Thoroughly Modern Millie

THIS MODERN GIRL Butler paints the town red.

Photo: Johnny Knight

As if the early Bush era weren’t grim enough, 2002’s Tony Award for best musical went to this soulless pastiche. Tesori and Scanlan, updating Morris’s creaky 1967 screenplay about a small-town girl in the Jazz Age big city, add little but brittle veneer. Osetek and choreographer Tammy Mader give the material a spirited run-through; ensemble numbers such as “Forget About the Boy,” with its commiserating typist pool, and “The Nutty Cracker Suite,” speechlessly depicting a vibrant ’20s speakeasy, are sharply designed and executed. Butler plays Millie as the thoroughly anime creation she is, all eyebrows, cheekbones, puckered mouth and bob. And she’s backed by an adeptly comic cast. She and Randall Dodge, as her boss, trade patter effortlessly in “The Speed Test” (with tune and rhythms lifted from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “My Eyes Are Fully Open”). But the show resembles little more than a two-and-a-half-hour commercial for itself.

Most curious are Millie’s self-conscious attempts to finesse its source’s iffy racial politics. Making Mickey Rooney’s performance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s look subtle, a main subplot of the film concerns the white-slavery ring run by wicked Mrs. Meers and her sinister Asian minions. The 21st-century version will still delight connoisseurs of bloken Engrish jokes. But it’s ironic, now, sort of, when Meers’s laundry-bearing assistants talk back in supertitled Cantonese and end up heroes. It’s neither offensive nor revelatory, really, but mostly just confusing, reflecting the hollow viewpoint of this synthetic-feeling show.

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