The Music Man: The Perfect Musical?

Friday I attended Mainstage Center for the Arts’ production of The Music Man. These young people gave some really terrific performances in a production that was musically polished to an impressive degree, from the soloists and chorus to the very fine orchestra in the pit. Kudos goes especially to the young men of the school board who negotiated their difficult barbershop harmonies not only accurately, but also with a great deal of style, individuality, and sense of comic vocal acting.

I am becoming more and more convinced that The Music Man is the perfect musical. And I don’t even believe in perfection, but every time I see the show I’m a little bit more impressed by its brilliance. The whole thing—book, music and lyrics all by Meredith Willson—is exceptionally well written.

It ought to be. It was in development for the better part of a decade, with several people helping Willson to doctor the script and get it just right. Willson wrote over forty songs, the majority of which were discarded at one point or another in the process to be replaced by something that worked better.

After the performance Micah, who also loves the show, went a little Music-Man-crazy, and I was happy enough to go along for the ride. First it was YouTube clips of the 2003 made-for-TV version with Kristin Chenoweth and Matthew Broderick. Then we watched the classic film adaptation of 1962 with Robert Preston, who of course originated the role of Harold Hill on Broadway as well.

I was struck by the realization that the Chenoweth-Broderick version is more exactly faithful to the stage show, though I don’t care much for the style of direction, the re-orchestrations, or the way Marian’s songs are transposed down so that Chenoweth can American-Idolize them instead of singing them properly as the prim Miss Marian Paroo undoubtedly would in real life (if people in real life sang their words as they do in musicals—would that they did!).

The aforementioned classic film with Robert Preston and Shirley Jones was directed by Morton DaCosta, who also directed the original Broadway production. It was and is unusual for a theater director to have the opportunity to direct in Holly wood the same show he made successful on the stage (just one of the many reasons film versions of great Broadway show are almost always terrible, in my opinion). The result with The Music Man is that the film is considered to be unusually faithful to the stage production. And of course in style and spirit it is, and the judicious minor changes and additional dialogue actually make the story stronger. We are thus fortunate to have Robert Preston’s historic performance luminously preserved on Hollywood-quality Technicolor film.

Many of Professor Harold Hill’s lyrics are actually written in Willson’s score as rhythmic speech rather than singing. There’s a whole technique the composer uses in this show in which a continuum of utterances from speech to song dramatizes the character arcs of Harold and Marian as they fall in love, with implications for gender, sexuality and our very notions of music. Someday I’m going to write a whole essay on that, but for now just enjoy the clip. It’s a little bit of genius.