The New York City Opera production of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man,” at Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater, is a sad failure. Bob Gunton is a versatile and accomplished actor—I’ve enjoyed watching him in Shakespeare, musical comedy, and contemporary drama. Earlier this season, he even managed to snatch a bit of victory from the jaws of “Roza,” in the unlikely role of a prizefighter turned transvestite. So I had hopes for his performance as Professor Harold Hill; at any rate, there were hopes mixed in with whatever fears I had about seeing anyone other than Robert Preston in the role. As it turns out, one’s memory of the role-creating star has little to do with one’s disappointment in Mr. Gunton and the City Opera revival: he and it fail on their own terms.
Willson’s hero is primarily an orator. Talking, not singing, is what he is good at—one reason that it seems odd for an opera company to produce this show. Mr. Gunton’s salesman, who is bland and colorless at the best of times—watching him is a little like watching Mister Rogers—is at his worst in spoken dialogue. In song and dance he only lacks luster; in speech he lacks personality, in motion he lack conviction. Watching him trying to reconstruct the soft-shoe shuffle that Preston made famous, waving his hands around a little, you realize that what you’re seeing is the gestural equivalent of lip-synching. In Morton DaCosta’s 1963 movie, Preston gave the impression of being unable to keep still—and in fact the idea of movement is written into the stage version: the dull, stolid blocking of “Iowa Stubborn”—the song in which the chorus of dull, stolid Midwesterners, declaring their literal-mindedness and lack of imagination, moves squarely forward and back en masse—is there to be broken in on by the music man’s dynamism and energy. As Mr. Gunton propels himself from one place to another on the State Theatre’s vast stage, he makes you feel that he’d be happier if he could stay put.
The City Opera has been producing revivals of Broadway musicals for three seasons now—first “Brigadoon,” then “South Pacific,” and now “The Music Man.” Still, it’s worth asking why this particular show. It’s one thing to produce “Candide”—which originally failed in the commercial arena despite its wonderfully witty score—or a musical of historical importance (like “South Pacific” or “Sweeney Todd,” which, like “Candide,” has entered the City Opera repertory). Even somewhat dated shows, like “Brigadoon,” have a sort of display-case historical value. But “The Music Man” is not dated. It’s not out of commission: it gets produced all the time in schools and dinner theaters across the country. If the City Opera version were respectable—if it offered relief from the crassness and vulgarity of so many Broadway revivals—it would be welcome. Just to have given us a chance to hear unamplified singing would have been a worthy mission for one of New York’s premiere opera companies. But the City Opera production is as over-miked as anything on Broadway.
Curiously, this revival makes one appreciate the commercial theater in all its blatant sexiness. It is, after all, sex (in the form of music) that Professor Hill brings to 1912 Iowa. The cleverness of Willson’s score lay in his insistence on discovering music in the sounds of everyday life: in commuters talking shop, in women gossiping, in the disposition of four men’s voices—even in a librarian’s name. A twist on the traveling-salesman joke, “The Music Man” is essentially a morality play—a conflict between salvation and seduction—about the tension between the good-girlism of the musical-comedy heroine and her desire to be seduced. But the matronly Leigh Munro, who plays Marian here, doesn’t want to be seduced, any more than Bob Gunton wants to seduce her. When the National Theater in London staged a revival of “Guys and Dolls,” in 1982, it was reorchestrated, clothed in a completely different sound: we went out humming new harmonies. The orchestrations for the current production of “The Music Man” (by Don Walker)—like the set (by David Jenkins) and the choreography (by Marcia Milgrom Dodge)—seem like facsimiles of the orchestrations in the movie, but with the life kicked out of them. The only effect the director, Arthur Masella, has had on “The Music Man” is desexualize it, to touch it with the dead hand of culture. The mayor’s daughter (Jill Powell) has been made to seem more half-witted than prepubescent; the barbershop singing is restrained and tasteful; the juvenile delinquent (Steven M. Schultz) seems more like a candidate for law school than for the reformatory. Moreover, there’s no tension between what the Iowans represent and what the salesman represents: the traveling salesman is more of a librarian than the librarian.
Of course, it’s obvious why the City Opera is putting on “The Music Man”: it is a family show, and suddenly there is an audience for family shows. Granted, audiences (i.e., subscribers) mean funding, but do we really want to see the City Opera turned briefly into an up-market dinner theater every year when the ballet closes down for the season? Can we even afford it? Productions like this don’t do the public any favors. They only mislead the innocent and confuse the nostalgic: one could attend the City Opera production and leave thinking “The Music Man” a rotten show.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, March 21, 1988