The week before last, I watched a community production of Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man. The show was delightful. It was skillfully staged, gloriously sung, and packed a powerful message about recognizing and appreciating the good that imperfect people bring into your life. But there was another message, a treacherous one, that left me musing on how we who want to use musicals to build Beloved Community need to reach higher and deeper than the family classics of Broadway’s golden age.
In predominantly church-going communities like mine, you see a lot of the same classic Broadway returning to the stage, year after year. It’s not just that these shows are proven money-makers. It’s also that they’re family-friendly: their language is decorous, they’re often short on sexual innuendo, and their message supports married people staying married. But our nostalgia for the 1940s and 50s may be misplaced. That was a time with its own deep problems, like racial segregation. And Broadway’s profit-focused priorities left it prone to propagating insidious messages along with the inspiring ones.
In The Music Man, it’s the myth that you can reform a scoundrel by applying love without any expectations. This is persuasively spun, because it’s presented right alongside Marian Paroo’s ennobling choice to forgive Harold Hill for being a self-serving con man and to thank him for all the good that he has, almost accidentally, brought into her life. She is exquisite when she tells her little brother Winthrop that Harold wasn’t lying when he duped the whole town into buying instruments and uniforms for a fictional band that he wouldn’t be around to lead, once he got their money.
“It all happened, just like he said,” Marian explains. “The lights and the flags and the colours and the cymbals…in the way every kid in this town walked around here the last three weeks, and looked and acted. Especially you, and the parents too.” Winthrop used to be so ashamed of his lisp that he almost never spoke… until he got caught up in the excitement of the promised band. So Marian forgives Harold’s duplicity. She has no regrets, and now she urges him to get out of town before an angry mob catches up with him.
But Harold refuses to flee because he’s finally fallen in love. When we see him choose to face the music so he can stay with Marian, and when, contrary to all plausibility, the music turns out to be his “band” playing a semi-discernable rendition of the Minuet in G, we actually believe in a happily-ever-after for Marian and Harold. We applaud, even leap to our feet once the jealous mayor relents and Harold is released into Marian’s arms. We believe that he’s going to stay happily caught by that “wide-eyed, innocent, wholesome” girl who demolished the walls around his heart by loving him without expecting anything in return. Now that Harold has also heard the bells on the hill, we feel assured that he has given up his self-serving ways and he’s going to give due consideration to other people, especially Marian and her family.
But how likely is that, really? About as likely as a couple dozen boys magically learning to play their band instruments just by thinking about the Minuet in G.
Remember that Harold’s character has been exhaustively revealed to us since the first scene. He’s bold, charismatic, and wholly self-centered. He takes delight in duping the most skeptical with his considerable address. He used to peddle steam engines until somebody actually invented one. Now, he sells boys’ bands; passing himself off as an accomplished musician just long enough to collect the commission on instruments and uniforms for a town full of boys. In order to do that, though, he has to keep any bonafide musicians from blowing his cover. So, he’s made a practice of wooing the music teacher in every town he’s worked. As a rival later tells Marian, who is River City’s music teacher, he’s “got a girl in every county in Illinois, and he's taken it from every one of them - and that’s 102 counties.”
When he’s collected his commissions in both money and pleasure, he flees town and moves on to another, without giving a thought to the people who’ve relied on his promises. He’s happy to play the role of suitor to any woman who serves his purposes, and he’s devoid of any compunctions about compromising her future prospects. No way is he going to give his heart to any virgin – she’ll entrap him into marriage! He sings, “I cheer, I rave, for the virtue I’m too late to save… I smile, I grin, when the gal with a touch of sin walks in.” And it’s not like he thinks such women are happier or better off. To the contrary: “The sadder-but-wiser girl for me.”
In River City, Harold holds true to form. In the process, he inadvertently does a lot of good. He distracts the ever-quarrelsome men of the school board from looking into his credentials by turning them into a barbershop quartet. Now they prefer harmonizing over arguing. He turns the town trouble-maker into his respected assistant. He flatters his critics into pursuing the arts. He takes Marian’s kid brother fishing and instills confidence in place of the boy’s paralyzing self-consciousness. And all of this is done to forward his con, with the full intention of running off with their money as soon as his commissions arrive.
