The Music Man : Show Development and Promotion

[jo]

I have also noticed a very slight trend from social media pages/theatre boards -

some of those whose new tickets are re-dated to the deep winter months are either moving their dates to spring/summer or asking for refunds ( to repurchase later on). Right now, tickets are on sale only up to July. Will Hugh's commitment go beyond that - given that the show has now been delayed by over a year from his original commitment date?

Unlike in the first postponement, they did not announce the time when NEW TICKETS not covered by the postponed dates can be purchased. My recollection from that time was around a month after the exchange period elapsed?


Jo

[jo]

Some insights from theatregoers on BWW --

Start from Post # 10, when the new schedule has been sent to ticketholders --


www.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.php?thread=1123712

[jo]

Reposting this here --

it was posted in the first Music Man thread) ... as we learn more on the show development --

Sept 15, 2019 18:30:07 GMT -5 jo said:

Found this interesting set of ( maybe not) trivia about the musical The Music Man.

Who knows -- they might even re-introduce some of the original ideas for the new Broadway revival?

This website is actually dedicated to another and related musical ( The Spirit of River City, but it includes a
TRIVIA FROM THE MUSIC MAN section is the most interesting.


www.spiritofrivercity.com/musicmantrivia.html

Did you know....?


The original name of The Music Man was The Silver Triangle. Producers Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin told Willson he needed a better title. Then they were the ones that came up with The Music Man.

Frank Loesser, the creator of Guys and Dolls, beginning in 1949, encouraged Meredith to write a musical about his childhood home, Mason City. He continued to mentor Meredith, co-producing The Music Man, and publishing the songs from the show under the company, Frank Music. Frank Music is now owned by Paul McCartney.



The character Tommy Djilas’ last name came from a New York City Bulgarian delicatessen worker Willson knew.
The character Marcellus Washburn—Harold Hill’s sidekick—was the name of the manager of the Mason City B.F. Goodrich tire store in 1918.

Eulalie Shinn’s (the wife of Mayor Shin) first name came from a high school classmate of Willson’s named Eulalie Johnson.
Rosalie Willson put Meredith Willson through the dreaded five-finger exercises on the piano. This was recreated in The Music Man with Marian Paroo teaching her student Amaryllis.



As a kid in the winter, Willson and his friends would grab onto the runners of the Wells Fargo Wagon to hitch rides.
At first, in The Music Man’s book, there was a spastic boy in a wheelchair, the son of a janitor, whose daily challenges were part of the story. Finally, under pressure from producers Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin, it was Martin who said the kid would steal every scene he was in, and later, the director, Morton da Costa, dropped this boy, substituting Winthrop Paroo, who had a lisp. Winthrop was based on a kid Meredith knew from his childhood in Mason City, named Charlie Haverdegraine, who had a lisp and played harmonica very well. Meredith thought his lisp helped him play the harmonica so well, so he asked Charlie to teach him how to lisp.

The barbershop quartet in The Music Man was based on a barbershop quartet in Mason City that Meredith knew, called "The Rusty Hinges". Meredith himself was in a barbershop quartet group.



Actors that were considered for the lead in the original The Music Man (before Robert Preston landed the role) included Van Heflin, Jackie Gleason, Danny Kaye, Lloyd Bridges, Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, Ray Bolger, Bert Parks, Art Carney, Jason Robards, Milton Berle, Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, James Cagney, James Whitemore, Any Griffith and Phil Harris.

There’re a couple of scenes in "The Music Man" where Harold Hill keeps Tommy Djilas busy inventing a way for a piccolo player to be able to read music while playing. The way this played out in the show is identical to the real-life experience Meredith had himself as a young man with a Mr. Bushgens, who owned a harness shop in Mason City. In 1915 he fiddled with ways to make music readable to a piccolo player. One was an elaborate breastplate affair that tied in the back with several laces. Swooping out from the breastplate was a curved arm and soldered onto this a lyre to hold the music. Willson strapped it on and tried it at a rehearsal but as he marched it bobbed and the music came right out of the lyre. Then he tried an upright lyre on a wide leather buckle around the upper left biceps. But this cut off Meredith’s circulation and his left arm and fingers went numb.



Along the way, Willson wrote 40 songs for The Music Man. 22 of them were cut. They include "You Don’t Have to Kiss Me Goodnight" (sung by Tommy to Zaneeta), a partner song for "My White Knight" harmonizing with "A Sadder but Wiser Girl". "Iowuh" that had a Native American beat. "Blessings" was written during the out-of-town run in Philadelphia, but was dropped. Also dropped were "I’ve Already Started to Try to Figure Out a Way to Work To Try to Get to You", "I Found a Horseshoe", "My Baby", "Tomorrow", "Chicago", and a salesman’s version of "Ya Got Trouble".

The Willson originally wrote the tune for "Till There was You" in 1950, when it was entitled "Till I Met You".
Rosalie’s mother’s name was Lida, as was Rosalie’s favorite sister, Lida, who lived in Topeka. The song "Lida Rose" was specifically inspired by his mother and aunt.

Willson’s grandfather Alonzo established the first public library in Mason City. And his mother used to take him to the library on Saturday nights. Hence Marian the librarian.



