Gregory Lee Rodriguez and Kyla Stone, in the Muny's MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS. Photo by Phillip Hamer. Courtesy of the Muny
– By Cate Marquis –
“Meet Me In St. Louis” is a Muny favorite – no surprise there – and has played the venerable theater many times. This production has the same sweet nostalgia local audiences love, and presented with spectacular staging, the best, the fanciest of this season. In fact, the staging is such a wow, it is worth going to this show even if you didn’t care for this particular show.
Of course, most Muny regulars do, and look forward to this familiar favorite particularly. The Broadway musical is based on the 1944 movie starring Judy Garland, and features all the beloved songs in the movie. Set in St. Louis in 1903, in the run-up to the 1904 World’s Fair, it is the story of one large St. Louis family, the Smith family. The plot follows them from late spring and summer up to Christmas, and then the opening of the 1904 St. Louis Worlds Fair.
Prosperous attorney Alonzo Smith (Colin Donnell) and wife Anna Smith (Patti Murin) are parents of son Lon (Ilan Eskenazi) and daughters (from oldest to youngest) Rose (Kyla Stone), Esther (Katerina McCrimmon), Agnes (Joylin Bass), and little Tootie (Lilah Levinson). Grandpa Prophater (Stan Brown) and the family’s Irish cook Katie Connelly (Beth Leavel) fill out the household. The upcoming 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair is designed to be the biggest one yet, and it is taking place a time when St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the country. St. Louis is growing fast, and is a progressive, economically-booming and sophisticated city to which people were flocking, and not just for the fair. Why would you want to leave when everyone is coming to St. Louis?
The Broadway musical follows the movie that inspired it in some ways but not others, There are more songs, more story about some characters and less focus on Esther (the Judy Garland character). While the movie was more about romance and affectionate vignettes of family life, the stage musical is more about the family as a whole and particularly about the pending move to New York, something that in the movie does not enter the story until near the end. Here it dominates things.
As the story opens, it is early summer or late spring, and like in the movie, Esther has a crush on the new boy next door John Truitt (Andrew Poston), even though they haven’t yet met. Meanwhile Rose has a boyfriend named Warren Sheffield (Gregory Lee Rodriguez), who is from New York. Son Lon is preparing to go to Princeton in the fall, while mischievous young Agnes and Tootie make, and get into, lots of trouble. There is another character, one that doesn’t show up in the movie until late, who is present from the beginning in this musical.
The acting is good, and the singing voices even better. We still get all the favorite songs from the movie including several rounds of “Meet Me In St. Louis,” but also “The Boy Next Door” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” The scene with the trolley and “the Trolley Song” is the show stopper of the evening, with delightful staging. There are new songs too, like “That’s Enough of That,” sung by Irish immigrant cook Katie, scolding the family for being traditional and for being too fond of St. Louis. One of the strangest newer songs is “Under the Anheuser Bush,” performed on a stage filled with references to the one-time-local beer brand.
While the movie is sweetly fond of St. Louis and depicts it in a warm, positive way, the play is less sweet towards St. Louis. A minor character in the movie, Lucille Ballard (Emma Crow), a young New Yorker, who only appears in the scene at the Christmas ball in the movie, but she is now a major one in the stage musical, a character who is present from the beginning. Ballard’s function seems to be to highlight what rubes the St. Louis family is (although they weren’t in the movie) and remind us how much better Old New York is. There is so much of this St. Louis bashing and praise of New York, that I was almost a bit surprised at the end that the family didn’t move to NYC.
Not that the audience seemed to notice, dazzled as they were by the spectacular staging. And spectacular is the word for it.
The musical opens with a stage-spanning screen, on which is projected a lovely old fashioned postcard of 1903 St. Louis, or perhaps the curtain for a vaudeville show – you know, the kind with curlicues, little scenes in oval frames and all sepia-toned and pastel nostalgic beauty. This picture perfect screen then parts to reveal more screens with projected images of stately Victorian St. Louis mansions, and with the set of the Smith family’s fine Victorian home at the center. The set is on the Muny’s big turntable, and rotates to display the front porch, the living room – um, parlor – of their home, the dining room and kitchen. All this vintage beauty is bathed in a flattering light, and melts the heart. The audience gasped when it was first revealed.
The period costumes are gorgeous too. The Muny goes all out on this one. As the characters walk down the street, a line of fine turn-of-the-last-century St. Louis mansions roll by, giving the feeling of a stroll in Lafayette Park or another restored historic neighborhood in our city. Every scene has little grace notes. One scene set in Forest Park has flats painted like trees, but the real trees of the park are seen in the background, carefully lit.
The biggest wow scene might be “The Trolley Song” scene, as the trolley filled with passengers rolls across the stage or turns to head deep upstage, while we see photos and street scenes of old St. Louis rolling by on the screens. The effect is entrancing and wholly charming.
The musical ends with the biggest, fanciest sets and projections of the show, as the family finally visits the newly opened 1904 Worlds Fair. There are photos of the fair itself and its various sights, and the tour all ends with a real bang – literally, as fireworks go off over the stage. It couldn’t be more perfect.
All this nostalgic beauty makes up for some not so nice aspects of the stage musical’s story, and all is forgotten by the time we get to that Worlds Fair scene and the cast sings another round of “Meet Me In St. Louis,” with the audience singing along
For gorgeous, eye-popping, and impressively delightful staging, “Meet Me In St. Louis” is the Muny at its best. “Meet Me In St. Louis” is on the Muny stage in Forest Park through Aug. 13, 2026.
© Cate Marquis
