The Music Man : Show Development and Promotion

[njr]

Oct 15, 2021 17:56:07 GMT -5 jo said:

From BWW --

Jeffrey Karasarides

THE MUSIC MAN Changes?
#15
Posted: 10/14/21 at 11:53am

ErmengardeStopSniveling said: "The musical arrangements will also be...interesting...to hear for Marian, since Sutton is not a soprano."


I just watched this video of her performing 'Tonight' from West Side Story with Brian Stokes Mitchell at the Hollywood Bowl back in 2018. Maria, like Marian, is a role that is typically played by a legit soprano. I think Sutton Foster should be fine.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWk_QrAGrUM

You just reposted this which doesn’t answer my question, is she a mezzo-soprano?

[jo]

Lol - how would I know ?? Not a music man but a finance woman myself

Judge for yourself based on the clip

Jo

[jo]

Nancy,

Just to be clear

I post news, clips, photos, whatever... because they seem interesting and mostly relevant to our topics. Sometimes they are in the form of food for thought.

But it is not my solemn duty to reply to questions especially if am not an authority. Entertainment, whether film or theatre or TV or whatever form, is just that -- and I thought sharing stuff with others is what helps the discussions flowing.



Jo

[JH4HJ]

Oct 15, 2021 15:36:06 GMT -5 njr said:

So is she considered a mezzo-soprano?

I'm not an expert on these things.

See discussion here for more -

"A mezzo, with a big belt" seems to be the consensus.

[njr]

Oct 17, 2021 10:00:36 GMT -5 JH4HJ said:

Oct 15, 2021 15:36:06 GMT -5 njr said:

So is she considered a mezzo-soprano?

I'm not an expert on these things.

See discussion here for more -

"A mezzo, with a big belt" seems to be the consensus.

Thank you!

[njr]

Oct 17, 2021 3:47:10 GMT -5 jo said:

Nancy,

Just to be clear

I post news, clips, photos, whatever... because they seem interesting and mostly relevant to our topics. Sometimes they are in the form of food for thought.

But it is not my solemn duty to reply to questions especially if am not an authority. Entertainment, whether film or theatre or TV or whatever form, is just that -- and I thought sharing stuff with others is what helps the discussions flowing.



Jo

A simple “I don’t know” would have sufficed. 😉

[jo]

Nancy,

You were demanding a reply to a re-post of something interesting posted by a BWW'er? A post not by me. Why not join BWW and ask the person? Or do your own research on the internet since you were so keen to find out if Sutton is a soprano or not...or how her vocal range is classified as a soprano?

I gave as reply a link on a particular Sutton performance - and you could have judged her vocal range on your own.


And --

There are even split comments on the topic of Sutton's voice.

www.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.php?thread=938891

Since I do not subscribe to the religion of vocal range preferences in musical theatre, it doesn't matter much to me. It is the message of the song and how it sounds to me that matters - and if it truly sends the message - that is good emough for me. Example - you cannot say that Preston's singing was in accord with typical musical theatre styles - but what a delivery! They have become iconic!

I have more complicated issues to deal with re The Music Man than wanting to know what kind of soprano Sutton is.


If you don't think my posts satisfy you ... I can't help that!

Jo

[njr]

I did get on Google and looked up the different types of singing voices and discovered that mezzo-soprano was below soprano, so I was asking if you (or anyone) thought she was mezzo-soprano. Then you merely re-posted the article from BWW! I thought if anyone would know the answer, it would be you!
And if you are keen to “keep the discussion flowing” it would help if you didn’t say things like “you were demanding a reply.”

[jo]

From BWW --

sondheim94
Send PM
Profile
Understudy
joined:10/9/11
Upcoming Cast Albums
#1
Posted: 10/18/21 at 3:01pm
Originally I was only curious about Caroline, or Change (I PRAY they record a cast recording), but there are a lot of upcoming musicals!



Mrs. Doubfire
Flying Over Sunset
Company (already have the London recording... but with the names in the revival... perhaps?)
MJ
The Music Man
Paradise Square
Funny Girl

Caroline and Company are the only two I'm doubtful about... the rest seem they'll surely get a recording? Or am I being too hopeful.

Hopefully, the original Broadway cast recording for The Music Man gets released even before its Official Opening Night? But I am not sure if that ever happens - they usually wait for the show to be "frozen" (right before Opening Night) before releasing it. The studio recording sessions can happen much earlier, though. Any changes can easily be adapted.