But first, he plans to seduce Marian on his way out. Only Marian arrives late to their rendezvous, having just learned that he’s been using her for his con. She has decided to be grateful, in spite of his motivations, for his kindness to her brother and his teaching her heart to love. She tells him she knows he’s a fraud and hands him the evidence she’s been holding onto for weeks, with her thanks. And then she walks away.
How can she be anything but irresistible to a man who deals in promises he doesn’t intend to fulfill? Here’s a woman who loves him without any expectation of fidelity or follow through. She says he doesn’t owe her anything, and there’s the rub. At this moment in time, he doesn’t. She saw through him long ago, never relied on any of his promises, and they haven’t even kissed. But will she feel the same when she’s entrusted her entire future to his care?
In the glow of new-discovered love, he sees himself the way she sees him and behaves like a changed man. But will he be able to maintain that when the initial glow wears off? Or will the habits of a lifetime reassert themselves? Will he spend the rest of his life trying to con her, while she keeps pouring love without expectations at him, desperately hoping to reawaken the man who once faced the music on her behalf, until her well of love runs dry?
I am not trying to argue against the genuine and incomparable power of unconditional love, or to say that Harold’s sudden desire to reform isn’t real. I think it is. But he has a whole lot to do in reckoning with his past and changing his personal habits, before he can be a match for Marian. Unconditional love is mighty and should be freely given. Trust, however, needs to be earned. Otherwise, you can wind up relying on someone who is unprepared in ways that are deeply detrimental to the relationship as well as to the people in it.
Harold is not yet ready to be relied upon. He is not even ready to acknowledge to himself that he used Winthrop to win Marian.
“You’re a wonderful kid,” he tells the boy, who is devastated by his lies and false friendship. “I thought so from the first. That’s why I wanted you in the band, just so you’d stop moping around feeling sorry for yourself.”
“What band?” Winthrop fires back.
“I always think there’s a band, kid,” Harold replies.
There’s no apology here, no connection with Winthrop’s pain or with that of the countless people who’ve had their trust in him betrayed.
Nor does he apologize to anyone in the town. He’s carted away by a mob who are talking about tarring and feathering him, but they are dissuaded by a dressing-down from Marian, not an apology from Harold. Then the band arrives on the scene, all the boys with their instruments, in uniform. They look to Harold to lead them. He starts waving the baton that Marian hands him and, miraculously, the boys start playing awkward but discernible music. Suddenly Harold is the town hero, easy as that.
The message to scoundrels is you just need to find that person who really loves you, and all your problems will disappear. The message to the rest of us: if we can learn to love like Marian loves and, despite all cautionary evidence, trust people to rise to what we see in them, we can reform our scoundrels too. It doesn’t work that way in real life, but as long as we believe it, we’ll keep trying.
Now, to the bigger picture. I have wondered why so many classic Broadway musicals have us rooting for relationships that would never work in real life. In My Fair Lady, why does Eliza Doolittle sing “Without You” to Henry Higgins, bid him a final farewell when he claims to have created a woman in her, and then return to his quarters to docilely accept his, “Where the devil are my slippers?” In Guys and Dolls, why do we believe that Sky and Nathan will actually give up gambling once Sarah and Adelaide decide to marry them now and reform them later? And so forth.
I’m beginning to believe that it has a lot to do with the messages that sold well during Broadway’s Golden Age. During the 40s and 50s, tickets were bought by the breadwinners, the men. In his book The Secret Life of the American Musical, Broadway producer Jack Viertel declares, “for decades, the principal responsibility of the Broadway musical was to be an effective aphrodisiac.” What could be more effective than to persuade women to root for an unlikely couple, to inspire them with visions of love that conquers all, and to pair the long-suffering leading lady with a leading man who made the theatre-going husband look good by comparison? I doubt that the librettists and lyricists realized they were propagating messages that would wreak havoc in people’s lives. I think they just followed their gut on what would sell.
Why does all of this matter? Because if we are going to create, produce and promote world-class musicals that build Beloved Community, we need to be mindful of all our messages. Not just the powerfully positive ones that make our musicals work, but also the potentially destructive ones. We need to listen to each other in order to become aware of the destructive messaging that doesn’t even make it onto our radar. And we need to keep working until we get it right.
