I saw this afternoon's performance, and while I thoroughly enjoyed it, I wouldn't give it the "bring this straight to Broadway!" endorsement. Stephen Pasquale was as glorious as I hoped, but I was not quite in love with Laura Osnes's performance. She was fairly plain and conventional for someone commonly described as "a queer one"--I felt like the qualities that make her a perfect ingenue got in the way of this role. She gave a lovely "What's the Use of Wondering?" though.
Rob Ashford's choreography is pretty much what I've come to expect from him: the ensemble constantly climbing on top of each other in needless feats of physical exhaustion. However, the big ballet in the second act was a surprising and very welcome break from that, it was a really lovely highlight. The same could be said of his staging; he frequently tends too far to the big and grand (there was a distracting and unnecessary scene shift in "Soliloquy," for instance) but then came "You'll Never Walk Alone" in which he simply placed the characters onstage and let them do their thing, and that really worked. I haven't ever been Ashford's biggest fan, and this production demonstrated a lot of my issues with his work, but then there were some really lovely moments when he broke from that.
I felt it was rather jarring to cast one lead as a major opera star, while the rest of the cast was musical theatre performers. Denyce Graves was very good, but she really stuck out and felt like she was from a different world from the rest of the piece. I really didn't buy her as Julie's cousin.
I've seen pretty much all of the shows in Chicago that were said to possibly be eying Broadway, and while I mostly really loved this production, I wouldn't put this at the top of the list, especially after Brigadoon last summer. But then again, I'm not a producer who has the power to make such a transfer happen.