Jo

[jo]

Full and better audio sound of Jerry Zaks interview with Variety --

variety.com/video/music-man-jerry-zaks-hugh-jackman/?fbclid=IwAR3ULzSHJXB-6wVkeMeIBz70rFL4PwlVeBpdLUQ1CDB-tTQ498eR8eXHwdU


Wow -- did I hear Jerry say that Hugh said to him " What a year we will have!"

From rehearsals date to 10 months later? Or maybe he meant something else?

I like what Jerry is thinking about emphasizing the romantic angle...and that it is not mostly comedic.

And that he has been busy looking at set designer Loquasto's designs, hoping for a picturesque design of River City.

If I can put in a wish-request --

all I want is to see an old-fashioned gazebo in this period setting


Jo

[jo]

The original Marian on Broadway, our favorite late Ozalot Barbara Cook sings " 'Til There Was You "




She would be on the front row on Opening Night of the revival of The Music Man if Ms Cook were still around.

She sat behind us close to the stage at the Closing Night of The Boy From Oz.


Jo

[jo]

[mamaleh]

Jackman's Landing posted this great interview with Hugh conducted by his old Detroit pal, Mitch Albom. Great publicity for THE MUSIC MAN.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5WYEn3OIJU

Ellen

[jo]

Thanks, Ellen.

Jo

[jo]

Interesting show development story from the NYTimes --

www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/theater/music-man-disability-meredith-willson.html?

‘The Music Man’ Once Had a Disabled Character. Then He Was Erased.
At the urging of producers, Meredith Willson cut a boy in a wheelchair from the early scripts for his 1957 musical. A look back shows what was lost.

By Amanda Morris
Dec. 15, 2021, 12:09 a.m. ET

Many know Meredith Willson’s 1957 Broadway musical, “The Music Man,” as a light comedy centered on a cheeky scam artist who pretends to be a musician and sells the idea of starting a boys’ band to a small town in Iowa. The show is being revived on Broadway starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, and will begin performances this month.

But several newly recognized drafts of the musical, written between 1954 and 1957, show that originally, the story focused more on the town’s persecution of a boy in a wheelchair — carrying a much more serious message than the final draft. At the time, children with disabilities were routinely institutionalized in horrid conditions and denied an education.

In the version that debuted in 1957, the only character that doesn’t fall for the scheme is Marian Paroo, a well-read single woman who has a shy younger brother with a lisp, named Winthrop. But the con man, Harold Hill, manages to charm Marian and wins her over in part by being kind to Winthrop and including him in the band.

In the earlier drafts, Marian’s younger brother was a character named Jim Paroo, a boy in a wheelchair who, in some versions of the show, has limited use of his arms and could not speak. Wherever Jim goes, townspeople want to lock him up, and in some versions, this drives him to hide and live in the school basement instead of at home.



Then, Harold comes along and challenges the community’s assumptions about Jim by bringing him into the band and finding an instrument he’s capable of playing with his limited range of motion. An early title for the show, “The Silver Triangle,” highlights Jim’s instrument of choice and contribution to the band.

“I think that Jim was very much at the heart of the show,” said Dominic Broomfield-McHugh, a musicology professor at the University of Sheffield in England who discovered many of the earlier drafts in 2013 at the Great American Songbook Foundation in Indiana. These discoveries were published in May in Broomfield-McHugh’s new book, “The Big Parade: Meredith Willson’s Musicals from ‘The Music Man’ to ‘1491.’” The book explores the musical’s journey from “The Silver Triangle” to “The Music Man” we know today — and has a chapter devoted to the various early drafts of the show.

“When you read the first draft, it feels quite thin until you get to the scenes with Jim or about Jim, and suddenly it becomes very dramatic and serious,” he said. “I still feel astonished when I look at it.”

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Most of the songs and scenes in earlier drafts are also significantly different, according to Broomfield-McHugh. In one deleted song, Jim, who is nonverbal in this version of the show, starts to sing onstage alone.

“What Willson was trying to do was to sort of say, even though he can’t physically speak, he has all these thoughts and ideas going around in his head,” Broomfield-McHugh said.




Though Willson’s writing of disability was sometimes gimmicky in ways that could now be seen as offensive — in one scene, music inspires Jim to stand up for the first time — Broomfield-McHugh believes that the playwright was trying to spark a conversation about how people with disabilities were treated at the time.

He found evidence that the playwright had visited organizations for disabled children but couldn’t find any other personal reasons that Willson may have had for writing about this issue.

Just 10 months before the show opened, Willson dropped the character of Jim, replacing him with Winthrop at the urging of producers who felt there was no place for serious representations of disability onstage.

“But I sense such a frustration in him that he really, really tried for years to make it work like this,” Broomfield-McHugh said.

