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Iowa Stubborn, cont’d

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I just went to a performance of The Music Man at the local middle school, and apart from the irony of seeing all these parents gush about their children's incompetent performance after seeing a show in which parents are parodied for doing that exact thing, it called to mind that my recent post about this show left a couple of things out.
 
For one thing, there's the librarian's argument at the end that it's really okay to be swindled as long as the swindler is making your ho-hum Midwestern life more exciting by giving you something to look forward to, even if that hope will inevitably be dashed. I can't say I've ever found that argument very convincing, but maybe it was just another insult to Iowans.
 
And then there's my pet peeve: the scale which the chorus sings in the song "Shipoopi", to the lyrics:
Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-si-do
Those aren't the right syllables for the scale they sing at all. Charitably, we could call it a mixolydian scale, but the notes really are so-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa-so. Surely Meredith Willson knew better. Maybe it's those ignorant Iowans again. Can't be because their local librarian/music teacher/intellectual hasn't taught them the right notes, can it?

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  2. I think the show is about forgiveness, love, and growth — away from dysfunction, and toward wholeness. Marian helped Harold to grow out of his con man self and realize that he was capable of much more than that … and Harold helped Marian grow out of her self-protective and defensively aloof bubble. They both grew, and in their growth the audience gets a big infusion of hope for humankind — "Maybe we can all become more loving, more forgiving, less judgmental, and more congruent in the way we live our lives and relate to other people" might be the voice of that hope. 
     
    And on a related tangent, I had the great privilege of seeing Dick van Dyke play Harold Hill in a Vegas production decades ago. WOW! Truly one of the best shows — and the best casting — I’ve ever seen.  
     
     

  3. Allen, sorry, but "Music Man" is and always has been my ideal as The Perfect Musical!  It’s a period piece, for heaven’s sake!  And not so far away from reality at that.  The same exact thing happened in Winnipeg in about the same time period, only it was an itenerant violin teacher who recruited a THOUSAND students and taught them in classes, which outraged all the private teachers!
     
    As to your second criticism, don’t forget that Marion was in love and therefore by definition out of her mind!
     
    And like Oscar Hammerstein, Willson simply used the familiar syllables in a way that made dramatic sense to him.  And don’t forget that he portrayed Harold Hill as NOT having graduated from the Gary Conservatory, class of ’08!!!  So it might indeed have been a VERY subtle dig, although I doubt it.
     
    And any writer who could make a barbershop quartet into a major character is a genius in MY book!  Even though he did NOT understand barbershop voicing and committed the unpardonable sin of give the melody to the baritone!!  I know the story of how he first heard the Buffalo Bills (at a Barbershop Parade in New Jersey) and conceived the idea of using them, from someone who was there at the time and hosting him, and the story is almost worth a Broadway script of its own!
     
    Too bad he only had one great show in him.  "Molly Brown" was OK, and enjoyable, but it wasn’t HIM and it showed.
     
    All the best,
    John
     
     

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