeavor that's much more likely to disappoint than to surpass or even equal expectations.

So even if Little Women were a failure you'd have to give some props to Allan Knee, who wrote the book for the musical, and to composer Jason Howland and lyricist Mindi Dickstein. If nothing else, they had the nerve to try to adapt Louisa May Alcott's gentle epic about sisters growing up in the years after the Civil War.

But when the first-ever tour of Little Women stopped at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center on Tuesday evening, the show revealed itself to be generally successful. It's no triumph of musical theater, but it's replete with pleasant and refreshingly melodic songs, excellent stagecraft and good performances.

Almost inevitably, the two-and-a-half-hour musical offers a superficial version of the 600-page novel. The musical has a bucolic pave, but nevertheless it skips rather than saunters. Some elements of plot and character development are awkwardly handled. (Mr. Laurence changes instantly from a bad guy into a good guy; Jo and Laurie meet in one scene, are best friends in the next and discuss marriage moments later.) But the charm of the March sisters and the general warmth of the story remain admirably intact.

Howland and Dickstein have written some pretty songs and, perhaps even more importantly, very few bad ones. But none of the songs have the power to endure outside the show.

The songs, and the show in general, work better in the quiet moments than in the times they try to be more overtly inspirational. Act One ends in a thud with a song called Astonishing that meant to be thrilling but falls far short. It's sung by Kate Fisher as Jo, who has charm to spare but doesn't have the vocal power to give the song the punch it desperately needs.

By far the worst song is Days of Plenty, an ironic dirge sung by Marmee. Maureen McGovern, the biggest name in the cats, plays Marmee (medium-sized role) with fine coal ability but not much charisma.

The rest of the cast members, especially the other three March sisters, are excellent. The one exception is Louisa Flaningam, who makes the role of annoying Aunt March even more annoying than it should be with a fake-sounding warble.

Although the musical doesn't demand familiarity with the novel, people who have read the book will have a different kind of experience. Part of the musical's success is its ability to summon up the familiar emotions from the novel. For anyone who knows the book, the musical is a bit like looking a photographs from last year's vacation. For others, it's like looking at postcards of places they've never been.

Little Women, through Sunday at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center's Carol Morsani Hall. 7:30 p.m. tonight and Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Sunday. $31.50-$67.50 plus service charge. (813) 229-7827 or tbpac.org.

[Last modified March 8, 2006, 07:00:12]