The song that the band is exhorted to play by Harold Hill in The Music Man is Minuet in G. This song was played by Meredith’s high school band. It was the only piece they could play all the way through without stopping.



In Meredith’s book "And There I Stood with My Piccolo", he spoke of "The Spirit of ’76". Perhaps this was the origin of the number of trombones in the famous song. The painting of "The Spirit of ‘76" includes a fife player. A fife is essentially a piccolo which was Meredith’s main instrument. In the early 1950’s, Meredith did an orchestration of Frank Loesser’s "Ballad of Rodger Young"—with 76 musicians in the orchestra.



Mason City’s first high school band began in 1912, the year in which The Music Man takes place. Meredith played piccolo in this band. The band had 2 clarinets, 2 cornets, 1 euphonium, 1 tuba, 1 snare drum, 1 bass drum 1trombone and 1 alto sax.
The name Marian came from Marion McGuire, a senior in Mason City High School in 1912, and a cellist in its orchestra.
The name "Harold" for Harold Hill came from Meredith’s childhood friend Harold Keidle, with whom he played in a trio called "The Jones Brothers". The trio included Meredith’s brother Cedric, who also later played in Sousa’s band.

The Meredith Willson Residence Hall—an entire floor—opened at the Juilliard School, in October of 1990. Willson attended the school under its previous name of Damrosch School of Music.

In 1955, Meredith Willson and Walt Disney founded The Big Brothers of Greater Los Angeles (now expanded to include Big Sisters and still going strong.)


The cast recording of "The Music Man" won the first Grammy Award ever issued, in 1959.


In 1950, Meredith Willson wrote a fight song for the University of Iowa, which is still played to this day. In 1953, he wrote a fight song for Iowa State University that is still also still played. .

In 1999, a commemorative stamp with Meredith’s picture on it was issued.

[jo]

From a BWW post --

Lisalemann
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THE MUSIC MAN Will Now Start Previews 12/20/21#44
Posted: 10/26/20 at 5:11pm

Scarlet Leigh said: "Has there been any indication if they will be a window for trying to move dates if our new date given to us does not work well? The date I got it not BAD but I would like something a little later in the spring or early summer then what I was given."



I just got an email back from Telecharge. They said we will have "about 30 days" to either exchange the tickets or refund them.

Also - what was the original reported length of Hugh Jackman's contract? I thought it was a year. Telecharge also claimed that this show is a "limited engagement" and will only run through the end of July 2022 - which seems odd. We originally had tickets for the first weekend of December - got reassigned to July 4th weekend (no thank you!) - so we switched them to mid November - now we got reassigned again - to freaking July and I wanted to move them to fall again - but there are no dates showing up. I guess I will try to move them to May or June - I do not want to go NYC in the middle of July - I have enough unpleasant heat where I live now. Has anyone else heard that the show will not only run through July 2022?

While Hugh had originally committed to a year's run when the show  was first announced ( March 2019) and was originally to start previews on September 9, 2020 -- it could be that his commitment for the first postponement ( when previews were supposed to start on April 7, 2021) was still for a year. But given the second postponement, it may no be longer practical to think he will be with the show till December 2022. He has a film career to worry about. Unless he can do a movie project from now to the beginning of rehearsals (October 2021)?

Or it could be that the BWW member may have misunderstood what Telecharge has said -- unless it was on the email she got. Maybe Telecharge was simply saying that the end of the current booking period runs only until July 2022.


Jo

[jo]

On the Ticketing Page of Telecharge --

this is what is indicated :

First Preview Date/// Opening Date/// On Sale Through
December 20, 2021/// February 10, 2022/// July 31, 2022

No such thing as a declaration that July 31 is the last day of the show (with Hugh Jackman), just that they are selling tickets at the moment only up to July 31, 2022. It was normal in the past to have six-month sales periods, even for major hits.

Jo

[jo]

I wasn't sure if this had not been photo-shopped because the arms looked like Hugh's.

Hugh did put it up in his Instagram stories with his choice of message (LOVE), so he did acknowledge the photoshop

[jo]

From another BWW member --

Danasi
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THE MUSIC MAN Will Now Start Previews 12/20/21#45
Posted: 10/28/20 at 11:22am

Lisalemann said:
>
>
.

I just got an email back from Telecharge. They said we will have "about 30 days" to either exchange the tickets or refund them. Also - what was the original reported length of Hugh Jackman's contract? I thought it was a year. Telecharge also claimed that this show is a "limited engagement" and will only run through the end of July 2022 - which seems odd. We originally had tickets for the first weekend of December - got reassigned to July 4th weekend (no thank you!) - so we switched them to mid November - now we got reassigned again - to freaking July and I wanted to move them to fall again - but there are no dates showing up. I guess I will try to move them to May or June - I do not want to go NYC in the middle of July - I have enough unpleasant heat where I live now. Has anyone else heard that the show will not only run through July 2022?"




I think it's probably too early at this point to know how long the show will run. Hugh Jackman seems to really want to do it, which I'm sure is one of the many reasons for the rescheduling versus just refunding everyone. I also thought they originally said his contract was for a year. But 2022 is such a long ways out that he might not even know what his schedule will be.

