Meet Me in St. Louis

We’re not heartless. Sentimental fluff can make for classic holiday fare in theater and film: It’s a Wonderful Life, White Christmas and even A Christmas Carol are downright romantic. But what separates these from Meet Me in St. Louis, the Broadway adaptation of MGM’s 1944 Judy Garland vehicle that’s being revived by Circle as a family holiday show, is a degree of sophistication and a hint of a dark side. Wonderful Life has a juicy villain in its ruthless banker; White Christmas at least has glamorized backstage dirt and saucy banter; Dickens provides real supernatural danger for Scrooge and the Cratchits. The biggest threat in squeaky-clean St. Louis is that the Smith family might move to New York before the 1904 World’s Fair opens, and that menace doesn’t even surface until after intermission.

Both film and musical are drawn from Sally Benson’s New Yorker short stories about Midwestern life at the turn of the century, and padding them out with new numbers by the movie’s songwriting team only emphasizes the episodic nature of Benson’s work. Her stories were atmospheric vignettes; here we have as many as five songs in a single scene, but strip away the production numbers and there’s not much action happening. The most that’s at stake here is teenage love, and it’s tooth-rottingly sugary teenage love at that. It’s a shame to see Circle expending its considerable talents (notably Knuth’s well-appointed set and the winsome, promising Baylea Morgan in the Garland role) on this insipid, snooze-inducing material.—Kris Vire