The new version of Meredith Willson and Richard Morris’s upbeat musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, from Transport Group at the Abrons Arts Center, would seem to have little in common with recent Off-Broadway shows about suicide and torture. But it also plays with narrative, in that Dick Scanlan, author of the new book and lyrics, has totally reshaped and offered different perspectives from the 1960 original, which won a Tony for Tammy Grimes and an Oscar nomination for Debbie Reynolds for the 1964 film version. The original was Willson’s follow-up to The Music Man and seemed a variation on Annie Get Your Gun while a precursor to Jerry Herman’s “Big Lady” tuners, Hello, Dolly! and Mame.
Molly was based on the brassy, up-from-nothing socialite and survivor of the Titanic who was larger than life and, in the show, burst into song at the drop of a hat. Scanlan has incorporated Molly’s progressive activism for unions, women’s suffrage and immigrants’ rights into the tried-and-true romance trope with J.J. Brown, her just-as-ornery love interest.
At times, Scanlan’s book feels more like a stuffed-with-issues PBS documentary than a musical comedy, but there’s enough pizzazz and pathos to qualify it as an entertaining tuner. Director Kathleen Marshall manages to keep the action and choreography flowing across decades and continents, and Beth Malone is a joyous firecracker in the lead. Darren Aron Damane is a virile J.J., and there are valuable contributions from Paula Leggett Chase, Coco Smith, Nikka Graff Lanzarone, Michael Halling, and a host of triple-threat chorus members in this buoyant revisal.
