Broadway babe

That first big show can be a milestone in a young person's life.

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 30, 2000

I remember my first Broadway musical like it was yesterday, even though it was 40 years ago that I saw The Music Man.

It's strange. Other things I love haven't stuck in my mind quite the same way. I don't remember the first major league baseball game I went to, or the first movie to make an impression on me, or the first novel that kept me up reading all night.

But the memory of the curtain going up on the opening scene of Meredith Willson's homage to small-town Iowa -- Rock Island, that oddly syncopated number in which a railroad car of traveling salesmen rap about how "ya gotta know the territory" -- is burned into my brain.

I didn't even see Robert Preston in his legendary performance as Prof. Harold Hill. By the time I and my mother and father and two brothers got to the show in 1959 or '60, Bert Parks was in the lead.

Didn't matter. At that point, I had listened to the original cast album so many times that I could impersonate Preston's rendition of Trouble exactly, right down to a throwaway line about Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, whatever that was.

In May, I went to the revival of The Music Man on Broadway. It was a nostalgic treat to hear Seventy-Six Trombones, Till There Was You (the only show tune the Beatles ever covered) and all the other songs again. Craig Bierko sounded just like Preston, and Rebecca Luker, playing Marian the librarian, brought a warmth to Goodnight, My Someone and My White Knight that really got to me.

Old associations of family, of being 12 years old and going to a Broadway theater for the first time, came rushing back. What touched me then touched me now.

After seeing The Music Man again, I began wondering if my experience was universal. Of course, I have no illusions about the audience for the musical. It's a specialized taste these days, compared with the movies and television and pop music. I can't tell you the last time I heard a show tune on the radio that was by anyone other than Andrew Lloyd Webber. Still, I didn't have much trouble finding people who remembered their first musical as a landmark in their lives.

"Mine was Mame," said Lee Ahlin, the Tampa composer/lyricist whose latest venture into the art form is Webb's City: The Musical, playing this weekend at Mahaffey Theater. Ahlin went to his first Broadway show as a 14-year-old in the 1960s.

"It was absolutely riveting. Tickets were $12.50 for a Saturday night orchestra seat. It was Angela Lansbury and Bea Arthur at the Winter Garden Theater. I loved the play and everything, but what I remember most is that when Angela Lansbury came down to do her curtain call, she was so gracious and so warm, it was as if she made eye contact with everybody in that huge theater."

One of the best books on the Broadway musical I have read recently is Place for Us, an elegant, deeply personal essay by D.A. Miller, an English professor at Columbia University. Miller's subject is the supposed devotion of gay men to the musical, which, in his theory, is a consequence of the central role of female performers in it.

Miller's first musical was the one he calls "the musical of musicals," Gypsy. In 1961 in his hometown of San Francisco, he went with his mother to a matinee performance of a touring production that starred Ethel Merman in her signature role as Mama Rose.

"In a certain way, what a stroke of fortune I had," Miller said. "The first musical I saw was the one that actually is the greatest. But I'm wondering if perhaps I was prepared to attend to it precisely because it was the first one I saw. And to see it with Merman. It becomes heavier in retrospect than it was at the time."

When I was growing up, the original cast albums of musicals were best sellers. As Broadway composer Cy Coleman once told me in an interview, back in those days people came into the theater humming the tunes, because they already knew them from the albums. That was my experience with The Music Man, and it was the same for Miller with Gypsy.

"Gypsy was the first musical I ever saw, but I had already embraced it through the cast album," he said. "For me, the actual experience of seeing musicals, which were usually local productions, was often a disappointment because it didn't sound like the album, which I had learned by heart. I think the experience was more powerful in the purely musical form of the cast album. It's more powerful, I think, because it's more solitary, and it facilitates that inner communion with the musical. Going to the theater is a public event, and your response is shared. The cast album is usually played in solitude."

On the other hand, some people cherish their first musical precisely because it was a shared experience. One is Lorie Cowen Levy, one of the producers of the current revival of The Music Man, who grew up in New York. For her sixth birthday party, Levy's father, a stockbroker and sometime Broadway investor, rented a yellow school bus to take her and her friends to her first musical. It was the original Music Man, for which they had front-row seats.

"We were all dressed up in patent leather shoes and crinoline," Levy said. "I don't really remember anything about the performance. It was more the idea of the school bus, of being all dressed up, the anticipation, of being with my friends, having it be my special day and being exposed to this larger-than-life experience."

As a child, Levy said, she found things in musicals and plays that were missing from the rest of her life. "I always felt that theater, for me growing up, was a way to purge, to sort of overcome some dysfunctional aspects of the family, to laugh and cry in a dark room full of strangers. That's the dark side of it, but that's what I think is true for myself and for many people."

Levy's description of theater as catharsis jibed with something I felt about the revival of The Music Man but couldn't put my finger on until I had a phone interview with Luker, whose performance as Marian I had enjoyed so much. She is the quintessential Broadway ingenue, having also played Magnolia in Show Boat and Maria in The Sound of Music in recent years.

Luker suggested to me that her characterization of the town librarian had been, to some extent, colored by director Susan Stroman's personal tragedy in losing her husband, director Mike Ockrent, to cancer in December.

"I feel that the whole production has Susan's heart in it that way," she said. "I don't know how I would say that it affects it exactly, but for the relationship between Harold and Marian to be successful, you have to show that they're vulnerable, that they've got flaws, that they need each other."

This is quite a different approach than that taken by Barbara Cook, who originated the role of Marian. Cook gave a tougher sort of performance. She was a brassier, more high-flying presence, at least on the album.

"I do sort of hear her in my head when I sing the role, although I think we're as different as night and day," Luker said. "I think we have very different sounds. Mine is probably a little more mellow. I think she has a little quicker vibrato. I have a lower, more melodic voice."

Naturally, I asked Luker, who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., what her first musical had been. Surprisingly, she couldn't really remember. "I was in college before I saw Pippin in a tour that came through Birmingham," she said, not sounding especially enthusiastic.

"I came very late to musical theater. I grew up in a family that wasn't concerned with that sort of thing. There weren't a lot of plays to see in Birmingham, and we didn't have a lot of money. It just wasn't part of my upbringing. Church and high school football games was what we did."

In fact, Luker didn't perform in a musical until she went to the University of Montevallo in Alabama. Her first major role was Marian in The Music Man, and the rest is musical theater history.

Well, at least we have that in common. I made my stage debut in The Music Man -- as a drum major in a high school production -- but it just wasn't the same as going to the show.

Perhaps it goes to prove that some people are born to be practitioners of musical theater, while others are born to be fans.

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