Pied Piper of Broadway

(See Cover)

The curtain drops at 11:05. The pit orchestra swings into a blasting reprise of the show's big tune, a walloping march called Seventy-Six Trombones. The audience applauds. Up goes the curtain again. And onstage for the curtain call throng the 67 men, women, boys and girls of the cast--the folks of River City, Iowa ("pop. 2,212"), in the summer of 1912. Marching two by two they go, first to one side, then to the other, and then back again. They pantomime the players of a big brass band --trombones sliding, cornets flashing, cymbals smashing, piccolos chirping, wood winds whining, drumheads cracking. The music bugles in smashing thunderclaps.

Abruptly, as if by some magical cue from the conductor, the 1,695 hypnotized customers in the audience begin to slam their hands together in rhythm to the march. The music wells, and the actors turn, dip, twist and prance. The applause pounds on in martial time as, a-tatatatat, a-tatatatat, the music pours up from the pit and gilds the hall with shimmering sheets of brass. At last the house lights come on, and the customers shoulder their way to the door, hands burning and hearts still tingling with a rediscovery of a bygone Fourth of July--a time when the franks were fat and hot and the firecrackers spat showers of sparks and the drum major's spinning baton flashed in the sun, and the grass in the park felt as soft as corn silk underfoot. Since opening night last Dec. 19, every audience has reacted in this same wholehearted way to The Music Man, Broadway's biggest musical hit.

Plot for a Graveyard. Some smart Broadway money was betting that Music Man would fall flat on its corn husks when it opened at the Majestic Theater. By Broadway standards, it is simpleminded and unsophisticated. It is also warmhearted, brilliantly performed and a lot of fun. The Music Man is Professor Harold Hill, a glib-tongued, fast-footed, woman-chasing rascal of a traveling salesman from Gary, Ind., who bursts into staid River City, charms a frozen-faced populace into digging into their cookie jars and mattresses to buy instruments and uniforms for a boys' marching band that will be led by Professor Hill himself. The show winds up with an enlivened townsfolk who know the score, and a mildly reformed Pied Piper who has scored with the pretty librarian.

Before opening night, this sort of plot was regarded by Broadway wiseacres as something that belongs in the theatrical graveyard. But when the opening-night curtain fell, most critics were ecstatic. "Marvelous," said the New York Times's Brooks Atkinson. "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." Cheered the Herald Tribune's Walter Kerr: "The brightest, breeziest, most winning new musical to come along since My Fair Lady enchanted us all. [It's] a wow. A nice wow."

By last week The Music Man was a well-established wow. Ticket-hungry New Yorkers and summer visitors swarmed around the box office at every performance, trying to wangle one or two seats in the orchestra ($8.05)--or even a square foot of standing space ($3). The Music Man was the toughest ticket in town, even harder to snag than My Fair Lady, and, for expense-account buyers, worth the $50 scalpers' price.

Business was so good that the gross topped $2,250,000 last week. The producers paid off the $300,000 nut to 200 investors within four months of the opening, are now grossing $70,000 a week, of which $19,000 is clean profit. More than 20 different Music Man recordings are selling like pinwheels on the third of July. The marching band arrangement of Seventy-Six Trombones is already on the music racks of more than 6,000 brass bands across the U.S. And the ultimate recognition--from the business world--is already at the stage door: toy manufacturers want to make Music Man toys; clothing firms want to manufacture Music Man caps, shirts and sweaters.

Fat Lady & Barbershop Quartet. How could a show, blended with such fine old period pieces as a player piano, a sputtering mayor, a fat lady who dances, a plain-Jane librarian--even a redheaded lisping boy and a celluloid-dickeyed barbershop quartet--make the grade on coldhearted Broadway? Talent is only part of the answer. Many an able combination of stage talent has been hooted off the boards on opening night. In this case, there happened to be a just-right blending of first-rate talents.

Broadway's top producer this season, 53-year-old Kermit (Look Homeward, Angel] Bloomgarden (TIME, April 21), had the good fortune to form a team of three men with widely varied experience in show business: Composer (You and I, Two in Love] and oldtime Radio Performer Meredith Willson, 56, the jovial lowan who in his first try for the theater wrote book, music and lyrics; Director (No Time for Sergeants, Auntie Mame) Morton Da Costa, 44, who gave the show its sparkle and pace; and the Music Man himself, longtime Cinemactor Robert Preston, 40, known vaguely to millions of moviegoers for years as the handsome, thick-browed heavy of B pictures who rarely got the girl.

