“Whadaya Talk Whadaya Talk Whadaya Talk”

How the Opening Number Establishes The Music Man as the GOAT

“Words holler at me.” — Meredith Willson

Oh ho, another revival of Meredith Willson’s seminal classic The Music Man is coming down to Broadway and with it the agonized groans from its detractors. “UGH, why is this backwards, old school, boring piece of Norman Rockwell idealism being dragged out of its grave when there are more important things to put on our stages like BEETLEJUICE?!” The easy answer is that it’s a well-established classic with Wolverine attached as the lead so it’s going to sell as quickly as Harold Hill’s trombones. However, the truer answer to the show’s staying power is a little more nuanced than one might initially see.

Everyone has a classic musical that they cannot stand, but it seems that in recent years The Music Man receives most of this ire. Why is that? One reason could be that people consider the musical old fashioned. That the show is a relic not only of the time it takes place, 1912, in but the time it was written, 1954. A musical that could look back at the “Aw shucks” normalcy of small-town American life before industrialization, two world wars, and an economic depression hit the country like a ton of bricks cannot possibly connect to modern audiences. It is a “nice” story taking place in a “nice” time written during another “nice” time for American prosperity. Therefore, how can something like that be relevant in today’s cultural climate?

The Music Man’s just-folks appearance is just that. An appearance. Underneath the surface is a much more deceptive story about a man conning an entire town, selling them on a dream knowing that he’s taking them on a ride. That is until the tables turn as he becomes invested in the people he befriends and the very ideals he’s selling. It is a story of a man entering a repressed town only to liberate them and rehabilitate himself thanks to the unifying power of music.

The biggest strength of The Music Man lies in its use of music. Writer and composer Meredith Willson was fascinated by the relationship between speech and song and used The Music Man to explore that idea. What makes The Music Man so effective is its ability to seamlessly transition from dialogue to song and vice versa. It finds the music within our own reality and it’s clear even from its opening number.