Friday, February 14, 2003

The Music Man Returns

First, a small confession. Though I’m not a great fan of musicals, I’ve listened to the songs from Meredith Wilson’s “The Music Man” many times over the years, starting in the early 1970s, when my family sometimes played the sound track while we ate dinner. With 76 trombones and 110 cornets and “rows and rows of the finest virtuosos” booming out of our stereo, you’d think we would have needed to raise our voices around the table, but, instead, we ate without speaking because we wanted to hear the lyrics. The Music Man, I knew even then, is not about the music. Like any good play, it’s about the words.

You probably know the story. In the middle of a successful confidence scheme, the con man, so-called Professor Harold Hill, has his heart softened by the people he encounters in the summer of 1912 in River City, Iowa. But the simple story comes wrapped in richer and edgier materials about language, manipulation, power, and status. Hill is a spellbinder who captures the attention of the townspeople with a miraculous piece of rhetorical hair-splitting. The town’s billiard table, he says, is a point of pride, but the new pool table is a gift from Satan himself. “That game with the fifteen numbered balls is the devil’s tool,” he says, “That spells trouble, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Pool.” Hill proposes to keep the town’s young ones “moral after school” by setting up and leading a boys’ band. He claims to have seen the five great marching bands of the previous generation playing together in what would have been the world’s first super-group – that explains the 76 trombones and the rows of virtuosos, of course. His verbal fireworks inspire the assembled townspeople to an ecstatic hallucination of a band and help him close the deal on the sale of instruments, instruction books, and band uniforms all around town. “I’d set my River City band against any town west of Chicago,” the mayor says when the hallucination is complete. “What band?” asks the clear-headed librarian Marian Paroo.

Many of the movie’s other incidents revolve around language and character – the people’s gossip and shop talk, their misunderstandings, their incoherence, their hobbyhorses and stock phrases. The mayor’s wife and her friends complain that Marian the librarian advocates dirty books – Chaucer, Rabelais, and worst of all, Balzac! Marian’s young brother, Winthrop, who mourns the loss of their father, has picked up a lisp and refuses to speak to anyone out of shame and grief. Whenever there’s any excitement in town, the teenagers’ language collapses into the dopey slang of the day: Great Honk! Ye gods! So’s your old man! And as false as the sales pitch is, Hill has grounded it on real dreams and aspirations, and even though “the professor” can’t read a note of music he manages to break through to troubled young Winthrop. He delivers Winthrop’s shiny new cornet himself, and in one of the movie’s most healing moments, the little boy can’t help but speak.

If you watch the new version of the movie, airing on ABC this Sunday evening and starring Matthew Broderick as Harold Hill, you’ll know right away whether it’s any good. If the dialogue has an edge to it, if it strikes to the heart of the characters, their weaknesses and strengths, then you’ll know the director has found the pulse of the work. If not, then all we’ll see will be the costumes and sets, the dancing and the big band numbers.

Here’s how you can tell, in the first five minutes, whether Broderick can fill Harold Hill and Robert Preston’s shoes. When four salesmen play poker on the train outside River City, one says to another, “How far are you going, friend?” With his back to the camera, not revealing himself just yet, the second man answers, “Wherever the people are as green as the money, friend.” From the pause before that final word, friend, and from the little bite in Harold Hill’s tone as he says it, you can tell what kind of man he is. You can tell from his words that he’s moving faster than anybody else in the room. If Harold Hill has that bite, that edge, that speedy falseness, right from the start, then it will really mean something, later on, when Winthrop challenges him and the fly-by-night salesman finally looks him in the eye and tells the truth. That’s when the man of many words becomes a man of his word.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on February 14, 2003
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