I wouldn't be surprised if they don't release tickets for any dates after July 2022 until they know for sure they can open. Once they know that, and his schedule, they'll probably determine if it's truly a limited engagement or if the show will continue once he and Sutton Foster have left the cast whenever their final show is (like Hello Dolly post Bette Midler).

I know what you mean about wanting fall tickets. When tickets originally went on sale one of the shows I bought tickets for was the week of Thanksgiving, since family usually comes to visit. That got postponed the first time to a random weekday in June 2021. We decided to get a refund, and were planning buy tickets for Thanksgiving 2021 if/when they went on sale. Still hoping it'll be showing in Nov 2022 so they can see it

Sounds like a fair analysis.

But we do not know if Hugh is looking at film projects now which he can film either before TMM starts rehearsals or after July 2022...or can wait till he completes a whole year with the show in December 2022.

There was mention in an Australian publication ( unfortunately, seems to be always unreliable) that he was discussing a possible action film project with Tom Cruise -- that would be promising, if true

Jo

[jo]

The latest outlook from Dr. Fauci --

As reported by CNN :

LIVE UPDATES
The latest on the coronavirus pandemic
By Nectar Gan, Adam Renton and Luke McGee, CNN

Updated 3:02 p.m. ET, October 29, 2020

The US is reporting a record high seven-day average of more than 74,000 new Covid-19 cases per day.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said the country may not return to normalcy until 2022.


Latest
17 hr 33 min ago

US may not be back to normal until 2022, Fauci says

From CNN's Madeline Holcombe, Holly Yan and Amir Vera

As Covid-19 cases continue to jump during the fall surge, Dr. Anthony Fauci says there's little chance of normalcy on the horizon.

The US will have a vaccine in the next few months, but there's a chance a "substantial proportion of the people" won't be vaccinated until the second or third quarter of 2021, Fauci said.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases reiterated caution on the nation's outlook.

"I think it will be easily by the end of 2021, and perhaps even into the next year, before we start having some semblances of normality," Fauci said during a University of Melbourne panel discussion Tuesday.

[jo]

Tragedy at the Winter Garden Theatre -- as a stage hand had a fatal accident in the theatre.

nypost.com/2020/11/12/stagehand-falls-to-his-death-inside-broadway-theater/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR2yVEdfEk5INM5ockrkFP2uYiqdmNnoPsScXiAebmekWVxUIvPwfjo4XBw





This is the 3rd negative news referring to the show. The first one was the negative outburst from Beetlejuice fans when their show announced its imminent closing, indirectly blaming it to the incoming show. The second and most important negative development was the onset of the pandemic which put the whole world under suspension ( resulting in 2 postponements of the revival). And now this tragic accident as the theatre prepares for The Music Man.

They say negative events/things come in three's! Hopefully, these developments/events are it...and soon, only good news about the show will come out. After all, it is the bravest show out there - being the first to restart the much-delayed Broadway season! Break a leg - Hugh and company!


Jo

[jo]

The revival seemed to have anticipated the breakout of the vaccine(s) that can help society regain their more normal lives. December 2021 is now looking like a safe bet to open the show for previews. As someone said on BWW, it seems that it will be The Music Man that will usher in the new Broadway! (" I would say that The Music Man is looking a lot more like the kick start of the new normal for Broadway.")

A feel-good musical!

[jo]

Found this link to the Beatles Music History blog -- tracing how " 'TIL THERE WAS YOU" helped push their career to its exceptional heights.

www.beatlesebooks.com/till-there-was-you

Interesting read --

*If you like Beatles music
*If you like 'Til There Was You
*If you like to read about Meredith Willson's background ( did not know he was a former member of the Philip Sousa band as well as the NY Philharmonic).


Jo

[jo]

[jo]

The NYTimes recommendation came from Jesse Green.

It is available at Amazon, if you're interested.

[jo]

Is this the start of the publicity blitz? Or is Broadway so dark that any story that can start relighting the spark will be welcome news, with top publicity pusher Michael Riedel giving us the reassurances? A year from now, the show will open for previews!


www.insidehook.com/article/arts-entertainment/hugh-jackman-broadway-savior-music-man?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ihsocial

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 18, 2020 8:16 AM
Can Hugh Jackman Be the Savior Broadway Needs Him to Be?

His turn in "The Music Man" was a guaranteed smash. Now it’s a post-pandemic lifeline.


Hugh Jackman The Music Man Broadway



Hugh Jackman has been a champion of the theater. In "The Music Man," he's now the savior.

Alexi Rosenfeld / Pacific Press via Getty Images


BY ALEX LAUER @alexlauer

On September 17, all 41 of the theaters that make up Broadway were dark, just as they had been for the past six months during the pandemic. That’s roughly $900 million in ticket sales down the drain, not to mention the thousands of jobs, with no end to the bleeding in sight. The Broadway League had hoped to open theaters at the start of 2021, but that was never realistic; they’ve since extended the closure until at least May 30, and most experts don’t see the Theater District coming alive until at least the fall.

