I will begin with an admission: The Music Man is one of my favorite musicals and, therefore, I do not have professional detachment when I write about it. This may be due to the fact that I played the role of Harold Hill while a student at Great Valley High School and during that show I was totally and for all time bitten by the theater bug. So, 40 years and two theater degrees later, having spent my life making theater, I am still a lover of this show.
Allow me to suggest some of the reasons that I enjoy this show, beyond my personal experience with it. But first some background information: it opened in 1957 and swept the 1958 Tony awards beating out West Side Story for best musical. It also captured honors for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress in a Musical. Having two truly great musicals to choose from in the same year is a testament to why this period was called the Golden Age of Musicals.
This show is beloved in the musical theater cannon partly because its story and small-town values, set in the Midwest town of River City Iowa, are almost irresistible nostalgia-candy for our overstimulated, digitized, complex modern sensibilities. It is not surprising that Walt Disney chose this same time/place combination to serve as the setting for the Main Street USA entrance to the Magic Kingdom at Disneyland and Disney World.
But beyond the nostalgia, this musical has some wonderfully original aspects that justify its place in the history of the American Musical. Let's begin with the opening number: "Rock Island". This unusual, spoken word, introduction to the place, time and characters of the story is truly unique in the annals of musical theatre. The famous spoken number, "Ya Got Trouble", is an unusual tour-de-force acting piece for the performer playing Harold Hill (who, by the way, has more lines to speak than the character Hamlet in the play of the same name). The show offers a delightful variety of musical experiences. The more traditional chorus numbers ("Wells Fargo Wagon" and "Seventy-Six Trombones") alternating with memorable, classic ballads ("My White Knight" and "Till There Was You") are punctuated by idiosyncratic numbers performed by the Pick-a-little ladies and the barbershop quartet.
If you have experienced this show before, I invite you to rediscover these inventive and original aspects that have kept the show a favorite for years. And if you are seeing it for the first time (as I recently discovered was true for two of our staff members) I can only say: you are in for a treat.
Enjoy the show,
Mark Abram-Copenhaver
Artistic Director
