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[0:07] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process.

[0:21] David Armstrong: I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode The Musicals of Meredith Wilson, Part 1.

[0:33] David Armstrong: My guest today is author Dominick McHugh, whose latest book is titled The Big Parade: Meredith Wilson's Musicals from The Music Man to 1491.

[0:43] David Armstrong: Dominick is professor of musicology at the University of Sheffield in the UK.

[0:49] David Armstrong: His previous books include Loverly, The Life and Times of My Fair Lady, Adapting The Wizard of Oz, Musical Versions from Baum to MGM and Beyond, and he's also served as editor for The Letters of Cole Porter and The Complete Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner.

[1:04] David Armstrong: As it turns out, the timing of this episode couldn't be more on point, since after being derailed when both of its stars contracted COVID, the big new Broadway revival of The Music Man starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster is supposed to return to Broadway tonight.

[1:21] David Armstrong: Many listeners will know by now that The Music Man is one of my all-time favorite musicals, and one that I consider to be one of the greatest musicals of all time as well.

[1:31] David Armstrong: And it's one that I know backwards and forwards, inside and out.

[1:35] David Armstrong: Over the course of my career, I've danced in it, choreographed it, produced it, lectured about it, and seen it countless times.

[1:42] David Armstrong: So it was a great pleasure to discover in The Big Parade so many remarkable and surprising things that I didn't know about the show, and the extraordinary struggles and challenges that Meredith Wilson grappled with during its development, including, as recently reported in the New York Times, his efforts to include a disabled character in the show who was intended as a major focus of the story.

[2:04] David Armstrong: And that's only half of the book. The rest covers Wilson's other four major musicals, about which I knew even less.

[2:11] David Armstrong: I found it all to be fascinating, and I think you will as well.

[2:14] David Armstrong: Here we go. Welcome, Dominick.

[2:17] Dominick McHugh: Thank you so much for joining me today on Broadway Nation.

[2:19] Dominick McHugh: Oh, thank you so much for making time for me.

[2:21] Dominick McHugh: I so enjoyed reading your new book, The Big Parade.

[2:25] Dominick McHugh: There have been biographies of Meredith Wilson, including his autobiographies, but this is the first look at all of his Broadway musicals together. Is that correct?

[2:33] Dominick McHugh: Yeah, I think so. There were maybe one or two dissertations, but this is the first time someone's looked at the musicals, and I really thought he's such an unusual figure that he deserved to have a book about all four of them.

[2:43] Dominick McHugh: Originally, I was talking to the publisher about just doing The Music Man, but I thought if I do that and if I do a really detailed book about The Music Man, then no one will ever write about 1491. And it's kind of sad. So that's how it ended up happening.

[2:55] Dominick McHugh: I think it's fascinating at the context that you provide using all four shows. I mean, the first half of the book is The Music Man, and the second half of the book are the other three shows, which I think is the right proportion. But it's not that we're not interested in those other shows. In fact, sometimes I know a lot of people find flop shows more interesting than hit shows. What was it that inspired you to take this on? What was it about Wilson? You've written about many other figures who have much bigger careers on Broadway. Why Wilson?

[3:21] Dominick McHugh: I just have fun. I'm an academic, and it is my job to produce research and serious publications, but I basically only ever do things that I want to do that I'm gonna find enjoyable. My favorite musical is My Fair Lady, so I did my PhD on that, and then I turned it into a book, and then I did more work on Lerner and Loewe. And then my second favorite musical is The Music Man. So here we are. It's literally as simple as that.

[3:42] Dominick McHugh: And the funny thing to me though about those projects is there hadn't been a book about My Fair Lady or very much on Lerner and Loewe, and there hasn't been much on Meredith Wilson or The Music Man, despite that being such a big show, and obviously it's coming back to Broadway now. But that's been a treat because it's not like having to find out, you know, small extra new things. Actually, it was possible to just start from scratch and say, how are these musicals written? And then the other thing is I just found his overall career interesting. He had all these non-Broadway activities before he wrote The Music Man at the age of 55, or he was 55 when it had its premiere on Broadway, and then he wrote this small group of shows and then retired because he was ready to retire. So it's a really curious overall picture and story. I became interested in all of that as well as The Music Man, and that's how the book took its shape.

