New Musical in Manhattan

The Music Man is creatively a one-man show, with book, music and lyrics by Meredith Willson. One result is that it does seem created, that it displays a style, a sense of one-man showmanship. It also achieves a sustained swinging tempo; as his own triumvirate, Willson escapes all the Stop and Go, the Detour and Closed for Repairs signs of musicomedy collaborations. Boasting a brisk production, and in Robert Preston a delightful star, this 1912 tale of an itinerant con man, a musical ignoramus who invades an Iowa town posing as a bandleader, has unrationed, oldfashioned, bring-the-whole-family high spirits.

In theme, The Music Man is just one more sentimental-satiric yarn about a fake who floods a dull hole with genuine gaiety. It has, besides, its sinking spells of wit and mild attacks of cuteness. More damagingly, the second act has an air of playing back much of the first, repeating all manner of effects. Fortunately, The Music Man can even walk backward and downhill with considerable elan; there is no denying the bounce of the show.

One source of exuberance is that, rather than seeming sung or danced or chanted, a lot of production numbers seem spieled or shilled; they have a contagious carnival air, a ballyhoo rhythm. Opening with a jingly, jabbery railroad-car recitative of traveling salesmen, the show soon catapults Actor Preston into River City. There he first catches the town's eye with a kind of stylish evangelical pitch called Trouble, then clutches the town by the lapels with a rousing Seventy Six Trombones. Later in a gay, public-library ballet, Preston soft-shoes a hard sell of love-making to the librarian. Number after number--street gossipers, the arrival of cornets by Wells Fargo, a Shipoopi in a gym--has its own blared or strutted, puppet-jiggled or cricket-chirped animation. In the title role, a Preston who had never danced or sung during 20 years of show business becomes, at a bound, a brilliant song-and-dance man. His triumph, to be sure, stems from something less than singing, and seldom exactly dancing; it grows from a leg-and-larynx zest, a mating of sales-talk incantation and engaging panhandle stride. And something of this solo zip is mass-produced in the festive small-town spin of Onna White's dances. Prettily singing the show's over-pretty romantic tunes, Barbara Cook provides a contrastingly quiet charm. The Music Man is not pure cream, only nice, fresh half-and-half. But it particularly catches the jubilant oldtime energy of a small-town jamboree--an energy whose modern habitat may well be the musi-comedy stage.

Growing up in small-town Mason City, Iowa, Composer-Author-Lyricist Meredith Willson tootled his flute in the local band, watched the trotters at the county fair, pumped water for Saturday-night baths, was taught to beware of anyone who smoked cigarettes, especially tailor-mades. "Innocent--that was the adjective for Iowa," says Willson. "I didn't have to make anything up for The Music Man. All I had to do was remember."

At 55, veteran Music Man Willson still acts like a wide-eyed Iowa innocent. He is bowled over by the thumping success of his first musical ("I'm on Cloud 9012"), lavishes credit on the whole company for its "wholesome" approach to the job. "You hear all this business about Broadway sin and sex and smoke-filled rooms," Willson says, "but this company is different. It really is. Our kids weep with joy over the show, that's how much they feel about it. Do you know there hasn't been a gripe, not a bit of hysteria, not a fight from anyone since we started?"

Behind his Harold Lloyd glasses, Willson still looks much like the round-eyed boy wonder who packed up his flute at twelve and left Mason City for New York and a career as a versatile but erratic musician. At 19 he was good enough to play with John Philip Sousa, at 22 was playing under Toscanini with the New York Philharmonic. In 1929 he defected to radio, for the next two decades whipped up foamy musical souffles and sprightly chatter for such shows as Maxwell House Coffee Time, The Big Show. Along the way, he tried his hand at anything with a tune, crashed The Hit Parade (You and I, Two in Love), wrote two symphonies, several orchestral suites.

When he sat down two years ago to turn his recollections of Mason City into rhythm and song, Willson found the going slow. His trouble: too many memories and too many tunes. He rewrote the whole show, he vows, at least 20 times, turned out 38 songs that eventually were whittled down to 17. Finally he found he did his best work about 5 a.m. "I'd wake up and lie there and suddenly something would come clear," he says.

"Nothing prepares you for Broadway. All those years in radio with some guy holding up an applause card--that isn't show business. You aren't a success in show business until you do something that makes the people dig down in their pants pockets and buy a ticket." Last week so many people were digging down for tickets to his rollicking smash hit musical that Music Man Willson was a victim of his own success, had to watch one performance from standing room in the rear of the theater.

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