The Music Man
Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man has a reputation as for sweetness, but there’s more than a little sour mixed in. River City, Iowa—the small turn-of-the-century town that gets taken in by the musical’s antihero, Professor Harold Hill—is a crabbed little burg inhabited by cranks and fools, and much of Wilson’s top-notch score is written in the surprising rhythms of pattering salesmen and gossiping hens. In Mary Zimmerman’s revival for the Goodman Theatre, it’s these notes that come through most strongly, leaving a pleasantly astringent aftertaste.
As is usually the case with Zimmernan, the show is visually stunning: Designer Dan Ostling’s set presents River City as a Whistler landscape in clapboard, with lofty prosceniums framing an endless horizon. (Grant Wood’s American Gothic gets an explicit shout-out.) But the show’s characters can get lost within the sheer amount of space that Zimmerman’s staging conjures— none more so that Geoff Packard’s oddly retiring Hill. Even as the man brazenly swindles an entire town into starting a boy’s band—with instruments, sheet music and uniforms that he himself will supply—Packard’s voice hardly rises above a murmur. It’s a performance full of shy glances and shrugging shoulders, and this curious lack of con-man swagger spills over into his persistent wooing the town’s skeptical librarian, Marian Paroo (Monica West).