[4:28] David Armstrong: I think what you just said, him being in his fifties when he starts to write a Broadway musical, is really one of the most extraordinary things about Meredith Wilson. It's a young person's game to a certain extent. Everybody else starts in their twenties or even at least in their thirties, and then that he takes on the challenge of writing the book, the music, and the lyrics for a show. And as we know, you can count on at least one hand the hit musicals that have come from someone being the sole author of a musical. Most people are sort of giving up by the age of 55. Very often Broadway writers in their twenties or thirties. They're of the generation that's most present on Broadway, and therefore they have their big hit, and then they become veterans, and yes, they might produce more, but they tend to be big when they're in their 20s, 30s, maybe 40s. But he starts in his 50s. It's like an anomaly. But then part of the reason for that is that he'd had several other careers, all of which were also quite successful.

[5:21] David Armstrong: And then to the second point, as you say, that this sense of an overall vision, like an auteur, it's like someone writing, starring in, producing, directing their own film or something, where the whole thing comes from a single vision, or at least a single vision is clearly at the heart of the piece. And that's how he saw The Music Man, although I think he actually struggled as a librettist, as a book writer. And that's one of the things I get into in the book is how did he go about writing the script? Because that's really, I think what took him all of those years, even though he went through lots of versions of the score, actually. He was just struggling to find out what the story is, how to structure it, all of that kind of thing.

[6:24] Dominick McHugh: Meredith Wilson was born in 1902 and grew up in Mason City, Iowa, which would become the model for the town of River City in The Music Man. In an interview in Time Magazine, Wilson would famously say that he didn't have to make up anything for The Music Man, all he had to do was remember. And indeed, to a large extent, the story was inspired by his experiences growing up there during the first two decades of the 20th century. Many details and plot points, such as the excitement of packages arriving via the Wells Fargo wagon, the Paynes fireworks display featuring, as the Midwesterners pronounced it, the last days of Pompeii, Beethoven's minuet in G, barbershop quartets, and the stubbornness of Iowans all stem from those memories.

[7:10] Dominick McHugh: However, in The Big Parade, I make a compelling case that as important as Wilson's childhood experiences were, the incredible achievement of The Music Man is best seen as a culmination of Wilson's entire wide-ranging career and diverse and eclectic activities up to that point. So he started out, um he trained at Juilliard under another name, and then joined Sousa's band. So he had these four years where he's in the greatest marching band in the world, and then he moves to the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the greatest orchestra in America. He encounters Ravel, Stravinsky, Toscanini, the greatest classical musicians of the day, which is crazy. And then suddenly he moves to the West Coast and takes over a radio station.

And then for a good 10, 15 years, he's working mainly on the radio during the war. He was in charge of the armed forces entertainment. So he was working with all these Hollywood stars, Bing Crosby, Sinatra, Garland, all of the people you would expect. So by 1945, let's say, he'd already done all this stuff. He also wrote two symphonies by this point. He wrote the scores for two films, including The Great Dictator with Charlie Chaplin. You just can't believe that he interacted with all of these projects. And actually, most of them were on a major scale. I really don't know where this came from because he just grew up in Mason City, and I don't know where the ambition even came from, the vision to do that, and then have this portfolio career, which seems like a very 21st-century way to make your life. He was certainly no novice to show business when he decides to write a musical. He had success in all these different fields that seem somewhat unrelated, including becoming a personality on his own.

[8:45] Dominick McHugh: Yeah, that's a funny one on the Burns and Allen show and on other radio programs. He sort of created this persona for himself. And a lot of that he was actually making a mockery of himself. He would slightly play the fool or the buffoon on the radio. Which is a curious thing to decide to do. He was often the butt of the jokes on those programs. But then he was also serious. So he wrote this pamphlet on, I think it's called What Every Young Musician Should Know. It's almost like a music theory book, but a very practical one, unlike anything else you've ever written. So he also had a serious public profile. The range and versatility is unusual for a Broadway writer, I think, even allowing for Bernstein, who also had range and versatility.

