Review: History Theatre's 'Boy Wonder' burns bright around Minnesota's youngest governor

For a couple who were said to have had an equal partnership at a time when gender roles were rigidly enforced, Harold and Esther Stassen find themselves in an odd moment at dinner in "The Boy Wonder."

The men at the table are talking politics while the women gab about rutabagas, and never the twain conversations meet. It's a funny and telling moment in "Boy," Keith Hovis' new musical that premiered Saturday at St. Paul's History Theatre.

The episodic, sometimes magical show uses finger-snapping flashbacks as the dramatic frame for the story. The Stassens' son Glen (Thomas Bevan) interviews his father as the story jogs between memory and late life.

Director Laura Leffler stages the action on a bunting-festooned set that looks like the stage for a nominating convention. That scenography, by Sadie Ward, foregrounds a Harold Stassen obsession. The youngest governor in Minnesota history, Stassen is best known for running for president nine times.

"Boy" seeks to flesh him out a bit, from finishing high school, college and law school at tender ages to being elected governor at 31 in 1938. His political aides in St. Paul included Warren Burger, who went on to become chief justice of the United States, and Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche.

But Stassen, who later became a World War II hero and a college president, is what we might consider an oxymoron today. He was a progressive Republican who worked proudly to build consensus in the middle of left and right. He believed deeply in American democracy and spent his life championing his principles.

Will a musical about his life presage a return to civility and bipartisan commonweal? Or does this show paint him as a quaint curio of a much-mythologized time when Americans were said to have clarity around moral questions, racial caste systems and Charles Lindbergh's coddling of Nazis notwithstanding?

Hovis' other big number is "The Waiting," a showstopping solo by Dwight Xaveir Leslie as Bunche.

That Stassen's legacy peters out as he runs for the presidency with diminishing returns was a difficulty for him in real life and presents a nearly insurmountable challenge for the show's creator, as well. Hovis wrestles with how to handle a "Groundhog Day" situation in a man's life by looking at the idea of what running means.

The first act of "Boy" is brisk and delightful, with lots of sweet, polished moments from a nine-member cast that includes Jen Maren as Stassen family matriarch Elsie, and Bradley Greenwald as, among others, decrepit William Stassen, Harold's father and the mayor of St. Paul.

Musical director Amanda Weis, whose band sits in a bird's nest stage left, backs the singers with taut efficiency.

The second act, in which Stassen confronts Lindbergh and goes off to war, stalls out a bit. Hovis continues to pack in a lot of history, but when Harold sings "Drifting," it is as much a confession about his mental state as it is about the show losing some of its energy.

If Stassen was besotted, it wasn't with drink. But like many a character in a Tennessee Williams drama, he may have peaked early and spent his life trying mightily to recapture some adrenaline-drenched magic. Run on, indeed, "Boy Wonder," run on.