"Once" With Steve Kazee And Cristin Milioti At Jacobs Theater

Sometimes how cool you look depends on where you’re standing. When I first saw the musical “Once” at the New York Theater Workshop last December, it registered as a little too twee, too conventionally sentimental, for the East Village. Yet on Broadway — at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater to be exact, where “Once” opened on Sunday night — what is essentially the same production feels as vital and surprising as the early spring that has crept up on Manhattan.

It’s not just that what seems hokey downtown can read quirky in Midtown, where overpriced-ticket buyers tend to prefer familiarity to novelty. True, “Once” — adapted from a wistful low-budget Irish movie about two young songwriters who seem destined to make sweet music together — is exotically modest by the standards of loud, expensively dressed Broadway. But in its new incarnation this musical reveals itself to be a show that was always meant (and probably lusting) for a brighter limelight and a bigger stage. You have to watch out for those shy ones.

In some ways “Once,” which is directed by John Tiffany, has followed a typical route for Broadway musicals, in that it was inspired by a film; and in translating that film to the stage it made the implicit explicit, and the understated overstated. (See “Sister Act” or “Priscilla Queen of the Desert” for corroborating evidence.) I had made the mistake of watching the enchantingly low-key 2006 movie only hours before I first saw the musical downtown. And while there was much I admired in the stage version then, its scaled-up adorability factor got on my nerves.

What annoyed me then — which was mostly inherent in the show’s book, written by the generally terrific playwright Enda Walsh — hasn’t been erased from “Once.” It still has too many lines like “You cannot walk through your life leaving unfinished love behind you.”

But the greater distance between stage and audience that comes with a move to a Broadway house softens the edges of its exaggeration. And what was always wonderful about “Once,” its songs and its staging, has been magnified. In the meantime its appealing stars, Steve Kazee and Cristin Milioti, have only grown in presence and dimensionality. Who would have thought that this soft-spoken little musical would have found itself by raising its voice?

Mr. Kazee and Ms. Milioti play characters named Guy and Girl (yeah, I know, but bear with me — and them), parts created on screen by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who also wrote the songs (which are used here too). Guy, who is Irish, and Girl, who is Czech, meet in Dublin and discover they share a knack for creating folk-rock tunes that ripple with melancholy and rue.

They’re different too, in complementary ways. Guy’s a brooding quitter; Girl’s a never-say-die doer. And together — with the help of their standard-issue wacky friends — they just might make it after all. Professionally I mean. Romantically they’re both otherwise engaged. Or are they?

You’ve heard it all before, right? Except you haven’t, quite. Because “Once” uses song and dance in a way I’ve never experienced in an American musical (even if its sound will be familiar to alternative radio listeners): to convey a beautiful shimmer of might-have-been regret. Of course the anguish produced by the man or woman that got away has been a staple of musicals and opera for centuries. Heck, it accounts for at least 50 percent of chart-topping pop hits. (Hello, Adele.)

What lends a special, tickling poignancy to Mr. Hansard and Ms. Irglova’s songs is their acceptance of loneliness as an existential given. These are not big ballads that complain angrily about how we could have had it all, you and I. An air of romantic resignation, streaked in minor-key undercurrents, tempers the core heartache of numbers like “Leave,” “When Your Mind’s Made Up” and (the Oscar winner for best song from the movie) “Falling Slowly.” (Martin Lowe is the excellent music supervisor and orchestrator.)
And because every member of the ensemble here is a musician, functioning as both the show’s band and its cast of characters, this savory-sweet sadness feels both organic and universal. (Bob Crowley’s single set, given multifarious life by Natasha Katz’s expert lighting, suggests the kind of pub where people come to lose themselves in song as well as drink, and the audience is invited to join in an improvised preshow hootenanny on the stage.)

This is not music that lends itself to the usual chorus-line kicks and shimmies. Instead, Steven Hoggett (who collaborated with Mr. Tiffany on the National Theater of Scotland’s marvelous men-at-war play “Black Watch”) sets the songs to stylized physical movements that are as distinctive and evocative as any Broadway choreography since Bill T. Jones’s work on “Spring Awakening.”