By Jackie Demaline
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Thoroughly Modern Millie may be a "best" musical as proclaimed by Broadway's Tony Awards in 2002, but it isn't a good musical, as seen on tour through Nov. 30 as part of Fifth Third Bank Broadway in Cincinnati.

Millie is a new musical in name only. It reaches back almost 40 years to a Julie Andrews screen vehicle from the Sixties, which reached back 40 years to tell the story of a flapper finding adventure and love.

It's not the source material that makes it feel old. Great older musicals always feel fresh and new. It's the general lack of creative stagecraft.

The screen Millie still has a sweetly ingenuous nature and a silly charm (check it out on video or DVD) and a lot of toe-tapping (if even more thoroughly silly) musical numbers.

The stage version feels like a formulaic bid for commercial success (which it accomplished). Any fan of musicals can pick just about any part of Millie and know where they've seen something very like it before (and done better). The show also dumps a lot of the original score without actually improving on it.

Our heroine is Millie Dillmont (Darcie Roberts), fresh from Kansas to take on the Big City. Being a thoroughly modern Millie, she starts interviewing potential bosses, because when she meets the right one she plans to take the job and marry him.

She moves into a ladies boarding house, which just happens to be the front for a white slavery ring. (Does this girl have adventures, or what?) And she meets Jimmy (Matt Cavenaugh), who appears to be disinterested in making an honest living, but falls for him anyway, even though he may be two-timing her with her best friend. (Of course he isn't!)

There are a lot of swell performances in Millie and there are few things more disappointing on the musical stage than watching performers give a song their all when the song is utterly forgettable even while it's being sung.

Cavenaugh gets to cut loose every now and again and you think, "Wow," but you also think, if you can't stop yourself from thinking when you go to the theater, that too often what he's singing doesn't make a lick of sense.

Pamela Isaacs is the high-living Muzzy Van Hossmere who belts out maybe the worst song about New York ever written.

Roberts can sing the role (and dance the Charleston) but she'd do better with a softer, marshmallow center. Roberts' Millie is not just wrong-headed but tough. She'd be easier to like if there were a little bit of vulnerability early on.

Hollis Resnik is a trooper as the comic villainess, disguised as a Chinese dragon lady whose plots to kidnap innocent orphans are constantly frustrated.

Thoroughly Modern Millie, through Nov. 30, Fifth Third Bank Broadway in Cincinnati, Aronoff Center, 241-7469.