[9:27] David Armstrong: It's interesting. We compare Bernstein and Wilson. We compare the two shows. We compare The Music Man and West Side Story, of course, because they went up for the Tony Award against one another. I have a whole episode about that. But I thought your point in your book was really interesting that Bernstein and Wilson both share a lot of things as well. Their relationship to the New York Philharmonic, they're both conductors, they both come from the classical music world, and yet they're most known in some ways for their Broadway output.

[9:56] David Armstrong: I've always found it interesting how people pit the two figures against each other. There was a good 20-year period, I think, which is beginning to pass, where people were saying that West Side Story is so modern and much more engaged with issues of race and ethnicity and representation than The Music Man, and therefore it's the greater work. Whereas actually I think now there's critique around West Side Story and representation. So I wonder whether actually maybe the revival of The Music Man, depending on how it goes, it might have the opportunity to redress the balance a bit because I don't think that it's an old-fashioned work. It's very creative. Some of the ways in which the songs work are unique and unusual in the way that a lot of West Side Story actually is quite old-fashioned in a funny way.

It's great. But actually, Bernstein wears his classical learning quite heavily on the score. It's very symphonic, very operatic. Bernstein is very present when you're sitting through West Side Story, whereas The Music Man, there's this lighter touch, and actually the sophistication of marrying the librarian, for example, musically. It is equivalent to those West Side Story numbers.

[11:10] Dominick McHugh: But it just happens in a much lighter kind of way, I guess. What can I do, my dear, to catch your ear? I love you madly, madly, madam librarian, Marion. Heaven help us if the library caught on fire, and the volunteer hose brigade men had to whisper the news to man.

[11:48] Dominick McHugh: What he certainly didn't toss off was the book. I'm actually going to speak later today to the freshman writing class at NYU. I'm going to lecture them today on story structure. And one of the things I often say and will say again to them today is that one of the hardest things you can possibly do in life, the hardest tasks is writing a musical. And another of the hardest tasks in life is to create an original story. And when you put those two things together, you create an almost impossible task. You spend a very fascinating whole chapter on the six years that he struggles to do these two things. How did the challenge of doing these two things, which maybe at first seemed like it would be an easy task for him, prove to be difficult?

[12:31] Dominick McHugh: Actually, at first he said very memorably that he didn't believe it could be done. And it was particularly Frank Lesser and Furum Martin who were going to be the producers who were saying you should turn your autobiography into a musical, there's material here that could be the inspiration for a musical. And he thought it was going to be difficult, and indeed it was. The problem was really that there's no story. He started out, and it could be anything, and all he's got really is a kind of midwestern setting, and it's gonna be somehow about music, and maybe there's gonna be some kids in it. And I think the Fourth of July timing of it was always there from the beginning. But basically, because you're not adapting something, it's like a blank page, and this was a great impediment to him because every aspect of the piece, there were multiple options, it could be anything.

It's so much easier to write West Side Story, one would think, after reading about the genesis of the book of The Music Man, because even though obviously West Side is not a straight adaptation of Romeo and Juliet at all, at least there's a sense of rival people and there's adversity and there's people in love and they die. Maybe Maria doesn't die in the end, but the structure is in there somewhere, and they just had to figure out how to adapt. They actually follow almost all the plot points of Romeo and Juliet step by step.

[13:43] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[13:44] Dominick McHugh: And we just add music dancing and we tell the story as if it happened in the 1950s in New York City. Music Man, poor Meredith. I don't know how he did it. And of course, in the end, he did get help from a number of people, but particularly this guy Franklin Lacey, who's always been credited as the co-book writer, but who is also a rather shadowy figure, and in a way remains a bit shadowy in that he didn't have a big public career beyond The Music Man. But he came in and it's very clear, you read all these hundreds of drafts that survive, as I describe in the book, and suddenly it gains a lot of focus once Franklin Lacey's name is on the front.

[14:18] David Armstrong: It's also fascinating to see that this main plot element that he starts with and hangs on to throughout eventually goes away, but would have made it an entirely different show had he been able to figure that out. And I don't know that that show would have been as successful, probably not.

