Immortality, like Krazy Glue, styrofoam and the two-party system, seems like a great idea — until you find your fingers stuck together under a mountain of landfill with Donald Trump running

for President. The premise of Natalie Babbitt’s 1975 YA novel was that in an earlier century, a rural New Hampshire family of Tucks drank from a spring whose waters set them in time forever:

Ma and Pa Tuck in mid-parenthood; Miles and Jesse Tuck as older and younger brother, respectively. When teenage Jesse (who by now is in fact 104) encounters pre-teen local lass Winnie

Foster in the woods one day, friendship blooms, and possibly love. Jesse and his family reluctantly share their secret. Winnie has a coming-of-age experience denied her would-be beau.

pretty fine job of that well before J.K. Rowling, but not on the global HP scale, in which children by the millions lined up for the latest installment of a story that challenged them to

become immersed in long, twisty narratives combining fantasies of good and evil with the everyday tribulations of being a kid. WATCH ON DEADLINE All of which is my circuitous way of avoiding

the mostly depressing task of writing about the latest Tuck family visit, in the form of a Broadway musical so treacly you may leave the Broadhurst Theatre wanting to kick a puppy. This is

mildly surprising because the team behind the show is not known for overdosing on corn syrup:  The book is by Claudia Shear and Tim Federle, she of the agreeably wicked _Dirty Blonde_, he of

the theater-geeky comic novel_ Better Nate Than Ever_. The score is by Chris Miller (composer) and Nathan Tysen (lyrics), whose haunting, coal-country musical _The Burnt Part Boys _was a

highlight of the Vineyard Theater’s musical theater program awhile back. And the director/choreographer is the ingenious Casey Nicholaw, whose impressive resume includes _Something Rotten!_,

_Aladdin_ and the mad dancing in _The Book of Mormon_. Nicholaw and his team do tap into the spirit of Agnes De Mille with the show’s most inspired, wholly theatrical device, a ballet in

which Winnie’s passage from girlhood through adolescence, marriage, motherhood and old age have echoes of _Carousel_ and deliver a nonverbal gut-wrench showing what Winnie will experience

and will forever be denied Jesse and his clan. Jesse is played by Andrew Keenan-Bolger, an amiable actor who really does seem eternally youthful. Winnie is played by newcomer Sarah Charles

Lewis and — I will try to whisper this softly, taking no pleasure in it — she is charmless, with all the attributes of an over-prepared, too-polished child actor. Veteran Carolee Carmello,

late of _Finding Neverland_, is sympathetic as Jesse’s Mom, as is Michael Park as his Pa. But the best bit of casting is Terrence Mann as the evil Man in the Yellow Suit. Not only because

costume designer Gregg Barnes gives him threads that prompt Winnie’s grandma (Pippa Pearthree) to call him “an evil banana” but because of the sheer malignant joy Mann brings to a comic-book

turn. Here’s Rum Tum Tugger and Inspector Javert and the Beast himself, tricked out as a carny barker-cum-Rooster Hannigan, practically drooling over the prospect of bottling the secret

waters and building an empire on eternity. Mann (with the help of additional knowing vaudeville turns from Fred Applegate and Michael Wartella) transforms a hopeless Act I into a nearly

salvageable Act II. Still, unlike the unlucky Tucks, this material aged out long ago and far away.