Alexis
Soloski

September 29, 2015

Will no one pity the postman? Two centuries of novels and plays would have run aground without these couriers delivering menace, promise and revelation with the morning letters. That mailbag is unusually full in “Daddy Long Legs,” a sweet, beautifully sung and only occasionally unsettling musical adaptation of Jean Webster’s 1912 novel, predicated on the lengthy correspondence between a pert orphan and the anonymous benefactor who sends her to college. On the stage of the Davenport Theater, itself not much bigger than a postcard, the adorable Megan McGinnis and the poised Paul Alexander Nolan relate the tale while three musicians huddle above them in an orchestra loft. The story begins as Jerusha Abbott, the eldest orphan at her New England asylum, receives the news that a trustee who calls himself John Smith has agreed to fund her college education. This John Smith demands that she send him a letter once a month, letters that he will never answer. Jerusha can’t abide his alias. “Why couldn’t you have picked out a name with a little personality?” she protests. Because she has had one small glimpse of him and knows him to be tall — and further imagines him old and gray — she calls him Daddy Long Legs.