[14:35] Dominick McHugh: You mean about the disabled child. So I find it a really fascinating thing. For me, it was the most interesting thing that I found. Although he does allude to it in his autobiography, I really hadn't appreciated that The Music Man originally was going to be about a small boy who is in a wheelchair and about the adversity that he faces in a parochial community. And the story was going to be about how Harold Hill comes in and integrates him into the community and makes them show him respect, basically. And understanding how powerful and controversial and cutting edge this was in the 1950s is quite difficult to us today. And in retrospect, it sounds a bit cringy, and you can certainly see that there are aspects of it that probably wouldn't play well at all today.

But in the 1950s, disability rights were only just beginning to take off. Parents at a grassroots level were having to try and create some kind of protection for children with disabilities because there was nothing. There was no legislation, no law. They had to create a charity. And then the other aspect of it was, of course, lots of veterans had come back from the Second World War facing all kinds of physical disabilities. There wasn't legislation around accessibility in public spaces, buildings, things like that. So there had to be a lot of sudden adaptation of all of those things. And here's Meredith Wilson, who's always depicted as such a conservative figure politically, wading in on this subject.

So while we can certainly critique some of the details of what he had in mind, which of course he didn't bring to the stage, so we shouldn't criticize him too much. But some of his ideas were really problematic, like the idea that this kid, Jim Peru, could be inspired by music to stand and that his disability is just a case of willpower. That's a terrible idea. But Wilson is trying to say something about the value of people and seeing beyond things like disability. Wilson was genuinely committed to the cause as well. So I discovered that when he was writing The Unsinkable Molly Brown, he went on a kind of fundraising tour for one of these disabled children's charities. So he was actually fundraising for them too. So I find it all really interesting because of what it says about Wilson, not just about what it says about The Music Man. He's much more interesting politically, I think, than we assume.

[16:46] David Armstrong: And did that have some relationship to his personal life? Did we know of anything in his background or someone personally that he knew that he was advocating for in this?

[16:54] Dominick McHugh: I've kind of assumed so. I'm ashamed to say I never managed to uncover anything like that. It feels like it must be motivated by something like that. He didn't have kids, so it can't have been that. But he must have known someone to whom this related. But I think he was kind of an engaged guy. Some of his politics take us aback when we look at them now. But actually, I think he was thoughtful and sensitive, and this is part of that. And the original title was intended to be The Silver Triangle, because this young boy was going to play the triangle in the band. The music was going to be part of that story as well. The question was how is Jim going to become part of the community, bearing in mind he had physical disabilities and one version of the show that went on for maybe about a year of drafts?

The idea was the climactic moment would be Jim playing the triangle along with the boys' band and the right beats of each measure, that sort of thing. It reminds us, you're quite right that the title of the show was going to be different as a reflection of the fact that the whole thing was about something else.

[17:54] David Armstrong: And as you point out in the book, it probably was taking the focus away from Harold Hill. The title changes from The Silver Triangle, which is about the boy, to The Music Man, which is about Harold Hill.

[18:04] Dominick McHugh: And the boy becomes Winthrop.

[18:06] David Armstrong: That's right. It becomes a compromise, very watered down. But still someone with a disability. We have a president right now who suffers from that disability.

[18:14] Dominick McHugh: Absolutely.

[18:15] David Armstrong: And not to be dismissive about that at all. But Winthrop was in the show as well already. So the Wells Fargo wagon scene was actually in the show quite early on in some formation.

[18:26] ♪ Musical number ♪

[19:25] David Armstrong: Don't go away. Broadway Nation will be back with more on The Big Parade right after this short break.

[19:41] Dominick McHugh: I thought it was fascinating the way you describe how the characters morph and evolve and their names change and Marion doesn't start off being in the Peru family, but Mrs. Peru is there from the beginning. But they all have various different guises, which are surprising based on where we know where it went to.

[19:59] David Armstrong: Absolutely. I think I'm a little overcommitted to the theme. If I have to criticize my own book, this chapter was really difficult to manage because I had so much material around all these different outlines and scripts and things. I think it's at the heart of admiring the final achievement is understanding how extensive and difficult the process was. You're quite right. Looking at it, there are some really interesting different permutations. In one permutation, Marion was the daughter of Mare Shin, so that's a very curious relationship. In one version that I find quite moving, both Harold Hill and Marion are orphans, and their relationship is about how they have that in common. They have the same sort of loss and they see it in each other and they're attracted by it.

