Last time we visited the Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre, it was to see an unexpected treat, a dinner theater show of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats.” The show was sexy, bold and furball-fluffy — the kind of thing most dinner theaters wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot scratching post. Considering we’re talking about the realm of dinner theater, where “bold” and “sexy” get as much play as Tabasco does in the food, the show was a tempered triumph.

But “Cats” was the big bang at the close of the season. This is summertime, or darn near, and the Palm is playing a different tune — something safer, tamer, something we all know: Meredith Willson’s warhorse “The Music Man,” in which a con man selling musical instruments without knowing a lick of music himself unintentionally falls in love with a sweet piano teacher/librarian in uptight River City, Iowa.

The production, directed by Brian Enzman, comes from the Palm’s sister playhouse in Florida with all the edges sanded off, ready to go down as smooth as the buffet’s carrot cake. The performances are solid though unremarkable, the songs are treated with dignity but without pizzazz and the sets are painted-on and flat. And though it may not offer anything new, the choreography (by Colleen Shreiner) is bright, snappy and tasteful.

In all, it’s a simple, no-frills charmer.

No mounting of “The Music Man” these days could possibly reinvent the wheel (unless casting a black guy as traveling instrument salesman Harold Hill, for some deliciously added miscegenation, but I digress, and this theater already did “Show Boat“). The Palm and Enzman, it seems, are happy just to put infectiously catchy ditties like “Ya Got Trouble,” “Seventy-Six Trombones” and “The Wells Fargo Wagon” back into our brains for an evening.

The Palm’s Hill is Paul Gregory Nelson, a swell-looking man sporting a TV news anchor’s hairstyle, a Colgate smile, a warm singing voice and — here’s the interesting part — an attitude less like a salesman and more like a politician. For those whose Harold Hill is indelibly Robert Preston (of the 1962 movie), Nelson’s take on Hill is a unique twist. We never quite see his shift from huckster to sincerity — the effect (or lack of) is as close to an edge as this rosy musical offers.

Truth be told, I expected much less from a show that had to follow on the heels of “Cats,” the Palm’s most boffo, big-budget show to date. This “Music Man” isn’t saying anything new, and it isn’t particularly saying anything at all, but sometimes — especially in dinner theater — a little charm is all you need.