Mr. Holland’s Opus, musicalization of the much-admired 1995 film about beloved teachers that’s about to wrap up its world premiere engagement at Maine’s Ogunquit Playhouse, is notable for some good ideas sitting cheek by jowl with many poor ones. This academic will need much remedial work before seeking tenure in another district.
Patrick Sheane Duncan’s synthetic but irresistible original screenplay follows the cradle-to-retirement career of Glenn Holland (Richard Dreyfuss on screen, Akron Watson here), moderately successful touring musician and composer manqué. The responsibilities of marriage to warm, understanding Iris (the late Glenne Headly originally, now Anastasia Barzee) warrant signing on as a high school music director “for four years or so” until he gets his writing under control. But four years becomes multiple decades, and the “American Rhapsody” that gets worked on in between summer driver’s ed and school band coaching gradually gathers dust in the ol’ piano bench.
In the movie, at least, Mr. Holland’s arc first involves getting over his resentment that a “temp job to fall back on” has become his lifelong calling. Then he must come to realize that diligently serving his students has caused him to neglect his wife and son Cole (Joshua Castille) – the latter of whom is born deaf, and thus ironically shut off from his dad’s consuming passion.
Both transformations suffer as penned by novice librettist-lyricist-director BD Wong, the estimable Tony-winning star of M. Butterfly and multiple Jurassic Park outings. So choppy is the storytelling that we never get a handle on Holland’s transition from grump to committed pedagogue. Nor is it clearly absorbable when, or even why, he resists learning ASL and bonding with his boy. Watson has been directed to oscillate from reserved contemplation (sometimes) to practically bouncing off the walls in excitement (often). When a main character’s moments of restraint are few, he will command the center of attention right enough but his choices risk remaining a blur, and so it is here.
Blurry, too, is the introduction of teachers and students within Holland’s orbit. They come and go confusingly, and generally opt for broad comedy rather than emotional reality. Using actors as stagehands to handle white styrofoam props, and having set designer Lex Liang’s rear panels reveal student musicians offering accompaniment, are conventions inconsistently employed. A young graffiti artist (I think) pops in from time to time to do something or other to the false proscenium, I never quite got what. And the movie’s sometime villain, a stiff-necked vice principal, has been woefully reconceived as a manic, benighted twit. Timothy Gulan can do nothing with this demented-leprechaun role, especially when the show, incredibly, chooses to get into his head in dream sequences involving starchy Principal Chae-Jacobs (a wasted Veanne Cox) in a skintight leotard.
The good ideas to which I earlier referred begin with Wong’s decision to lean into multicultural, gender-fluid, differently-abled, and non-body-shaming casting. Rarely in the past have musicals offered up such diverse ensembles – though we can surely look forward to more – and this large troupe readily demonstrates diversity’s entertainment value. They are excellent. Then, when the infant Cole morphs into the ebullient Castille, his smile lights up the room and the show’s promise begins to be revealed. He energizes the one true showstopper, act two’s ensemble opener “Cole World,” while wholly embodying the chagrin of an adolescent convinced he has irreparably disappointed his parent. Castille’s real-life deafness, and Barzee’s famous warmth (after the stage version of White Christmas, it’s famous to me) bring total authenticity to all their scenes, and spark Barzee’s big number, the rueful lament “My Day.”
It was also smart to invent the character of “Jim Stahlin” – Glenn’s boyhood friend whose latter-day rock stardom serves as a constant reminder of roads not taken – and to replace the film’s high school musical, a Gershwin revue, with a purported UK hit, a pop opera set in ancient Egypt. Yet even here, the show undoes itself. Stahlin is used as a hippy-dippy visual joke multiple times in act one, so when he dies in act two the desired poignancy is absent. And the Cleo-Popera staging is so messy that we never get signalled as to whether it’s camp, seriously intended, or just plain inept.
I couldn’t help wondering whether this was such a hot property for adaptation in the first place. Holland’s obstacle is that his musical expression has been shut down or sidelined across the decades, by virtue of his day job. But if the character is expressing himself musically, over and over and at length, where’s the obstacle? What is the lack in his life that we’re supposed to feel? Wayne Barker’s melodies (he’s the Tony-nominated composer of Peter and the Starcatcher) are gratifyingly complex on first hearing, but I never got a sense from them of a repressed talent’s seeking an outlet. And though Wong’s lyrics are technically proficient, they often serve only to underline thoughts of Mr. Holland’s that we can already infer.
Besides, if the teacher keeps displaying joy throughout, because that’s what musical comedy leads do, then his shifts into melancholy seem disturbingly bipolar rather than a defining trait of a locked-in, locked-down artistic creator. (Perhaps it would have worked to have everyone but Mr. Holland sing, until his career’s end prompts him once and for all to let loose.)
In any event, Dreyfuss’s Oscar-nominated performance, so careful, so restrained and cerebral, laid down a template for the Glenn Holland role, which of course Wong, Barker, and Watson were free not to follow. But departing from it so radically seems, in retrospect, to have been a counterproductive choice.
Mr. Holland’s Opus opened August 20, 2022 , at the Ogunquit Playhouse (Ogunquit, Maine) and runs through September 10. Tickets and information: ogunquitplayhouse.org