I think you could even play on that in a revival and sort of create some depth through maybe reintroducing some sense of that. And even Marcellus, who seems so incidental in some ways, in some drafts, he's in cahoots with the mayor and is very much against Hill, and then he ends up being the guy that helps him out. It's really curious how most of the characters went through multiple versions and combinations and bits of them were redistributed. It's very strange.

[21:06] Dominick McHugh: And the mayor was quite evil in several versions of it.

[21:09] David Armstrong: Yes, he came and took poor Jim Peru away and shoved him in an institution. It's terrible. I mean, you can't imagine something like that in The Music Man as we know it today. But as melodramatic as something like that sounds, it shows how Wilson was really trying to take this thing seriously. This stuff is happening, and it did happen. Disabled children in the 40s and 50s were taken away, put in institutions, some of them were experimented on. Really terrible stuff. I mentioned that briefly in the book. It was quite a daring idea, and it's a shame he couldn't make it work.

[21:39] Dominick McHugh: And how many versions of the script did you have access to? And where did you find them?

[21:42] David Armstrong: Oh, I can't remember how many. There are loads and loads and loads and loads. It was very difficult. They were split between the Great American Songbook Foundation, which is in Carmel, Indiana, the institution set up by Michael Feinstein, who's a good friend of mine. He was very generous and helpful in gaining access for me to that material. That was mainly material leading up to about 1956. And then by coincidence, there were further drafts from 1956 up to the opening in 1957 at the Wisconsin Historical Society, which is where they have the papers of Kermit Bloomgarden, who eventually produced the show. So I was able to marry up these drafts from multiple places and sort of sift through them. But it was a very complicated task. And as I say, I think it was only partly successful.

[22:26] Dominick McHugh: Well, I found it fascinating. Sort of like a reverse mystery in a way, because we know where it ends, and then to go backwards and see how all those strands came from different places was really interesting.

[22:36] ♪ Musical number ♪

[22:51] David Armstrong: Ultimately, the show becomes one of the biggest hits of the Golden Age, one of the biggest hits ever, the third longest-running show of the 1950s. Why? What do you attribute that to? What about this show made it so successful?

[23:05] Dominick McHugh: Musical comedy, I think that's part of it. Things were becoming quite serious on Broadway in terms of musicals by this point. By no means entirely. Things like Pajama Game and Damn Yankees were still happening, things like that. But I think that the proliferation of attempts to write artier things like Pipe Dream, for example. 1955, Rogers and Hammerstein, they adapt this novel that Steinbeck was writing. They involve Helen Trouble from the operatic world. The thing is not entirely serious, but it's sort of heavy somehow. This thing opened at the height of the Cold War. America was overshadowed by at least the threat. A very serious war, only a decade after the Second World War had ended. I think it was comforting to people to go to the theater see this really fresh, unusual thing.

It didn't resemble anything else. It's so non-generic, ungeneric, without genre, you know, that so many aspects of it are just so surprising and remain so that I think people were just riveted by what a distinctive flavor it had. And yet it has that old-fashioned feel-good factor. So even though the constituents are not old-fashioned, there is something really warm about its heart that I think is why it remains popular with a lot of people today.

[24:17] David Armstrong: Well, and as you just said, it does have this old-fashioned feel about it, even though the writing is actually quite revolutionary in many ways. I feel like the critics who see it as being a nostalgic piece of Americana fail to realize the subversive elements of it, which you point out very well in your book. We have an anti-hero as our main character, and we have this very transgressive woman who does not do at all what society is telling her to do, as the two leads in this show. I think that the negative critiques that the show get are very patronizing. And part of it is being patronizing about Middle America.

[24:55] Dominick McHugh: The particularly East Coast intelligentsia think that anyone that's born outside of the East Coast is not very sophisticated, and maybe not without having revisited The Music Man lately. They just assume that this thing is a piece of silly fluff, a Valentine to very conservative values. It's really not that at all. And Wilson, of course, spent a lot of time on the East Coast and the West Coast, was highly educated, was very smart. He wrote a novel. He knew lots of highly educated, smart people. He was innovative. He was a classical musician, primarily, really. And yet there is this negative thing about, oh, how awful The Music Man is, and we need to put that sort of culture behind us, and we need to embrace, I don't actually know what we need to embrace, but we can't embrace that.