There is nothing heavy about Bob Preston's Music Man. Feathery-footed, nimble-fingered, he is brassy, sassy and seemingly inexhaustible. Setting his style in his first big scene, he pounces on River City, peopled by folk straight out of Grant Wood's famed painting, American Gothic (one farm couple, in fact, gives a hilarious imitation, pitchfork and all, of the pair in the painting). River Cityans are high-minded, self-righteous, and

So by God stubborn we can stand touchin' noses

For a week at a time and never see eye-to-eye.

Furthermore, some of the gossips regard Librarian-Piano Teacher Marian Paroo (Barbara Cook) as something of a hussy because she approves of such racy authors as "Chaucer, Rabelais and Balzac." In this setting of cornfield provincialism, the Music Man decides to stir up a little trouble to distract attention from his own shenanigans. His horrifying revelation to the townspeople: a pool table has been installed in the billiard parlor.

T Rhymes with P. Preston's rapid-fire recitative, backed only by orchestral chords, is a heady showstopper. Weaving in and out among the townspeople, flipping his hands, posturing like a slicker, flicking his toes as if they were Satan's tail, he sows the seeds of Trouble.

The first big step on the road to the depths of deg-re-day--I say first--medicinal wine from a teaspoon, then--beer from a bottle! And the next thing you know, your son is playin' fer money in a pinchback suit. And list'nin' to some big out-a-town Jasper hearin' him tell about horse-race gamblin'. Not a wholesome trot tin' race. No! But a race where they set down right on the horse! Like to see some stuck-up Jockey-boy settin' on Dan Patch? . . . Trouble--oh, we've got Trouble, right here in River City. Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Pool.

Mothers of River City! Watch for the telltale signs of corruption. The moment your son leaves the house does he re-buckle his knickerbockers below the knee? Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corn crib? Is he memorizing jokes out of Capt. Billy's "Whiz Bang"? Are certain words creeping into his conversation? Words like "swell" and "so's your old man"? If so, my friends--ya got Trouble . . .

Soft Shoe & Music Lessons. By song's end, River City knows that it has trouble all right, and the audience knows that Bob Preston is the hottest performer on Broadway. Gliding tirelessly through scene after scene, he sings in an unpretentious, mellow baritone, turns Seventy-Six Trombones into as rapturous a piece of high-stepping bravura as ever brought down a house. His portrayal of a likable cad is a fine job of acting, but he does more than act and sing. He kicks a mean one-step, dances the Castle Walk. And in an inspired number that has already made Choreographer Onna White a big name on Broadway, he joins the dancing company in a softshoe, tippy-toe library ballet that is a triumph of precision and gaiety.

To sharp-eyed critics watching his performance, it was incredible that Actor Robert Preston Meservey should have spent a dozen years as a second-string Hollywood leading man. Bon of a French Huguenot and Irish line, Robert was two years old when his parents moved from Newton Highlands, Mass, to the going-to-seed Lincoln Heights section of Los Angeles. He grew up, among Italian and Mexican families, in a neighborhood dotted with rundown homes. But the Meserveys were a close-knit unit. Bob's mother fed her family on music, and as a small boy Bob learned to play piano, drums, guitar, trumpet and harmonica. Neither Bob nor his younger brother Frank Jr. ever got into trouble, even though they ran about and made mischief with the neighborhood Mexican boys twice their ages.

Bob progressed rapidly in a school populated mostly by children who had difficulty with the English language. But there came a day when Ruth Meservey decided to switch her boys to another school. "For a while," says she, "they were speaking with an accent. They would say 'My mother, he is in the kitchen, and my father, she is at work.' " When he got to Lincoln High School, Bob caught the acting bug, and it was nourished by a Shakespeare-loving dramatics teacher named E. J. Wenig.

In 1936, with Wenig's encouragement, Preston began working at the Pasadena Playhouse, the West Coast's top acting school (fellow students: Victor Jory, Dana Andrews, Victor Mature). For a time, dedicated Actor Preston studied nights at the Playhouse, worked days as a car parker at Santa Anita Race Track. Then he switched to fulltime acting.