That Thursday in September was also the day that The Music Man, a Broadway revival of the classic musical, hung its gleaming new marquee over the Winter Garden Theatre. That includes a gargantuan billboard that looms over the block, stretching between Ellen’s Stardust Diner and a multi-story Applebee’s. Plastered right at the top, in bold blue letters above even the name of the show, is the name of its leading man: Hugh Jackman.

The show was originally scheduled to begin performances that month, so it may have been part of the original plan. On the other hand, the installation in the middle of a pandemic may have been an act of theatrical defiance, a manifestation of the industry’s rallying cry, “The show must go on!” But it seems to me that the signage, hoisted over desolate sidewalks in the heart of Manhattan, is more accurately a Bat Signal, calling the newly anointed savior of Broadway to save the day. (Or should we say Wolverine Signal?)

“Who better than Hugh Jackman to tell the world that we’re back in business?”

That’s Michael Riedel, whose Broadway column at the New York Post has enraptured and enraged theater lovers for decades. I like to think of him as a Sherlock Holmes or Artful Dodger of the Great White Way, someone who has eyes and ears everywhere (or, as they call them in his line of business, unnamed sources), so I dialed him up to get a sense of how bad the situation is on Broadway, and why the Australian movie star is the one who can lead them back.

http://instagram.com/p/CGIsd0djh6N

First, a little groundwork for those who know Jackman mainly as a mutton-chopped superhero. His turn as Harold Hill in The Music Man (played by Robert Preston in the classic 1962 movie), alongside Broadway icon Sutton Foster, has been so highly anticipated that tickets went on sale in September 2019, a full year before previews were set to begin, and before the producers had even booked a theater. According to Riedel, the advance ticket sales were in ballpark of tens of millions of dollars.

“He is the biggest musical theater star on the planet right now, I would have to say,” Riedel acknowledges in no uncertain terms.

That may come as a surprise to some who think of him only as an A-list movie star whose film grosses can be measured in the hundreds of millions. But his theater chops go back to an iconic West End debut (London’s version of Broadway) in Oklahoma! in 1998 and miraculously winning a Tony Award for his Broadway debut in 2003’s The Boy from Oz even though the show itself was panned. These days, he’s the theatrical ambassador to Hollywood, keeping the live-action movie musical alive through classics like Les Misérables (for which he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination) and surprise new hits like The Greatest Showman.

“You just knew it was going to be one of those great Broadway opening nights,” Riedel says, describing the buzz around the show before the pandemic. “It would just catch the imagination of not only New York City, but also the country and beyond, because people want to see Hugh Jackman doing what he does best.”

But as the pandemic has held Broadway in its grip, with not even the minor summer respite that other industries received, opening nights like those are getting harder to remember. Some shows have been rescheduled, others, including Disney juggernaut Frozen, have announced they won’t be returning at all, and more are likely to follow. The cash cows and mainstays, like Hamilton and The Phantom of the Opera, have said they’re read to open whenever they’re given the green light, but Riedel doesn’t suspect those musicals will be the ones to revive Broadway.

“The first people to start going back to the theater are going to be New Yorkers,” he says, citing the forecasted slow return of tourism. “Are New Yorkers going to rush to see The Lion King? I think most New Yorkers have seen it. Are they going to rush to see The Book of Mormon? I think they’ve seen it. I actually think shows like Hugh Jackman in The Music Man or Patti LuPone in Company would be more enticing for New Yorkers, because that’s something new and different.”

http://instagram.com/p/CGQPET6Fg1T

Riedel intimately knows the storms Broadway has weathered, not just in his time reporting for the Post, but throughout history, having written about them in his critically acclaimed books Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway and the recent follow-up Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway, which ends by looking at the impact of September 11th.

“I thought a good subtitle for the book is ‘The Triumph of Broadway,’ because Broadway came back in a big way after what we thought was the existential crisis — 9/11,” he says. “Now, who knew we were going to face its real existential crisis? Being closed down for nine months, and probably not coming back until well into 2021.” Well, hopefully in 2021. The Music Man has essentially bet on another delay in Broadway’s reopening by slating its first preview for December 20, 2021 and opening night for February 10, 2022.

Even if it gets pushed back again, the dream team assembled for the show certainly won’t give up. Producer Scott Rudin, director Jerry Zaks and choreographer Warren Carlyle, among others in the Music Man ensemble, all worked on a Hello, Dolly! revival in 2017 that starred Bette Midler, and they’re not stopping until they replicate that commercial and critical success on an even larger scale.

However, for some in the Broadway arena, this sort of no-expense-spared star vehicle had previously become a drag. Oh, another movie star coming to do a vanity project in a show that’s been done a million times? But in Hugh Jackman, we have that rare Hollywood leading man who takes his thespian duties seriously; as Riedel reported back in 2017, Jackman has long been searching for the perfect show to make his Broadway return, and after testing out new musicals and serious plays, he chose The Music Man — a show that marked his introduction to musical theater all the way back in high school, as he once told Jay Leno.



“I do know that, as they kept postponing and changing dates, he was essentially saying, ‘Look, when it can open, I will be there. I will rearrange whatever stuff I’ve got going — movies, TV shows.’” Riedel says. “He is a busy man, but he wants to be there when Broadway reopens.”