Let's not have a good time. Actually, there's relevant stuff here. And I think it remains fresh when it's revived well. I hope they are going to revive it well, because I think the piece speaks to me, even though I'm not American, and it's not sort of comforting me culturally about my cultural background because it isn't my cultural background. I just find the whole thing incredibly smart and entertaining and warm and funny and romantic. What more do you want from a Broadway musical, for goodness sake? When Wilson is critiquing this conservative community. It's a critique of this small-town conservative values and how toxic they are, really, is what's at the heart of the show. When Marion stands up at the end and says, "What are you doing?

Look at yourselves in the mirror." It's powerful for that reason. And the fact that she has the sophistication and insight to do that is incredibly powerful. It's very difficult to resist the power of the moment because it's exactly pointing the finger back in at them. And Hill, of course, because he's come from somewhere else, he can see all these parochial values. And yes, of course, he's exploiting them for bad reasons, but then he turns around and actually there is good in him. And she manages to manage both the people of the town and Hill and say, "Come on, people. No, we were doing good things here. Why are you being like this? Are these really your values? Is this really how you want to see yourself?"

I do find it really interesting. The other revolutionary aspect of it is the use of music because the way Wilson uses music not just to tell the story but as part of the story. And he will continue to do this through all his shows. So he had this kind of leitmotif to use a musical term in his dramas. He likes to think that music could change people's lives and change people, and so it's part of the story. We see this throughout The Music Man with the barbershop quartet, with the piano lesson, with the boys' band. You know, it's there a lot of the time.

[27:29] ♪ Musical number ♪

[28:35] Dominick McHugh: I mean, The Music Man works particularly well because it resolves the age-old question of why are people singing? And this thing that people hate, some people hate about musicals. There's no reason for this to be going on, and people that can't accept the genre. Actually, in this case, it works very well because it just comes naturally out of the situation because they're talking about music, and sometimes it's not clear whether they know that they're singing and dancing or not. And sometimes it's clear that they both do and they don't. Or sometimes it moves from one mode to another seamlessly in a kind of hidden way within a single number. I think this is another respect in which The Music Man is more sophisticated than West Side Story.

Because West Side Story is very much about compositional presence, the composer's presence in the orchestra. And when people are singing, it tends to be very declamatory. Whereas in The Music Man, they're just singing some little song to each other, or are they? Who knows? Another revolutionary aspect of the show was Liza Redfield. Tell us who Liza Redfield was.

[29:32] David Armstrong: She was great. So she was the first woman, I believe, to be resident musical director on a Broadway production. Other women had done off-Broadway and non-New York productions, but she actually took over as the conductor. This fascinated me because it's another example actually of how the show is quite forward-looking in some aspect of its production and in ways that, you know, who was conducting West Side Story? Not a woman, is the answer. She must have been incredibly strong. I think she only died last year or the year before. There were lots of things in the press about her appointment on The Music Man, and all of them were patronizing. So she was interviewed, and the interviewer would say, "What do you call a female conductor?

Is it maestra rather than maestro?" She went on What's My Line. They were trying to guess what her profession was. The best they could do is she must be one of the strippers from Gypsy. All of those sorts of things illustrate how women were seen in very limited roles on Broadway in this period, in a way that's quite strange because Trude Rittman has been a dance arranger on so many Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe shows by this point. But still, it's one thing to arrange things in the background for other people. It's quite another to stand there in front of the audience and lead this orchestra of men playing their instruments. I just find her a fascinating figure, and I go on more about her than I do about Herbert Greene, who was the first musical director of the show, because I kind of think her story is more striking, and I was taken aback to find that.

[30:57] Dominick McHugh: And how much did Wilson have to do with putting her in that position?