The Discovery. One part--the down-at-heel song-and-dance man in a Playhouse production of Idiot's Delight--caught the eye of a Paramount executive and with the Meservey name chopped out of his professional life, Robert Preston was making "i 8-day wonders," as the B pictures were called. He was a sailor in The King of Alcatraz ("Mercifully," he says, "yet to be released on TV"), a truck driver in Illegal Traffic, a lawyer in Disbarred. A success of sorts, he mar ried a Playhouse actress, pretty, dark-haired Catherine Feltus, settled down in a big Brentwood house that had a swim ming pool in the backyard and nothing but a bed and a card table inside.

Preston's first big movie role was the villain in Union Pacific, a cinemepic produced by Cecil B. DeMille. The DeMille-Preston relationship deteriorated when Preston played in his second DeMille thriller, Northwest Mounted Police. Preston did not like the script and said so, out loud, to DeMille. "What's the matter?" snapped DeMille. "It's the same part you had in Union Pacific, isn't it?"

Fortunately, Preston was able to get professional satisfaction outside the movies. Along with other Pasadena Playhouse veterans and their wives, he was a mem ber of the "18 Actors," who staged serious plays for serious playgoers, kept up the work straight through his movie career. After a three-year hitch with the Army Air Forces (captain, Intelligence, Ninth Air Force), Bob turned out another clutch of movies (The Macomber Affair, Face to Face), but was still dissatisfied. "All the scripts I got," he says, "went first to Fred MacMurray, and if he didn't want them, they went to Ray Milland, and then to me. After me, it was the end of the line."

Preston got off the line and switched to Broadway seven years ago. Most of his eight plays (notable exceptions: revivals of The Male Animal and Twentieth Century) have been financial flops, but Preston himself won good notices from the critics. Nonetheless, he was still relatively unknown in New York until Meredith Willson came along with The Music Man.

White Knight. Willson, all through his years as a professional musician -- flutist with John Philip Sousa's band and with Toscanini's orchestra, composer of symphonies and pop songs, orchestra leader on radio shows--was collecting the satchelful of songs, story ideas and folklore about his home town of Mason City, Iowa.

His father was a moderately successful lawyer who had the idea that Iowa was going to become a wasteland, made plans to move out of the state and raise nuts somewhere; but he stayed. Meredith's mother Rosalie, a Sunday-school superintendent for 40 years, nicknamed him "Glory" because he always had a smile on his face. Rosalie acted in amateur plays--a daring hobby at the time--and grew lilies of the valley on the north side of the house. She kept Lorna Doone and Tennyson within easy reach of the Willson children, and dressed curly-haired Meredith in a black velvet Fauntleroy suit on the occasions when he spoke a piece at the Congregational Sunday School. Willson admits that The Music Man's heroine Marian is modeled after his mother; he wrote a warm, lyrical ballad for Soprano Barbara Cook that he feels captures Rosalie's image:

My White Knight--

Not a Lancelot, nor an angel with wings,

Just someone to love me

Who is not ashamed of a few nice things . . .

And if occasion'ly he'd ponder

What makes Shakespeare and Beethoven great,

Him I could love till I die

Him I could love till I die . . .

Willson lugged his memory-bag of "innocent Iowa" around for years, discussing it with producers, writing new material, throwing away songs, dashing off new ones. In 1956 Producer Bloomgarden told him that he would like to see the script. A year later, Willson called Bloomgarden from Hollywood. Says Bloomgarden: "I said to myself, 'Willson? Who the hell is

Willson?' But I told him that if I could hear it the next day I'd be free." Willson and his wife Rini took a plane for New York. Next night they met Bloomgarden at the apartment of Conductor Herbert Greene, who is a co-producer and musical director of the show. Willson played the piano and sang the male parts while Rini sang the female roles. They wound up at 5 a.m. At 9 a.m. Bloomgarden called Willson at his hotel and said: "May I have the honor of producing your beautiful play?"

Open Face & Big Frustration. Bloomgarden called in Director Da Costa and set to work casting the show. Barbara Cook (Plain and Fancy') had just the right sweet voice to play Marian; Comedian David Burns was a natural for the wacky mayor; an international championship barbershop quartet, the Buffalo Bills, was signed to harmonize the Sweet Adeline-style love songs that reminded Willson of Mason City days; a ten-year-old charmer named Eddie Hodges took on the role of Marian's shy little brother.