Besides the billboard over the Winter Garden, there have been other signs that Jackman is itching to get onstage. Co-star Sutton Foster, who will play Marian Paroo, told The New York Times in September that the two were set to run a two-week choreography rehearsal (Jackman is a New Yorker now, after all, so he’s around the city). And then in October, she posted a picture of them, masked up in a rehearsal room, on Instagram.

“If there’s anyone who can live up to the expectations, it’s Hugh Jackman,” promises Riedel. “His sense of the importance of Broadway to New York City will definitely be on his mind and in his heart when he opens the show. But you will never see that sense of purpose, because he wears it so lightly. I will be there for the first preview of the show, and I’ll be there for the opening night.”

Whether that happens a year from now, or well into 2022, you can bet Hugh Jackman will be there with a smile on his face and Broadway on his back. And whether or not the audiences previously considered themselves theater fans, Music Man fans or even a Hugh Jackman fans, they’ll no doubt find themselves standing on their feet.

[jo]

All lit up at night!

[jo]

Broadway Beat

BREAKING: "Mean Girls" Closes to Make Room for Second, Simultaneous Hugh Jackman "Music Man"
Updated: 4 hours ago

by Zach Raffio. @zachraffio.


NEW YORK, NY - The Tony-nominated Broadway musical Mean Girls announced tonight that it would not be reopening once Broadway returns following the COVID-19 pandemic, as the show will be shuttered to make room for a second, simultaneous production of Hugh Jackman in The Music Man in addition to the one set to run at the Winter Garden Theatre, sources have confirmed.


"He's just... won't stop. He's never going to stop," noted August Wilson theatre usher Katy DeLarn, nervously watching Hugh take down the show's marquee himself. "We've opened Pandora's Box. He won't stop until every show is The Music Man. I don't know how he'll do it. Will every show start at different times? Will the ensembles be the same? What happens on two-show days? I asked him all of these questions and it only seemed to make his smile grow wider. WHAT DOES HE HAVE PLANNED?"


More to come as this story develops.

LOLOL!


Jo

[jo]

Seriously --

[jo]

http://instagram.com/p/CJ_DGF0DHu8

[jo]

www.talkinbroadway.com/allthatchat_new/d.php?id=2503541

Michael Riedel on Broadway re-opening

Posted by: HelenHaze 11:06 am EST 01/13/21

Riedel was interviewed by Foster Hirsch last night for a Lambs Club event and said he thinks when Broadway re-opens it should be a HUGE event with a parade down Broadway led by Hugh Jackman and all the casts from all the shows doing "76 Trombones" ending in a Times Square performance that should be nationally televised. A real event. He also said he didn't think Broadway could come back with the same prices. He says people just don't have the money any more and the prices will come down for a while until everything is back to normal. I have to agree with him on both points.

BTW, he was plugging his new book which is terrific.

Could be workable -- if it is done via the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (when The Music Man will only be a few weeks from first previews) --

maybe by that time, herd immunity against the virus has been or close to being achieved?


Jo

[jo]

He's keeping up with the daily tap practice...

on the way to the forthcoming revival of The Music Man

[jo]

It is such a long and (im)patient wait for THE MUSIC MAN to start previews!

In the meantime, will we get a flavor of what is to come from the show...

from this most impressive scene in HELLO, DOLLY! - a revival brought by the same producer (Rudin) choreographer (Carlyle), costume designer ( Loquasto), lighting designer... who will be joined for The Music Man by EGOT-orchestrator Tunick and OUR music director Patrick Vacariello.

(i didn't have a chance to see this revival- my memories are of 2 shows I had seen on Broadway and the film version with Barbra) -- but this number, PUT ON YOUR SUNDAY CLOTHES is arguably one of the most spectacular from the show/movie.






The Music Man has the same period look and is also a musical comedy! But in a sense, the characters are more dramatic and interesting ( Who is Harold Hill and why did he become a huckster? What secret does Marian Paroo hold? Why is the Town Mayor and his wife alienated from the people? What were Marcellus & Harold Hill up to in the past? Interesting side characters, too!)


Jo

[jo]

Jan 31, 2021 20:27:16 GMT -5 jo said:

I will repost the above and this detailed discussion on Meredith Willson's contribution to musical theatre to the thread on SHOW DEVELOPMENT ... together with the above review. Both articles give deep insights on how a new revival need to find a way to emphasize the true assets of such an artistic creation beyond the musical score and spectacular production numbers --

www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/terry-teachout/the-man-behind-the-music-man/

APRIL 2012 ART

The Man Behind The Music Man
Who Was Meredith Willson?
by Terry Teachout


One of a bare handful of hit Broadway musicals to have been written in its entirety by a single person, The Music Man opened to rave reviews in 1957, beat out West Side Story at the Tony Awards, and ran for 1,375 performances. Then it was turned into one of the most popular Hollywood musicals ever filmed. The story of a smooth-talking con man who breezes into a hick town to swindle its residents and ends up losing his heart to the local librarian was successfully revived on Broadway in 2000, filmed a second time for TV in 2003, and continues to be performed regularly by regional and amateur theater companies throughout America.

