One Step from Drink and Debauchery
The Music Man at The New Theatre can’t be inspected too closely. On the one hand, it salutes small-town America circa 1912 and believes that music and love can straighten out an entire village’s kinks. Hold it up to the light and it becomes a subtle but sinister examination of how one man exploits a community’s naiveté. Though this production vigorously leans to the former, it does make its triple-threat writer-composer-lyricist Meredith Willson ripe for renewed scrutiny.
Though the score is sporadically guilty of schlock, such as the nonsensical “Shipoopi,” it also contains numbers that rank among the most interesting show music of their time. “Marian the Librarian” is a dark seduction of flats and sharps that plays slyly against the show’s sugary shell. And “Ya Got Trouble,” a sort of rap number tailored originally to Robert Preston’s vocal limitations, can be thematically linked to conservative pols’ paranoiac rants about the National Endowment for the Arts. When boys begin to utter such expletives as “swell,” the title character warns, the next step is drink and debauchery.
But it is all a clever ruse manufactured by this ersatz professor, Harold Hill, played here by an utterly winning Jim Korinke. His intent is to take in the gullible Iowans; he’ll pick their pockets and then disappear. What he didn’t count on was the feisty and allegedly trampy Marian Paroo, given a stern backbone with a caramel center by the charming Lori Blalock. She’s on to Harold three days after his arrival, and he can’t help but swoon.
Maybe Korinke isn’t as calculating as he might have been. When Marian’s little brother, Winthrop (Garrett Houghton), calls Harold a “dirty rotten crook,” Korinke’s affirmation of the boy’s charge isn’t very persuasive. But the actor’s vocal strengths certainly are, and the show can be forgiven its clean break from its shady alter ego.
Gregory Hill’s sets are so well-painted, their one-dimensionality never intrudes. Director Dennis Hennessy also fosters good performances from Patty Tiffany, Addison Myers, and especially James Andrew Wright as Harold’s venal colleague, whose posturing is only about jealousy. If Debra Bluford’s Eulalie Shinn isn’t the best role she’s ever received, she still manages to wring her share of laughs as the put-upon mayor’s wife.
The current revival of The Music Man on Broadway couldn’t have been more warmly received, and it would be fascinating to see director Susan Stroman’s take on the show. It has to be superior to the show that stole its Tony Award, Kiss Me Kate, the most overrated show on that city’s theater strip. Compared to that show’s stench of mothballs, this city’s Music Man is a garden of earthly delights.
