'Music Man' insightful below surface

There's a watershed moment in Meredith Willson's "The Music Man," playing at Clarence Brown Theatre through May 15, that transforms it from, perhaps, the best musical theater piece ever created to a work of insight into social psychology.

On the surface, it's just a fun musical with memorable songs and a great story about a con man duping an entire small Iowa community, just to make a few bucks so he can move to the next community and do it again.

But underneath, at least in director Risa Brainin's energetically choreographed version, it's about how people want to believe in something and need someone else to believe in them.

The important moment, as Brainin has carefully staged it, happens when the dashing Harold Hill, superbly played by David Kortemeier - who knows nothing about music but is a keen observer of human nature and how to manipulate it to his advantage - meets the shy, young Winthrop, nicely played by Maryville sixth-grader Jacob Carpenter. Hill convinces him that he can learn to play a musical instrument as well as anyone else.

More than anything else, Winthrop just wants to be an ordinary kid, but his lisp makes him the target of endless teasing and harassment.

That brief, little moment is witnessed by Winthrop's older sister, town librarian Marian Paroo, terrifically played by Katy Wolfe Zahn.

One can see the transformation from her innate suspicion of all men, especially strangers, to someone who glimpses that Hill's spell on the town just might have more possibilities than his intended consequences.

Hill's scheme is to convince the town that it really needs a boys' band to keep them occupied and out of trouble, like the evils of the pool hall that just happens to be owned by the town's mayor.

Of course, Hill is just the man to provide the instruments, the music and the uniforms, none of which he plans to deliver once he gets everyone's money.

But it turns out that Miss Marian has plans of her own.

Needless to say, there's lots of dancing to all of those famous songs along the way, notably the "Seventy-Six Trombones" that is so rooted in the American musical garden that not everyone remembers where the original came from.

There's not a one in the large cast of 40 that breaks the theatrical spell.

But of the several children in the play, Karns seventh-grader Maggie Kohlbusch, who plays Amaryllis - who not only taunts Winthrop, but plays a mean piano as well - is the kind of scene thief W.C. Fields warned adult actors about.

Harold Duckett is a free-lance contributor to the News Sentinel.

© 2011, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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