Why, then, is Meredith Willson—the author of its libretto and music and lyrics—so completely forgotten? Because nothing he did before or after The Music Man was of lasting interest. Willson (surely one of the last males in America to carry the first name of Meredith) was 55 years old when The Music Man premiered, and the two musicals that followed it, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1960) and Here’s Love (1962), were successful in their day but have since failed to hold the stage. (The peculiarly unmusical movie version of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, with Debbie Reynolds as a brassy survivor of the Titanic, was a big hit, but it dispensed with most of the score, featuring only six of Willson’s songs.) Willson also wrote the music for one film of note, William Wyler’s 1941 adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, but his score was undistinguished. Only one of his non-theatrical songs, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” continues to be sung, and except for the ubiquitous “Seventy-Six Trombones,” none of the numbers from The Music Man quite established itself as a standard (although “Till There Was You” came close).

Willson was, in other words, a one-hit wonder, and the immense and enduring popularity of his hit, coupled with the fact that he was by all accounts exceedingly likable and seems to have led a blameless private life, has had the unexpected effect of blotting out any lasting memories of the man who wrote it.

Fortunately, he also published a pair of anecdotal memoirs, And There I Stood with My Piccolo (1948) and “But He Doesn’t Know the Territory” (1959), in which he tells the story of his life up through the opening night of The Music Man. These charmingly breezy books, which went out of print long ago, were republished without fanfare by University of Minnesota Press in 2009 and are now available in paperback. They tell the story of a singularly eventful professional life—making clear in the process that The Music Man, while not literally autobiographical, was nonetheless deeply rooted in the details of Willson’s own childhood and youth.

Born in 1902, Willson came to New York at the age of 17 to study with the legendary French flutist Georges Barrère. He then spent three years with John Philip Sousa’s band and in 1924 joined the New York Philharmonic, subsequently playing under such conductors as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Willem Mengelberg, and Arturo Toscanini.

What is all the more surprising about these youthful achievements is that Willson came from the most inartistic and unselfconsciously provincial of backgrounds: an Iowa town called Mason City. To read the opening chapter of And There I Stood with My Piccolo, published nine years before The Music Man opened on Broadway, is to realize at once that the “River City” of The Music Man, with its “Iowa-stubborn” citizens who blanch at the thought that their children might inadvertently stumble across the novels of Balzac in the public library, is a barely fictionalized portrait of Mason City.

That it should also be a fundamentally affectionate portrait says much about Willson himself, who would forever after think of his hometown as the Edenic land of lost material that he portrays with only the gentlest glints of irony in The Music Man: “How well I remember my first ice cream cone. ‘The man down at the corner by the bank sells ice cream in a little glass!’ And my first street carnival was all Ferris wheel and butterfly scarf dancers making swirls in colored lights.”

Hearing the Mason City Municipal Band inspired young Meredith to take up the flute—he claimed to have owned the first flute ever seen there, which his parents ordered for him from a mail-order house in Chicago—and in 1921, after just two years of study with Barrère, he became the principal flutist in Sousa’s band, going directly from there to the New York Philharmonic.

For most aspiring musicians, landing a job with the Philharmonic at the age of 22 would be the dream of a lifetime, and Willson tells of his triumph with self-deprecating delight in And There I Stood with My Piccolo. His portrayal of life with the famously temperamental Toscanini is especially vivid:

Like the troops on the transport ship in that famous cartoon who all marched overboard because their commanding officer was a stutterer and couldn’t manage to say “Halt!” any of us in Toscanini’s orchestra would have unquestioningly done the same, though as much from reasons of being afraid of him as of loving him.

But Willson, who had also played in dance bands and pit orchestras in Iowa and New York, aspired to be a composer. In 1929 he left the orchestra and moved to the West Coast to work in radio, quickly becoming the musical director of a San Francisco station. Within a few years he was living in Hollywood and conducting for such popular programs as Maxwell House Coffee Time, on which, in addition to leading the orchestra, he doubled as the comic stooge to George Burns and Gracie Allen.

After brief and modestly successful attempts to establish himself as a film composer and popular songwriter, Willson returned to the airwaves. In 1950 he became the musical director of The Big Show, a series starring Tallulah Bankhead and Fred Allen which was network radio’s last big-budget variety program. By then, TV was rapidly supplanting radio, and after The Big Show was canceled in 1951, the untelegenic Willson, finding it difficult to make the transition to the new medium, decided to try his hand at writing for the theater, hanging on to such work as was still available in radio in order to pay the bills.

Encouraged by his friend Frank Loesser and by Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin, the producing team that had brought Guys and Dolls to Broadway the year before, Willson resolved to put the Mason City of his youth on stage. The results seem so effortless that those unfamiliar with the complex process of creating a Broadway show will be startled to read Willson’s detailed account in “But He Doesn’t Know the Territory” of his six-year struggle to write The Music Man and bring it to the stage. Among other things, he admits to having written 40 different songs for the show, only 18 of which made it into the final script.

The plot of The Music Man, in which Harold Hill, a musical illiterate, passes himself off as an experienced bandmaster in order to defraud the citizens of River City by selling them instruments that he cannot teach their children how to play, is far from the only original and unprecedented aspect of this singular piece of work. Willson, who had never before written any kind of stage work, produced on his first try (albeit after much revision) a musical-comedy book that is technically impeccable to the point of virtuosity, not least in the way that it compresses the equivalent of an entire expository dialogue scene into the four-minute-long opening number, “Rock Island,” set on the train that brings Hill to River City.

