THE MUSIC MAN
Premiered on 12/19/1957
At the Majestic Theatre
Ran for 1375 performances
The road to Broadway is often incredibly rough, and one can only hope that those shows that take a long time gestating are worth the effort. That was certainly the case with THE MUSIC MAN. With a gentle prod from mentor Frank Loesser, composer/author Meredith Willson became interested in writing an All-American musical comedy that celebrated the Iowa of his youth. “I didn’t have to make up anything for THE MUSIC MAN,” Meredith Willson said about his first musical. “All I had to do was remember.” What Willson remembered was his childhood in Mason City, Iowa. He was 10 years old in 1912, the year THE MUSIC MAN takes place, and the people and places of the play are the ones he grew up with. But despite the comedy Willson has mined from Mason City, he has always maintained that THE MUSIC MAN is a tribute to his home, not a satire.
After writing, writing, and rewriting, Willson finally showed a rough draft of his script and songs to Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin, reigning producers of their day. They were enthusiastic about the project and went to CBS, who was interested in presenting the musical as a 2-hour television special. But when the network wanted input in the casting process, Feuer and Martin backed out. Then movie producer Sol Siegel, seeing potential in the star role of swindler Harold Hill, offered to develop the property as a movie musical to star Bing Crosby. But again the project stalled. Frustrated, Willson enjoined Franklin Lacey to come on board and help trim, simplify, and focus the piece. During this cut-and-paste period, Willson was ready to excise a long piece of dialogue facing River City parents. But upon rereading it, he discovered that it sounded almost like a lyric, and he composed music to accompany the dialogue, turning an almost-cut sequence into the showstopping song “Ya Got Trouble.” Somehow, the exciting birth of that number gave Willson and Lacey the hope they needed to continue. After the 32nd draft was completed, Willson finally had a cast for his show and saw it open, a smash hit.
Of course, between Willson’s first jottings and the out-of-town opening in Philadelphia, around 40 songs were written, and 22 were cut for one reason or another. Looking to stretch the boundaries of musical theatre, he also devised 53 different rhythmic numbers, written as experiments for the opening of the show, the salesmen’s spoken “Rock Island.” With this spoken opening number, the barbershop harmonies of “Lida Rose,” and the songs “Goodnight, My Someone” and “76 Trombones,” (which shared the same melody but with wildly different tempi) Willson flew in the face of the Broadway music tradition of the 1950s. Meredith Willson had gambled and won big, overshadowing competition as fierce as West Side Story in the 1957-58 season. THE MUSIC MAN spawned countless regional productions, as well as a movie version that faithfully captured the seminal Harold Hill of Robert Preston. Yes, this “overnight success” took a long, long time to come to fruition, but left with us all with a rich legacy of gentle memories from another time in the America that Meredith Willson carried in his mind and heart.
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