Back to The Music Man. Could that story be told in a way that conveys the power of unconditional love as well as the importance of allowing your loved ones to earn your trust before you pledge it? I think it could. Here’s a rough alternative ending, picking up after Marian and Winthrop both urge Harold to go before the mob catches him and he says, “I can’t go… For the first time in my life, I got my foot caught in the door.”
Marian: No. Go! I’ve read Balzac. This is not what I want.
Harold: Me?
Marian: A life on the run. Always having to skip town when my friends get tired of being swindled by my husband.
Harold: No, darling! I’ll be an honest man.
Marian (fondly): “I always think there’s a band?” Dear Harold, you don’t know where to start.
Constable appears at the door. Harold is handcuffed and carted off to the town hall, where everyone is assembled, including the boys, dressed in uniform and holding their instruments at the ready. Tommy is arguing with the Mayor.
Tommy: Professor Hill is our friend. He wouldn’t trick us, use me to help him steal from the whole town!
Mayor: Sure as legs he is. (Hands Harold a baton).
Harold: Think boys, think! (Starts waving the baton. Boys make enthusiastic blats on their instruments but nothing like music comes out. They lower their instruments and look at him, confused).
Tommy: Professor Hill?
Harold: Sorry Tommy. It’s like the mayor says. I was using you. All of you. I’ve never stuck around before to see what happens after, and I’m…
(Tommy knocks him to the ground with a facer. Mayor puts an arm around the boy).
Zaneeta: Ye gods!
(School board members and Constable cart Harold off stage, while he pleads and shouts desperate apologies).
Final Scene:
Paroo living room. Mrs. Paroo knits in the corner. Marian stands near the piano as cross-hands piece is being played by Amaryllis' little sister, Marigold - played by the same actress as Amaryllis. She hits the wrong final note and Marian corrects her.
Marian: That’s fine, Marigold. You remind me so much of your sister Amaryllis at your age, and now, she’s winning competitions at the state fair.
Marigold: Can I go now, Miss Marian. I’m supposed to babysit for Zaneeta Djilas.
Marian: Yes, go ahead.
Marigold leaves. Marian sits at the piano and starts playing GOODNIGHT MY SOMEONE.
Mrs. Paroo: You’re missing him again. If you don’t mind my saying so, that was a fine catch you let slip through your fingers. And now you wish you’d gone with him.
Marian: No. I wish he’d come back. (Stands, crosses to Winthrop’s cornet and caresses it as she sings GOODNIGHT MY SOMEONE)
Marian is absorbed in her song and doesn’t hear a knock at the door. Mrs. Paroo answers and starts to exclaim when Harold Hill walks in. He holds a finger to his lips. Goes to the piano and starts playing the cross-hands piece, accompanying Marian’s song. He plays the final note correctly.
Marian: Marigold, that was excellent. (Turns toward the piano). Harold?
Harold: At last.
Marian: You never wrote.
Harold: I wasn’t sure I could stay the course. I almost didn’t. And I didn’t want to give the postmistress any fuel for gossip against you.
Marian: But Gary Conservatory class of ‘16 graduated four months ago.
Harold: I’ve been making reparations in 102 counties.
Marian: Oh.
Harold: I’ve been helping my classmates find jobs in towns full of eager boys and top-of-the-line band instruments.
Marian: And the music teachers?
Harold: You can’t make anything right by offering a heart that already belongs to someone else.
(Sings):
THERE WAS LOVE ALL AROUND
BUT I NEVER HEARD IT SINGING
NO I NEVER HEARD IT AT ALL
Harold and Marian: TILL THERE WAS YOU
They kiss.
What do you think? Would you keep The Music Man the same, or do you wish for an ending more like this?
I love this new ending. I'd never considered the implausibility of relationships in plays. I suppose the same holds true for movies and books. I suppose sometimes it is chosen for an emotional rollercoaster (or other reasons, like the one you mentioned), but doesn't let people see what healthy relationships look like or offer anything of value for healing or improving their own relationships.