That said, the score of The Music Man is the show’s most immediately engaging feature—even though “Ya Got Trouble,” Hill’s show-stopping introductory solo, dispenses not only with rhyme but also with melody, the lyrics spoken instead in rapid-fire patter. Willson was not a natural tunesmith, even though in “Till There Was You,” the confessional ballad sung to Hill by Marian Paroo, the lonely town librarian, he eked out a warm, expansive arch of melody that is reminiscent of Tchaikovsky in its straightforward warmth.

More often, his “tunes” are either functional vehicles for his lyrics or superbly knowing pastiches of turn-of-the-century popular-song genres. The most memorable example of Willson’s gifts as a pasticheur is “Seventy-Six Trombones,” whose tune sounds exactly like a trombone counter-melody from a Sousa march (and which, when slowed down and recast in waltz time, does double duty as the sweetly naive ballad “Goodnight, My Someone”).

Brooks Atkinson spoke for his colleagues in his New York Times review, calling The Music Man “a warm and genial cartoon of American life” and going on to say that “if Mark Twain could have collaborated with Vachel Lindsay, they might have devised a rhythmic lark like The Music Man, which is as American as apple pie and a Fourth of July oration.”

It is a tribute to the conceptual strength and theatrical soundness of The Music Man that most of its subsequent productions, including Susan Stroman’s 2000 Broadway revival, have made little or no attempt to deviate from the precedents established by Morton Da Costa, the show’s original director, and Robert Preston, who created the role of Harold Hill on Broadway and transferred his performance to the screen with exuberant aplomb.1

But The Music Man is more than just a cartoon. It is, to begin with, highly innovative in its use of unrhyming lyrics and parlando “speak-songs” (as Willson called them). Moreover, an imaginative director who takes The Music Man seriously, as Bill Rauch did in the nontraditionally cast production that he staged in 2009 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, can find in it overtones of loneliness and doubt that more traditional stagings usually overlook. (At its climax, Harold Hill is nearly set upon and lynched.)

Willson loved the real-life River City of his youth, but he needed no reminding that a town full of upright, censorious gossips who lead ultra-proper lives can make things hard for any citizen who begs to differ with them (We’re so by-God stubborn we can stand touchin’ noses/For a week at a time and never see eye to eye). And that’s the hinge on which The Music Man pivots: The bookish Marian is an outcast because she is unmarried and serious about literature, and it is Hill, the brash and dishonest outsider, who opens the eyes of the well-meaning but priggish townspeople to her worth—just as his musical ignorance doesn’t stop him from showing them that there’s nothing wrong with having a good time.

To see a production that underlines this subtext without hammering it into the ground is to be reminded that The Music Man is as evocative of small-town America in its essentially optimistic way as is Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s much darker study of the complexities of life in a closely knit community.

Willson would always be characteristically modest about his crowning achievement: “The existence of The Music Man proves Somerset Maugham’s contention that anybody with a good memory can write down a story. I remember my childhood so well that each character in the show is not one, but a composite of three or four different people.”

The degree to which the results embodied his personal experience—and used up the clay from which he could mold his art—was further demonstrated by the fact that he never again wrote an original musical-comedy book for Broadway. He collaborated with Richard Morris on The Unsinkable Molly Brown and adapted Here’s Love from the film Miracle on 34th Street, neither of which comes remotely near matching The Music Man in quality.

Clearly, Meredith Willson, like most amateur authors, had only one story to tell, that of his own childhood. But if you tell your story in the right way, you only need one, and with The Music Man he ensured for himself a lasting place in the annals of American theater. No other musical says so much about the homespun joys of life in turn-of-the-century America, or says it so endearingly. It is, in its unassuming way, a masterpiece of popular art, one that will surely continue to be performed for as long as Americans continue to believe in their own fundamental innocence—or long to recapture it.

1 Another reason for this faithfulness is that the film version of The Music Man, also directed by Da Costa, is one of the few Hollywood musicals to clearly suggest the potent theatrical impact of the original Broadway production on which it was based. As a result, most stage directors now use the film as a model for their own productions.



Terry Teachout is Commentary’s critic-at-large and the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his one-man play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.

[jo]

Jan 31, 2021 20:13:50 GMT -5 jo said:

I came upon this review ( linked on Twitter) by a drama critic of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL of a recent production of The Music Man.

‘The Music Man’ Review: Trouble in Eden

Goodspeed Musicals revives Meredith Willson’s 1957 story of a small Iowa town turned inside out by the coming of a charismatic traveling salesman.

By Terry Teachout
May 16, 2019 1:59 pm ET


Is there a Great American Musical, a show that embodies the historic values of our country and our culture while simultaneously acknowledging their myriad contradictions? Indeed there is—and it’s not the one that you’re expecting, either. Instead of “Oklahoma!” or “West Side Story,” or even “Hamilton,” my pick for the prize is “The Music Man,” Meredith Willson’s 1957 fairy tale about a small town that is turned inside out by the coming of a charismatic traveling salesman who proposes to stem the rising tide of adolescent discontent in River City, Iowa, by putting together a boys’ band.


