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The curtain drops at 11:05. The pit orchestra swings into a blasting reprise of the show's big tune, a walloping march called Seventy-Six Trombones. The audience applauds. Up goes the curtain again. And onstage for the curtain call throng the 67 men, women, boys and girls of the cast—the folks of River City, Iowa ("pop. 2,212"), in the summer of 1912. Marching two by two they go, first to one side, then to the other, and then back again. They pantomime the players of a big brass band —trombones sliding, cornets flashing, cymbals smashing, piccolos chirping, wood winds whining, drumheads cracking. The music bugles in smashing thunderclaps.
Abruptly, as if by some magical cue from the conductor, the 1,695 hypnotized customers in the audience begin to slam their hands together in rhythm to the march. The music wells, and the actors turn, dip, twist and prance. The applause pounds on in martial time as, a-tatatatat, a-tatatatat, the music pours up from the pit and gilds the hall with shimmering sheets of brass. At last the house lights come on, and the customers shoulder their way to the door, hands burning and hearts still tingling with a rediscovery of a bygone Fourth of July—a time when the franks were fat and hot and the firecrackers spat showers of sparks and the drum major's spinning baton flashed in the sun, and the grass in the park felt as soft as corn silk underfoot. Since opening night last Dec. 19, every audience has reacted in this same wholehearted way to The Music Man, Broadway's biggest musical hit.
Plot for a Graveyard. Some smart Broadway money was betting that Music Man would fall flat on its corn husks when it opened at the Majestic Theater. By Broadway standards, it is simpleminded and unsophisticated. It is also warmhearted, brilliantly performed and a lot of fun. The Music Man is Professor Harold Hill, a glib-tongued, fast-footed, woman-chasing rascal of a traveling salesman from Gary, Ind., who bursts into staid River City, charms a frozen-faced populace into digging into their cookie jars and mattresses to buy instruments and uniforms for a boys' marching band that will be led by Professor Hill himself. The show winds up with an enlivened townsfolk who know the score, and a mildly reformed Pied Piper who has scored with the pretty librarian.
Before opening night, this sort of plot was regarded by Broadway wiseacres as something that belongs in the theatrical graveyard. But when the opening-night curtain fell, most critics were ecstatic. "Marvelous," said the New York Times's Brooks Atkinson. "If Mark Twain could have collaborated with Vachel Lindsay, they might have devised a rhythmic lark like The Music Man, which is as American as apple pie and a Fourth of July oration." Cheered the Herald Tribune's Walter Kerr: "The brightest, breeziest, most winning new musical to come along since My Fair Lady enchanted us all. [It's] a wow. A nice wow."