Here at the outset I want to repeat a thesis I have long maintained, as follows: Meredith Willson's "The Music Man" is the best damned musical that ever graced any stage anywhere. "My Fair Lady" comes up fast on the rail, along with "Guys and Dolls" and I will make room for "South Pacific."
Don't talk to me about "Cats," with its one song, namely the eminently forgettable "Memory." Never mind "A Chorus Line," which is dreary, whining, self-pitying, and musically impoverished. "West Side Story"? Pretentious twaddle.
Meredith Willson's creation ranks singularly at the top. "The Music Man" is the Fourth of July set to music with ballads that touch the heart with moonlight. The sunny Iowa of 1912 emerges as profoundly American as Huckleberry Finn, for River City was Meredith's own Mississippi. As his title character, Meredith brought to life an engaging rascal, a fast-moving, sleekly tailored, smooth-talking charmer named Hill who glides into town to sell band instruments and put the locals under his spell. And then love steps in as Marian the librarian reverses the whammy.
And if you want to know the derivation of Marian the librarian, you must go back to a long-ago revelation that came to Meredith just before the show had its pre-Broadway tryout in Philadelphia. This was in 1957. Meredith has written: "Standing in the back, I caught up with the true Marian – what she was – who she was. She was a certain girl graduate of the Armour Institute in Chicago circa 1880 who took her appreciation for a few nice things into a little town and spent her life scattering it among the kids in her Sunday school class, the kids in her kindergarten, and the kids just passing by the house, not to mention her own flute-playing son.
"I had Mama in the show all the time."
His enchanting legacy
Meredith Willson died at 82 in June of 1984, but "The Music Man," for which he wrote music and lyrics and book, will endure always. The show is his enchanting legacy. In the year 2000 a revival of "The Music Man," directed by choreographer Susasn Stroman, wowed Broadway again and now a touring production, which she also staged, comes to the Civic Theater for a June 11-16 run.
How easy it is now to remember Meredith, a big man who had a voice that bounced off the walls. He delighted in the sound of words to express his fervent joy. A true-blue Iowan from Mason City, he was a man of robust good humor, with values and rectitude, and I liked him very much. A fine musician who had played the piccolo under Toscanini's baton, Meredith had written music and words for "The California Story," which was an ornament to a mid-1950s event called the "Fiesta del Pacifico" in San Diego. He came to town with his wife, Rini, (after her death he would marry the former Rosemary Sullivan) and together, in private sessions, they performed the songs from "The Music Man" for prospective backers. And that explains how some of the show's "angels" were the fortunate San Diegans.
As simple as Picasso
I recall hearing Meredith theorize that when you are writing a musical show, it is the first four words that are the easiest. They flow with ease. The words, at the top of the page, are: "Act 1, Scene 1."
"The fifth word!" Meredith would holler. "Now that is your stumbling block. The fifth word comes out so slowly."
Meredith's "Music Man" had a long incubation. And then he tried to interest Broadway's biggest director at the time, Moss Hart. "It's too full of corn," Hart said, smugly. Moss Hart was dead wrong. Contrary to the pseudo-sophisticates, "The Music Man" is a work of great sophistication and great subtlety with its soaring musicianship, its pathos and irrepressible humor. Corny it definitely is not. "The Music Man" is as simple as Picasso.
Who but Meredith could have written a superb march (as good as any ever written) that is also a marvelous love song. Listen attentively to "76 Trombones" and then listen to the tender and affecting "Goodnight, My Someone." You will hear the same notes played at different intervals with, of course, different lyrics. As Meredith used to say, and it was always so rewarding to hear him say it: "I wasn't just whittlin' a stick."