Finding the man to play Harold Hill was a more complicated problem. Television Comic Milton Berle wanted the part. TV Actor Art Carney was considered, and so was Dancer Ray Bolger. Da Costa had seen Robert Preston in a few summer stock shows; Bloomgarden, too, knew Preston's work. Says Da Costa: "Preston has energy and he has reality. He's an actor who can project himself larger than life. And he has enough sureness of technique and enough urbanity to portray the con man and the opportunist without resorting to a wax mustache. The part calls for a guy with an open face and a great big frustration which he can satisfy only by taking the easy way out --conning people."

Preston tried out first for Da Costa and Bloomgarden, and his version of Trouble--the toughest song in the show --sold them. Next, they had to sell Willson. Willson heard Trouble and bought.

Trouble was a song, but it was also a shadow on the show. For all his big-money-making successes on Broadway, Bloomgarden had to scrounge to find the $300,000 producing tab. He thought that the Columbia Broadcasting System would jump for The Music Man. CBS had made a mountain of money investing in hit shows and pressing musical albums; e.g., the company footed the $400,000 bill for My Fair Lady, collected both royalties and extra profits from the smash sale of My Fair Lady recordings. "These CBS executives filed in and sat down," Bloomgarden recalls. "They were cold and serious. Meredith went over to the piano and did Trouble. They just sat there without cracking a smile. Then Meredith did some other numbers from the show. They still sat on their hands. They thought it was corny. Meredith and I were absolutely miserable." Bloomgarden tried NBC, Decca Records and a flock of other big-time investors, but it was no sale. After nearly six months of plugging, he finally raised the money piecemeal, including $1,000 of it from Music Man's pressagent, Arthur Cantor, who is now happily collecting at 10 for 1.

The Shape. With money and a cast, the show still had a long way to go. Willson's script needed cutting and shaping to give it a nonstop lilt and easy movement. Director Da Costa, a craftsman who has worked quietly in the theater for more than 20 years, buckled down. Says he: "I thought the time had come to send the public out of the theater light-hearted instead of depressed. I wanted this to come off as a story about a charming renegade who reforms, a show with a lot of love and no hate, one that a sophisticated viewer could see with pleasure and that a child could watch with understanding." The cast also credits Da Costa--as well as Preston--for having welded the troupe into one of Broadway's happiest companies.

Among the best of Da Costa's touches is the train scene: in a railroad car are nine traveling salesmen, some playing cards, others reading newspapers--the Wall Street Journal, selected by Da Costa as perfect for 1912 typography and makeup. During the long weeks of rehearsals, the salesmen, backed by a full orchestra, chanted an intricate number called Rock Island, passing phrases from one to the other in complex antiphony. As they spoke, the rhythms changed, grew faster and faster in time to the clackety-clack of the train:

Cash for the merchandise--cash for the button-hooks--

Cash for the cotton goods--cash for the hard goods--cash for the soft goods . . .

Cash for the hogshead, cask and demijohn.

Cash for the crackers and the pickles and the flypaper.

Look whadayatalk, whadayatalk, whada-yatalk, whadayatalk, whadayatalk? . . .

In Philadelphia tryouts, audiences remained cold to this opening. Instead of throwing out the scene, Da Costa had a brainstorm: he threw out the orchestra.

This ear-catcher, signaled by a blast of steam, is The Music Man's curtain-raiser, an invitation for the audience to visit River City, and an underscoring of Director Da Costa's feeling that "the job of the theater is not to feed pessimism but to dispel it."

It is a quality that bombards the customers as they settle down to hear the rousing overture of the show, a quality that wreathes the Majestic Theater with a sunny-day-at-the-farm euphoria. In a fat Broadway season whose successes deal so clinically with such subjects as marital frustration, alcoholism, dope addiction, juvenile delinquency and abortion, The Music Man is a monument to golden unpretentiousness and wholesome fun--one of the happiest chemical explosions to hit the street since John Philip Sousa himself marched grandly into town, as the Music Man says, when

Seventy-six trombones led the big parade

With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand ...

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.