The Nostalgic Comforts of The Music Man

While it’s spent many years on Broadway, The Music Man is pretty much the ideal community theater production.

That’s not an insult! I know it sounds like one, but consider:

• The hook of the confidence man who gets caught up in his own scheme and eventually finds love and redemption is a classic, giving audience members the thrill of the con without the guilt of the crime. Better yet, the con is centered on a very soft moral panic: bored young men might get into all kinds of mischief with a pool hall and no pro-social activities to set them right, so you’d better get a boys’ band started.¹
  
• Unlike other perennial classics like The King & I or West Side Story, the setting is soft-focus Americana, which lends itself easily to colorblind casting. (It’s still a very white show, but it’s less dependent on whiteness than you might expect.)
  
• The perennial challenge of community theater—that far more women typically audition for parts than men—is eased a little by the presence of some really stellar patter songs, which helps disguise when your best actor is a weak singer.
  
• It’s easy to scale up or down, adding chorus members or cutting things down with dual casting, and costuming is also pretty straightforward. The biggest challenge is band uniforms, which can normally be sourced from any of the local high schools, where someone with hoarding tendencies has stashed a good dozen or two somewhere just in case someone wanted to put on The Music Man.²
  
• It’s considered a classic, and has a movie adaptation that’s just good enough: not enough of a masterpiece that people wouldn’t want to see a different version, but certainly not bad enough to turn people off the show.

Now, of course, the show isn’t perfect. If we celebrate its virtues, we need to call out its flaws as well:

• The dark side of nostalgia, including the “funny” racist song. I don’t care if the real joke is on the Mayor’s wife, that fucking “joke” is trash, and far too many productions can’t even be bothered with as much as a note in the program saying that it’s trash. The Music Man also has the same genial background racism-by-omission of many shows of its time. Marian’s little brother has that lisp going on. You get the idea.
  
• That includes what you might call period-typical sexism, especially when it comes to the aforementioned Mayor’s wife.³
  
• Seriously, you omit that song completely and literally change nothing. 
  
• Marian’s part is as hard to sing as Harold’s is generally easy. Just because there are more women around doesn’t mean there are more women who can sing Marian the Librarian well.
  
• I continue to be Big Mad that more directors don’t put historical notes in their programs. You’ll let your director blather on for three paragraphs about learning cornet in middle school but not, “Hey, this ‘funny’ racism is still racism?”
  
• You really do need to have charismatic leads with chemistry, because the romance is, um, slight.
  
• Seriously, is it so hard to say “while we recognize that dressing the ladies up as ‘Indians’ was meant to poke gentle fun at Eulalie MacKecknie Shinn, it’s important to note that this is now considered a super fucking racist caricature and you should tell any kids watching this family show we sold all kinds of half-price tickets for that it is dated and not okay?” Absolutely fucking not. Be a grown-up and at least own your stupid bullshit.
  
• And of course, what is familiar can all too easily get stale. The show runs on nostalgia, a double-edged sword, and without a deft hand can feel predictable and overly sentimental.

But let’s be real, corniness is not the worst flaw a Broadway show can have, and we shouldn’t hold the fact that it won the Tony over West Side Story against it.⁴

When the show works, it really does work, and one of the keys to its success is its sense of community. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” talked about the price of conformity and the stifling pressure of tradition in small towns. Our Town insists the greatest value is staying home. The Music Man is about finding home. Marian grew up in River City, but she’s standoffish and prickly, tired of people expecting her to marry and exhausted by rumors about the old man who left her his library collection. The neighbors tease her little brother about his lisp. Harold Hill (almost certainly not his real name) is a man from nowhere. He may tell everyone he’s from Gary, Indiana,⁵ but if you believe him, well, I have a full set of high-quality band instruments to sell you. He comes in ready to run his usual scam, but soon finds himself the muse of a barbershop quartet, the slightly unwilling accomplice to the local Romeo and Juliet, and, of course, in love. Love makes both Marian and Harold see the world in a different light, and realize that maybe the people around them aren’t so bad after all. River City might be idealized, but not perfect, not even close. It’s the connections Marion and Harold make — and the music they make together — that turn River City into a place they can call home. 

