Those who are fond of “The Wells Fargo Wagon” might want to enter this contest.
Cervaise, I loved reading your well-thought-out words. Obviously a musical connoisseur! But I’m a-gonna disagree with you anyway. 
I sure could, and easily, too! I think TMM is just as flawed, if not moreso, as WSS – the inanity of ‘Shipoopie’, the repetitive nature of the barbershop songs, the copout ending… all drag the show down for me. Don’t get me wrong, I do love TMM, and like the OP I have very very fond memories of being introduced to this show by my late mom. (And Robert Preston’s performance in the film is one of my all-time favorites.) It’s a very good show indeed. But compared to WSS, it’s a trifle that had no lasting impact. WSS, with its gritty (for its day) storyline, integral Robbins choreography as storytelling technique, sublime Bernstein score and witty Sondheim lyrics (with a lapse or two), is superlative and was at the time widely acknowledged by critics as a breakthrough for American musical theater. Honestly I don’t know what the Tony folks were thinking! I guess TMM might have been a safer, less controversial choice, but why were they worried about safety? Really bizarre.
As a sidenote, I don’t think having a criminal, sleazy and/or ethically-challenged guy as a lead / antihero was that much of a breakthrough. Harold Hill was beaten to the punch by Billy in Carousel, the eponymous Pal Joey, and most of the guys in Guys and Dolls. Admittedly the last group were comic baddies whose crimes were whitewashed. But hey, so were Hill’s!
remember the year in which these were both produced. a musical about middle America? Lovely! Hooray! Let us honor it! a musical about gangs in NYC? one of which is a bunch of immigrants? and someone dies? horrible! no, we shall not honor it!
Heh. I know, but I just never associated that desire for middle-of-the-road acceptance (or fear of its disapproval) with the Tony awards or the live theater scene in general – historically, that community has seemed to be more accepting of controversial or innovative creative efforts than film or television of the same period. Could just be my own perception of it.
Just to be fair, Music Man may be about Middle America, but a Middle America in the (in nostalgic hindsight) golden years before the Great War, and a small town Middle America that never really existed outside Norman Rockwell’s covers for the Saturday Evening Post and Booth Tarkington’s Penrod stories. Non-the-less, it is great fun. Not a moral lesson, not high drama, just fun. In a lecture in Iowa City in 1958 Wilson said as much.