The Music Man

Goodspeed Musicals, Goodspeed Opera House, 6 Main St., East Haddam, Conn.
$29-$79, 860-873-8668, closes June 20


Unselfconsciously nostalgic to the point of corniness yet at the same time emotionally complex, “The Music Man” is a masterpiece not generally recognized as such, and Connecticut’s Goodspeed Musicals has given it a production that makes the most of its old-fashioned charms. Jenn Thompson’s unpretentiously imaginative staging, in which Edward Watts and Ellie Fishman play to perfection the lead roles that were created on Broadway by Robert Preston and Barbara Cook, vacuums the choking cobwebs of convention off a too-familiar warhorse. The result is the best stage production of “The Music Man” I’ve ever seen, one comparable in quality to the show’s justly admired 1962 screen adaptation.

What most revivals of “The Music Man” overlook are the hints of loneliness and despair that make it far more than just an affectionate exercise in small-town charm. For all its Edenic innocence, River City in 1912 is also a community full of censorious busybodies who can and do make life tough for those who refuse to toe the line of convention. That’s why the bookish, Balzac-loving Marian (Ms. Fishman) and Winthrop ( Alexander O’Brien ), her shy brother, are both constrictingly inhibited and agonizingly unhappy, while Harold Hill (Mr. Watts), the uninhibited con man who introduces them and the rest of River City to a more abundant life, comes within half a hair’s breadth of being tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail for his troubles. One might almost be watching an exceptionally dark production of “Our Town.”




Ms. Thompson is fully alive to these nuances. Here, as in all of her work, she penetrates to the inner truth of “The Music Man,” but does so without resorting to the over-obvious point-making that blights Daniel Fish’s “woke” Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!” Rather than bang you over the head with the show’s deeper meanings, she pays you the compliment of letting you uncover them for yourself. Nothing is exaggerated, not even Winthrop’s blush-making lisp, just as Ms. Thompson’s thoroughly nontraditional casting (among other things, the white mayor of River City has a black wife and daughter) is not italicized but taken for granted.


Mr. Watts wisely makes a point of not basing his performance on that of Preston, whose delectably fraudulent Harold Hill was preserved for all time in Morton DaCosta’s film version of “The Music Man.” Instead of running off a Xerox copy of Mr. Preston, as Craig Bierko did in Susan Stroman’s 2000 Broadway revival, Mr. Watts is engaging and affable, hiding his bad intentions as opposed to letting them ooze out of every pore. Similarly, Ms. Fishman’s Marian, far from being too good to be true, is anxious, even a touch vinegary. She knows life is passing her by, which makes you want to cheer when she finally stops playing it safe and puts her heart in the suspect hands of Harold—who is in turn redeemed by her love.



Ms. Thompson and her cast are well supported by the sets of Paul Tate dePoo III, who uses every inch of Goodspeed’s unforgivingly shallow stage without ever letting the production look crowded. In a masterstroke of creative design, he’s even painted a Grant Wood-like Iowa landscape onto the brick back wall. No less resourceful is the choreography of Patricia Wilcox, who first caught my eye with Ms. Thompson’s 2016 Goodspeed revival of “Bye Bye Birdie.” Given the minuscule size of the Goodspeed Opera House, which has 398 seats and a 27-by-22-foot stage, all of its productions are by definition small-scale shows, but Ms. Wilcox’s propulsive dances make this one feel twice as big. Likewise Ms. Thompson’s staging, which spills out into the aisles to excitingly expansive effect.


For the record, two higher-profile productions of “The Music Man” are now in the pipeline, the first directed by Mary Zimmerman for Chicago’s Goodman Theatre (where it will open in July) and the second a 2020 Broadway revival directed by Jerry Zaks and starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. Promising though they both sound, they’ll have to be truly exceptional to measure up to this one.


—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, is the author, most recently, of “Billy and Me.” Write to him at [e-mail].

He mentions the insights on the musical itself that makes it stand out ( I am not referring to necessarily to how good the production he reviewed is).

I do think that the musical is more than just light entertainment. It was a show that won the TONY over West Side Story, probably due to hidden insights of human behavior of many of the characters  ( In WSS, there were few deep insights into each character). It is a well-thought picture of a slice of small-town Americana -- which human traits are likely still present today but viewed with the different lens of modern times.


Jo

[jo]

I am not too sure about his comments which do not full justice to the social impact of the musical OKLAHOMA!

He obviously did not like the new Oklahoma! shown on Broadway in the past season before the pandemic.

But there are deeper insights beyond the musical score and the production numbers. There are strong characterizations, including the social impact of that period of American history of pioneering ( together with the social conflicts that then arose). There are contradictions that deepen the story. There are social issue insights into the key characters in Oklahoma!

So, I beg to disagree with the drama critic of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. At best, Oklahoma! and The Music Man are equally impressive in telling us a story in musical form of how a nation is shaped - whether in broad strokes like OKLAHOMA! or in microcosm like THE MUSIC MAN!

Jo

[jo]