And some of the songs are genuine bangers. “76 Trombones” is a lot of fun:

“Ya Got Trouble” is even more fun:

and “Gary Indiana” is the stickiest of earworms. 

And the main love theme, “Till There Was You,” is lovely and romantic. Even the Beatles covered it.⁶

The Music Man’s most recent revival was a big blockbuster show with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. It ran from late 2021 (in previews, officially beginning in 2022) through 2023, closing when Jackman and Foster left the production. If The Music Man is ideal for community theater, it’s also emblematic of the problems plaguing current Broadway: an over-focus on big stars and well-known productions, a need to make significant profit that makes shows less sustainable when those big stars leave, and an atmosphere that leaves little oxygen for more diverse and challenging productions⁷. The Music Man may be easy to cast colorblind, but that doesn’t guarantee it’ll happen, and all the happy endings are blandly heteronormative. The inoffensiveness is part of the charm, but it cuts off any sense of exploration or innovation. It’s a greatest hits album: sure it sells well, but there’s nothing new there. What makes The Music Man great for apple-cheeked high school kids in rural Vermont is part of what’s killing innovation on the Great White Way.

Even in 1957, the show was a throwback to a nostalgic “simpler time,” standing out in bright, candy-colored contrast to its Tony competitor West Side Story. Theater is weaker when it’s filled with nothing but sure hits and riffs on an imagined past.

But sometimes you just want a chocolate milkshake, not a matcha latte with raspberry cold foam. Sometimes the comforts of an imagined past are just that, comfort, and the joys of summer in a small town can be very real. Teenagers are flirting in the park, and the sky is full of stars. Somewhere in the distance, the kids in the community band are trying their best.

For how few people in the United States live in rural communities, we’re talked about a lot. In political circles, we’re talked over more than anything else. We’re symbols: the heartland, the boonies, ignoramuses, Real Americans. Sometimes it’s true. We’re “The Lottery” and we’re The Music Man and yes, sometimes even fucking Our Town, at least a little. The Music Man is better than most at getting at the truth of things.⁸ The gossipy bitch who ruined your life in high school might also be the one who bakes a really good casserole when your mother-in-law is recovering from surgery. The guy with the fucking MAGA poster is the one who tows your car out of the ditch. As long as you choose to stay, you’re stuck with each other, and that’s what’s wonderful and what’s miserable about it.

And that’s why The Music Man is the ideal community theater production. It’s a little behind the times, a little predictable, and not nearly as progressive as it thinks it is. I’d be disappointed in a world with no matcha lattes out there. But, under the right circumstances, it can hit the spot just like that chocolate milkshake.

1. Of course, this is actually true: bored young people with nothing to do will get into trouble, sometimes with a capital T, and enrolling them in activities like band can give them skills and purpose. The Music Man was making a case for music and the arts for young people long before we had studies to show it was a good idea. ↩︎
2. Every production of The Music Man I’ve seen live has had old band uniforms from the local high school in the climactic scene. The parents in the audience all go aww. ↩︎
3. Again, this could be worse. Marian’s not expected to get back to the kitchen as part of her happy ending, and the townspeople who look down on her are clearly shown to be in the wrong. ↩︎
4.  I mean, it’s embarrassing as hell, but that’s on the Tony voters, not the show. ↩︎
5. Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana, let me say it once again… ↩︎
6. Anita Bryant did too, but fuck her. ↩︎
7. The YouTube channel Wait in the Wings touches on this from time to time. The videos are a great watch either way, but I would particularly recommend the American Psycho video. ↩︎
8. Another one that really nails the feeling, for all its many flaws, is early South Park. ↩︎