I remember a night When My Mom and I took a bus downtown and ate at King Fong’s Chinese Restaurant then went to the Orpheum and saw “The Music Man.” We took the bus home and got an ice cream cone to eat on the walk home from the bus stop. This was my first Chinese food and my first pistachio ice cream cone.
Mom passed away seven years ago, and I miss her every day. I remember this movie outing like it happened last week. It was forty five years ago. I was nine years old. Tonight, I am up later than I should be, and I have had maybe more wine to drink than I should have, but I am remembering that night so long ago, and watching the movie through eyes oddly blurred…
Growing up my dad did a lot of local theater. He was in the Music Man several times. I also tried out for little Opies part but got relegated to the chorus…Damnit, now I’m gonna be singing Shapoopie all day…
Dad’s been gone 16 yrs but i STILL have the whole score in my head.
One of my (many) favorite musicals. Robert Preston was perfectly cast as Professor Harold Hill (although I would have loved to have seen Dick Van Dyke when he was in a short-run 1980 revival).
If you get a chance, however, be sure you miss the TV version with Matthew Broderick.
When the grandkids chipped in together to buy our grandparents their first VCR (I was just out of high school, and the oldest) I also included a VHS copy of this movie. It was one of my grandfather’s favorites.
What a great tribute to your mom. Great post. I love the movie too, even though I’m usually ambivalent about musicals. But there are two scenes in that movie where the music and the action go together perfectly. One is when the women are standing around talking, and there are chickens pecking around in the background, and the music is this plinky chirp-chirp tune. And the other is when the men are on the train and the music is beating out in rhythm to the train’s engine. Those two scenes make the movie for me. Come to think of it, I saw it for the first time with my mom, too. When I was a teenager, watching old movies on VHS was one of the few ways I could actually communicate with Mom. OK, now I’m getting choked up, so back to the politics thread…
I love the musical. One nice thing is that the Robert Preston movie had the same director as the stage show, so they filmed the show with few alterations.
I played Marcellus in a student production, and saw the revival on stage a couple of years ago. It’s really one of the top musicals out there.
I think I’ve seen The Music Man once. Maybe twice. But 76 Trombones is one of those songs that somehow became lodged in my memory as I was growing up. I’ve set the DVR for the next showing on HBOFW.
I love The Music Man! I was watching it the other night on HBO, too. SO many good songs!
It always reminds me of a joke from Happy Days. Mr. & Mrs. C were coming home from a night at the movies, and they had seen TMM. Mrs. C says something like, “And wasn’t that Winthrop cute? He reminded me so much of Richie when he was a little boy!”
I love that movie. I also saw the Dick Van Dyke revival (with my mother, co-incidentally), but Dick just didn’t have that undercurrent of larceny that Preston did. I mean, Harold Hill is lacrenous, no doubt about it, but with DVD you just knew there was a heart of gold under all that. With Preston, I had my doubts.
My father, in his inexplicable love for Broadway musicals, once proclaimed TMM to be the most American of musicals. Set in a small town, dialog and score that’s more often conversational than show stopping, even the story line (small time con man falls in love and goes straight. Sort of Damon Runyon in Iowa.)
By the same standards, he also declared Our Town to be the most American drama.
I used to be able to sing both parts of “The Piano Lesson” all by myself, complete with authentic sounding brogue. Can’t do it anymore - too old - no breath control
eta
I saw the 2000 revival with Craig Bierko - I swear he was channelling Robert Preston
Love MM. It’s just so darned…clever, with all the word play and musical jokes. My only quibble is the hack direction by Morton DaCosta…yes, we get that the patter in Rock Island matches the train sounds…you don’t need to cut back and forth to the wheels turning. And the spotlight fadeouts…gack. So I wondered how it would look in hands of a better director – but then we get the Matthew Broderick version. So we may never know.
(Bit of trivia I just heard on the radio, on the 50th anniversary of the opening of West Side Story. WSS didn’t make much of a splash that year – all the Tonys went to Music Man.)
That was a wonderful production. I saw that with a friend and her mother and we had a terrific time. Her mother died a few years after that, and I always remember our trip to see The Music Man when I think of her.
I’m still unhappy that they didn’t cast Barbara Cook in the movie. She’s (still) phenomenal.
I saw his version of The Producers a while back, and I thought it was decent. But I’d never seen any other versions of it…
I saw him as Professor Harold Hill, and all I could think was 1) they didn’t appear to change a damn thing, it was a scene-for-scene remake, and 2) Broderick is about 100,000 light years from Robert Preston.
I saw it live once with Forest Tucker, who was sort of a Robert Preston clone (and a very distant relative).
With respect to the ending, which I always thought was a cop-out and weak, I refer to the “Music Man Syndrome” when someone asks me why anyone would want to watch a video I made at our local school. They want to watch it for the same reason that the kid’s band sounded good at the end to the parents – “That’s my Johnny on the tuba!”
Meredith Willson was different from most musical theatre writers of the era – he wrote not only the music and lyrics, but the book (dialogue) as well. Other works were typically by teams – Sondheim/Bernstein, Lerner/Lowe, Rogers/Hammerstein, Rogers/Hart…
