Hilton Als: "Far from Heaven" and the Problem Musical: The New Yorker "Far from Heaven" (at Playwrights Horizons) is a problem musical, a genteel contrivance wrapped in "issues" - racism, homophobia, misogyny - that limit the show, even as they are intended to expand, and then blow, our minds. There's nothing sui generis about this latest work by the composer Scott Frankel and the lyricist Michael Korie, who also collaborated on the 2006 musical adaptation "Grey Gardens." And yet the production is noteworthy, because it may mark the end of a continuum that began in 1927, when Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's slushy "Show Boat" opened on Broadway. Kern and Hammerstein were interested in something more than giving voice to the genial impresario, Cap'n Andy, and his rambunctious troupe; the musical was a show-business extravaganza intertwined with political discussion. By then, bigotry had already begun to sell tickets. George Aiken's adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," had played on Broadway to great success a year or so after the book came out. And, in just plain wrong but historically fascinating works such as "Thirst" (1916) and "All God's Chillun Got Wings" (1924), an ardent young playwright named Eugene O'Neill had tackled - and made a hash of - race. But "Show Boat" was a musical, a genre that most people associated with blithe energy and with white America's romance with itself, not with the effects of slavery and miscegenation. Twenty-two years after the song "Ol" Man River" entered American culture and became something of a racist joke - all those shanty-Negro"d"sounds replacing "th"s - Hammerstein, who had a complicated relationship with his German-Jewish lineage, addressed prejudice again, in "South Pacific." In that far more mature work, he wrote acutely about how bigotry is handed down: "You've got to be taught to be afraid / Of people whose eyes are oddly made / And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade / You've got to be carefully taught." "Far from Heaven" is based on the 2002 movie of the same title, written and directed by Todd Haynes, and the book, by Richard Greenberg, is deeply faithful to the original tale. Cathy Whitaker (Kelli O'Hara) is a red-haired, thirtyish housewife who lives in a white man's Valhalla: Hartford, Connecticut, in 1957. Her husband, Frank (Steven Pasquale), works for a generic advertising firm. The Whitakers have two small children - a boy and a girl - who are alternately bratty and adorable, in the way of children who grow up in the suburbs, or in musicals. In the opening scene, of happy neighbors bustling about amid falling autumn leaves, the unparalleled O'Hara, who claims us not by grandstanding but by encouraging us to join her in the world she's imagining, articulates her character's contentment: "Pretty as a postcard, / The leaves in fall. / Filling up the driveways, / The sidewalks. / I just adore the feeling of it all." In memory, I confused the melody of this song, "Autumn in Connecticut," with Cole Porter's "I Happen to Like New York"; one of the show's strongest numbers, "Office Talk," recalls Noël Coward's patter-filled songs.. . .