Review: New ‘Summer Stock’ musical a farm-fresh frolic at the Goodspeed

Connecticut farmland has been used for theater shows and musical festivals for eons, but seldom with as much high-kicking, fresh-faced fervor as “Summer Stock,” at the Goodspeed Opera House through Aug. 27.

Everything on the Falbury family farm in the show serves as an excuse to dance: chores, breakfast, a chirping cricket, a harvest moon. The biggest, best and most obvious reason is that most of the main characters are rehearsing a show in the barn. They’re part of a long legacy of starving artists who hope that causing some excitement on an affordable Connecticut stage will get them an invite to conquer Broadway. Also struggling but hopeful: Jane Falbury and her dad “Pop,” who need to keep the farm going so it doesn’t get sold to their ritzy moneygrubbing, land-grabbing neighbor.

‘High School Musical’ star Corbin Bleu is rethinking ‘Summer Stock’ at the Goodspeed Opera House

It’s not a barn, but the Goodspeed Opera House has been developing new American musicals for 60 years. “Summer Stock” is its latest world premiere, based on a solid if largely unremarkable 1950 movie musical. The movie has been jazzed up considerably, replacing cornpone humor with well-crafted witty comebacks and sexist tropes with acts of self-empowerment.

This is a show that seems confident it’s got a future. It’s got several Broadway veterans in its cast, and it trusts these singular performers to help shape their own memorable characters. “Summer Stock” has more clever, full-cast, high-kicking dance numbers than it knows what to do with. Its score is a mix of songs from the original movie (including the iconic “Get Happy” but also “Hello Neighbor, Happy Harvest,” “Dig for Your Dinner” and others), various big-band hits from the 19-teens, ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s (everything from “Happy Days Are Here Again” to “Accentuate the Positive”).

There are many changes between the film and the stage show, but nothing that messes with the essential, wonderfully simple and engrossing story: a young woman struggling to save her family’s farm is beset by a theater troupe who have been told they can put on a show in the cow barn. The film starred Gene Kelly and Judy Garland, and it’s basically a responsible-adult update of the “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” movies a younger Garland made with Mickey Rooney.

“Summer Stock” stars Corbin Bleu (Chad from the “High School Musical” movies, all grown up with shorter hair) as Joe the musical theater wizard and Danielle Wade (who’s played a Judy Garland role as the first Dorothy in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s version of “The Wizard of Oz”) as Jane the farmer, and while they are not trying to mimic the movie’s stars, Wade has the same sweetly belting vocals as Garland and Bleu has Kelly’s athletic physique; he’s even mustered that iconic Gene Kelly hands-in-pockets strut.

The movie was adapted for the stage by Cheri Steinkellner, whose TV writing credits include “Cheers,” “The Jeffersons” and “Who’s the Boss” and whose previous movie-to-musical adaptation was “Sister Act.” Some of the most awkward material from the movie (Phil Silvers singing the blues, Silvers and Kelly as hillbillies singing with a pack of dogs) are happily gone, and the small Goodspeed stage wisely doesn’t even attempt to accommodate the destruction of a tractor that is so essential to the film. In the tractor’s place are bales of hay, kitchen tables and other convenient surfaces to dance on. It’s a much better use of space. The dancing in “Summer Stock” is constant. The cast can’t seem to walk across the stage without making a big hot sweaty dance extravaganza out of it. The most active of them all is Bleu, a whirlwind of leaps, struts, flips and taps, who even swings on a rope in one of his several outstanding dance solos.

Some of the fresh jokes and dance routines are better than anything in the movie. Some of the additions are just delightfully quirky, like deciding that the iconic fedora with waistcoat and stockings outfit that Garland (and now Wade) wears to sing “Get Happy” needs its own origin story.

Instead of an oddly clingy father and son team in the movie, who scheme to have the son marry Jane to join the long-feuding family’s land, Steinkellner has given the hapless son a tyrannical mom with even more insidious goals – she wants to own all the land in the region. The Falbury farm is in her way, and forcing a marriage between her son Orville. This is a comic relief subplot of the highest order, especially since Orville is played with top comical insecurity and obsequiousness by Will Roland (of Broadway’s “Be More Chill” and “Dear Evan Hansen”) and his mom Margaret is screeched and scowled hilariously by the divine Veanne Cox.

West Hartford audiences got a chance to see Cox carry the new comedy play “Webster’s Bitch” at Playhouse on Park just last month (not to mention the inspired virtual adaptation she and Ezra Barnes did of “Private Lives” for the same theater in 2021) and now can watch her steal all her scenes in “Summer Stock.” A versatile performer whose Broadway credits range from “Company” in 1995 to “Caroline, or Change” to 2004 to “An American in Paris” in 2015, she can add this over-the-top demented dowager role to her repertoire. Falling for a fallen matinee idol in the barnstorming company (J. Anthony Crane, another Broadway name having a grand hammy time here), Cox lifts the line “I saw your Coriolanus” from Shakespearean commentary to sublime saucy silliness.

As successful as script tweaks and the casting triumphs are, there are still a few squeaky boards in the “Summer Stock” barn. In some scenes, we’re told that the show-within-a-show is a surefire hit, while in others it’s suggested that Joe’s staging isn’t progressive enough, and when we finally see the show (titled “Till We Meet Again”) it’s actually pretty stodgy and hokey – until that classic “Get Happy” dance springs out of nowhere. Using such old and well-known tunes as “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” (which also figured heavily in the Goodspeed’s Judy Garland bio-musical “Chasing Rainbows” a few years ago), “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Me and My Shadow” and Irving Berlin’s “Always” is more fraught than it is safe.

Even with a pit band as feisty as this one (that overture is loud!) and some terrific one-liners added to the lyrics, it’s hard to make these songs pop like the less familiar ones from the movie do. When World War Two is evoked – several of the characters are veterans, and address each other by their military ranks – some of the songs they use to evoke it are actually from World War One, like “How’re You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm.” Much of “Summer Stock” is a jukebox musical with music from before the jukebox was invented.

There are many happy points in “Summer Stock” when all concerns about the plot or the characters fall away and you get to exult in some fine, flashy, dancing. Director/choreographer Donna Feore (best known for the many summer shows she’s directed at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, and fresh from helming the premiere of another new movie-inspired musical, “The Griswolds’ Broadway Vacation,” in New York last year) is the ideal person to help shape this farm-fresh work-in-progress. She keeps things moving constantly.

Of all the recent Goodspeed shows in the past decade or so which have repurposed classic Hollywood movies for the stage – “Christmas in Connecticut,” “Good News,” “Holiday Inn,” the revised versions “42nd Street” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” – “Summer Stock” is by far the best at keeping the nostalgic spirit and traditional song-and-dance of the original and adding elements that make the story fresh and palatable for modern audiences as well. “Christmas in Connecticut,” which also had WW2 themes and a farmhouse, deviated wildly (and unnecessarily) from its beloved screwball-comedy source material and seemed to treat dance as an afterthought. “Summer Stock” brings the diversity and the gender equality and the modern attitude but does it while constantly dancing, smiling and, yes, farming.

“Summer Stock” runs through Aug. 27 at the Goodspeed Opera House, 6 Main St., East Haddam. Performances are Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 3 and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., with added Sunday evening performances at 6:30 p.m. on July 30 and Aug. 6. $30-$89. goodspeed.org/shows/summer-stock.