[31:00] David Armstrong: It's not clear, except that he was very fussy about music. He tended to be contractually covered, thanks to Lesser, around these sorts of decisions. So although I didn't find any correspondence to say it was his idea or he liked it or didn't, my assumption is he probably very much endorsed it and wouldn't have been threatened about it. The Music Man has a hit movie, I believe one of the greatest movie musicals of all time, one of the ones that really gets it right, that finds that perfect mix between the theatricality of the show and the reality of movie making, and somehow blends those two things together. And with so many members of the original cast, I didn't realize that Paul Ford had been a replacement in the show until I read that in your book.

So it's really another Broadway cast member in that company. But the show has been rarely revived on Broadway and not very successfully. The Susan Stroman was the most successful revival that we've had. Has it been revived in London?

[32:07] Dominick McHugh: It has been revived in London. It was revived in Regent's Park, I think in the mid-1990s, with Liz Robertson, the last of Alan Jay Lerner's wives, was Marion. And we had a production at the Chichester Festival Theatre about 12, 13 years ago, which was quite good with Brian Conley. It is difficult to revive. I think clearly the character of Hill. It's a very fine line between him being a hero and an anti-hero and a likable and dislikable person. You need an actor somehow who can pull off both the rogue and the hero at the same time. And Robert Preston was just so amazing at doing that. I never get bored of watching him do that in the movie. It's hard to find other people that can do that nowadays, although back then they were considering other people who seem quite viable to me, like Danny Kaye and Gene Kelly.

You can sort of imagine it. It's strange that the Dick Van Dyke revival was unsuccessful because you would have thought on paper that he might well pull it off, but clearly he was too weak, not convincing enough as this villain.

[33:04] David Armstrong: I saw that production and it just was not successful in really any aspect. It just was very flat, partly because he was flat at the center of it, which is amazing because he's such a dynamic performer. But he was not the right person for Harold Hill. What I find fascinating is that the show still has stayed at the center of the canon, despite that, partly because it has been done in every high school and still is one of those shows that just gets done over and over again in professional theaters around the country. I've produced it. You can't kill it with a stick because it just works when you have a high school boy playing Harold Hill. Strangely enough, more than when you have Dick Van Dyke playing Harold Hill.

But it also has all those amazing characters. Everyone has a part, and everybody gets to play a great part that really lands. I think that's what's kept it at the center of the canon, in spite of it not being revived in the way that Hello, Dolly! or Guys and Dolls in London, you seem to do it there every 20 minutes.

[34:01] Dominick McHugh: It's only a few years since we did that, four or five years.

[34:06] David Armstrong: Yeah. But of course, that's only half your book. We need to lie down now to get revved up for the other half.

[34:10] Dominick McHugh: Yeah.

[34:10] David Armstrong: As you point out, the challenge of following up on The Music Man is not an easy task. I know that's a great story of L.B. Mayer was talking to Richard Rodgers after Oklahoma! and Richard Rodgers was saying you didn't know what they were going to do for their next show. And L.B. Mayer said, "I know what you should do. Shoot yourself." And I think Meredith Wilson's somewhat in the same boat at that point. How does he follow up on this giant, giant hit?

[34:50] To hear the answer to that question, I hope you will join Dominick and I on the next episode of Broadway Nation, where we discuss Meredith Wilson's other three musicals: The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Here's Love, and The Ill-Fated 1491. In the meantime, you may want to check out the episode I mentioned earlier, episode 19, West Side Story versus The Music Man, as well as one of my personal favorite episodes, Episode 15, Trudy Rittman and the Women Who Invented Broadway, all about that incredibly talented woman that Dominick just referred to. Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. This episode is made possible in part through the generous contributions of Backstage Pass patron level members, Gary Fuller and RANDY EVERETT.

Thank you, Gary and Randy. If you love this podcast and want to delve even deeper into the world of Broadway musicals, I invite you to become a member of the Broadway Nation Backstage Pass Club. For as little as $7 a month, members will receive exclusive access to never-before-heard, unedited versions of every season two interview and many from season one as well. I often record at least twice as much conversation as ends up in the public episodes. And this includes additional in-depth conversations with my frequent co-host, Albert Evans. You will also have the opportunity to ask us any questions about Broadway musicals that you would like to hear answered and to propose topics and subject matter that you would like me to cover, all of which I will incorporate into a special series of Ask Me Anything About Broadway episodes.

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