One memo urged Willson to change the character, stating that “physical disability in a child is impossible to view in any terms but pity and sentiment, the problem is to find some other form of disability besides physical.” The memo is undated and unsigned, but Broomfield-McHugh believes it was written in early 1957 by an employee of a producer. He found it in Wisconsin Historical Society archives, tucked in the back of a script that belonged to the producer Kermit Bloomgarden, who took over production of the show in 1957.



Today, audiences can more regularly see disabled actors onstage thanks to efforts by small theater companies like The Apothetae, which produces works centered on the disabled experience; and Theater Breaking Through Barriers, an Off Broadway organization that regularly casts actors with disabilities.

But on Broadway, which can elevate shows into mainstream commercial hits, authentic representations of disability are still few and far between, said Talleri A. McRae, a founder of National Disability Theater.

There have been some successes. Ali Stroker made history in 2019 as the first actor in a wheelchair to win a Tony Award for her role as a flirty fiancée, Ado Annie, in ‘Oklahoma!’; Madison Ferris, who has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair, played Laura in a 2017 production of “The Glass Menagerie.” There was also the casting of a disabled actor in the role of Tiny Tim in “A Christmas Carol” in 2019; a 2015 revival of “Spring Awakening” by Deaf West Theater, which featured deaf and hearing actors side by side; as well as Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer-winning 2017 Off Broadway play, “Cost of Living,” about people with disabilities.

Even with this progress, many disabled characters are not written in well-rounded ways, and actors without disabilities are often cast in these roles, McRae said.

To her knowledge, the character of Nessarose in “Wicked” — who uses a wheelchair — has never been played by a disabled actress on Broadway, and the same was true for the character of Crutchie, who uses a crutch in the show “Newsies.”

“Look how far we haven’t come,” said Gregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy and the founder and artistic director of the Apothetae. “Or how far we have yet to go.”

Part of the problem is inaccessibility for acting training programs, said Mozgala, who is also the director of inclusion for the Queens Theater’s program Theater for All, which helps support and train disabled playwrights and actors. In his own acting program at the Boston University School for the Arts, he was the only person who identified as disabled and said many actors with disabilities have been told to sit out of certain classes, such as movement classes, because professors felt uncomfortable teaching students with disabilities.



Another barrier is the perception of audiences. Nicholas Viselli, the artistic director of Theater Breaking Through Barriers, said audiences still feel uncomfortable watching disabled actors or characters onstage. For the plays he stages, he said he often receives donations from people who say they think the work is important but don’t want to come see it.

“When you advertise disability, it becomes a turnoff,” Viselli said. “People are like, ‘I’ll feel bad for them. It will perhaps diminish my experience.’”

In the end, the version of “The Music Man” without Jim was a hit; it won five Tony Awards, including best musical, ran for 1,375 performances and was adapted into an Oscar-winning movie in 1962.

“The Music Man” has since been criticized for making light of its con artist’s problematic, predatory behavior, such as a scene in which he follows Marian home and tries multiple times to seduce her.

The legacy of “The Music Man” may have been different if Willson’s original vision had made it onto the Broadway stage in a way that authentically represented people with disabilities. Many of the stigmas and barriers it tried to confront still persist, according to Penny Pun, the managing director of the National Disability Theater.

“A lot of these works are being put down before they even see the light of day,” Pun said. “So how do we know if they have mainstream appeal? They never get a chance.”

[jo]

I submitted a Comment which has been approved by the NYTimes editor

JosieB
Philippines2m ago


I am seeing the show in the summer (probably the safer time to travel overseas) and I have been able to get Meredith Willson's book on the development of the musical (which I am just beginning to read). While that feature on disability might have proved an interesting aspect of the show's book, I am more interested in seeing this overall slice of period Americana. It will be a period piece but there are already many hints of changes to reflect cultural changes such as in the casting( So proud to see a talented young Filipino-American, Kayla Teruel as Amaryllis). There are also hints of expanded production numbers (as in the Hugh Jackman clip showing him with the young band of boys&girls with pretend musical instruments suggesting "76 Trombones" (note "boys&girls, when it was only a boy band before). What other changes in the book & even the musical score we still have to see, although director Jerry Zaks has already hinted at looking deeper at how the romantic relationship between Harold & Marian developed & not simply blossomed overnight. The show has a good book & musical score & interesting small town characters. I am looking forward to enjoying this revival with some unexpected changes. Time to see something that recall happier times in this weary world of the pandemic!

[jo]

From the past!

The first step on the road for Hugh Jackman to become The Music Man

A photo shared by someone from Australia --








Ahem!

[jo]

Someone shared another photo of young Hugh as Salesman #2