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By last week The Music Man was a well-established wow. Ticket-hungry New Yorkers and summer visitors swarmed around the box office at every performance, trying to wangle one or two seats in the orchestra ($8.05)—or even a square foot of standing space ($3). The Music Man was the toughest ticket in town, even harder to snag than My Fair Lady, and, for expense-account buyers, worth the $50 scalpers' price.
Business was so good that the gross topped $2,250,000 last week. The producers paid off the $300,000 nut to 200 investors within four months of the opening, are now grossing $70,000 a week, of which $19,000 is clean profit. More than 20 different Music Man recordings are selling like pinwheels on the third of July. The marching band arrangement of Seventy-Six Trombones is already on the music racks of more than 6,000 brass bands across the U.S. And the ultimate recognition—from the business world—is already at the stage door: toy manufacturers want to make Music Man toys; clothing firms want to manufacture Music Man caps, shirts and sweaters.
Fat Lady & Barbershop Quartet. How could a show, blended with such fine old period pieces as a player piano, a sputtering mayor, a fat lady who dances, a plain-Jane librarian—even a redheaded lisping boy and a celluloid-dickeyed barbershop quartet—make the grade on coldhearted Broadway? Talent is only part of the answer. Many an able combination of stage talent has been hooted off the boards on opening night. In this case, there happened to be a just-right blending of first-rate talents.
Broadway's top producer this season, 53-year-old Kermit (Look Homeward, Angel] Bloomgarden (TIME, April 21), had the good fortune to form a team of three men with widely varied experience in show business: Composer (You and I, Two in Love] and oldtime Radio Performer Meredith Willson, 56, the jovial lowan who in his first try for the theater wrote book, music and lyrics; Director (No Time for Sergeants, Auntie Mame) Morton Da Costa, 44, who gave the show its sparkle and pace; and the Music Man himself, longtime Cinemactor Robert Preston, 40, known vaguely to millions of moviegoers for years as the handsome, thick-browed heavy of B pictures who rarely got the girl.
There is nothing heavy about Bob Preston's Music Man. Feathery-footed, nimble-fingered, he is brassy, sassy and seemingly inexhaustible. Setting his style in his first big scene, he pounces on River City, peopled by folk straight out of Grant Wood's famed painting, American Gothic (one farm couple, in fact, gives a hilarious imitation, pitchfork and all, of the pair in the painting). River Cityans are high-minded, self-righteous, and
So by God stubborn we can stand touchin' noses
For a week at a time and never see eye-to-eye.
Furthermore, some of the gossips regard Librarian-Piano Teacher Marian Paroo (Barbara Cook) as something of a hussy because she approves of such racy authors as "Chaucer, Rabelais and Balzac." In this setting of cornfield provincialism, the Music Man decides to stir up a little trouble to distract attention from his own shenanigans. His horrifying revelation to the townspeople: a pool table has been installed in the billiard parlor.