The Music Man was the first show I saw … on my 9th birthday

A revival opened last night. The reviews were not kind to Hugh Jackman playing Harold Hill.

Better for Sutton Foster:

. . . her take on Marian Paroo is witty and front-facing throughout. She fully commits to the seriousness but also to the size of the comedy, letting it arise from the big internal conflicts of a woman with standards too high for her own happiness. You believe it when her mother complains in a semi-spoken song that “not a man alive could hope to measure up to that blend a’ Paul Bunyan, Saint Pat and Noah Webster you’ve concocted for yourself outa your Irish imagination, your Iowa stubbornness and your liberry fulla’ books.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/theater/the-music-man-review.html

Here’s an example of what was so interesting about the show:

With its outpouring of musical styles and counterpoint numbers, Meredith Willson’s score is designed to push different worldviews into proximity and sometimes into harmony. Marian’s soprano literalizes the idealism at the heart of her character and conflict. Her lilting “Goodnight, My Someone” and Hill’s raucous “Seventy-Six Trombones” could not be more oppositional — until it turns out they are in fact the same melody, in different octaves and at different tempos.