New York City has never looked cleaner than it does in “If/Then,” the gleaming drawing board of a musical that opened on Sunday night at the Richard Rodgers Theater, starring the shiny-voiced Idina Menzel.

Actually, to find any urban environment that is this spick and span, you’d need to look back to the 1970s, when Mary Tyler Moore conquered Minneapolis on television. The nearest contemporary equivalents are those commercials in which peppy young things go dancing in the streets to trumpet the virtues of cars and colas.

But even they — and “If/Then” does bear a passing resemblance to such ads — lack the antiseptic sheen of this production, written by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, with direction by Michael Greif, the team that gave us the four-handkerchief triumph “Next to Normal” several years ago. Every surface here appears to have been so thoroughly polished that you could not just eat off the sidewalks but see your own reflection in them, if you so chose.

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The show’s protagonist, Elizabeth (Ms. Menzel), a conflicted city planner, so chooses. Manhattan is her mirror, a place to regard herself, not only as she is but also as she could have, would have and possibly should have been. It feels right that Mark Wendland’s set includes a mirrored ceiling to reflect and multiply the actions onstage，