Daniel Frank (whose weblog I hope you visit when you leave here) writes to ask, "So what was the surprise at the curtain call of The Music Man?" (This is the Broadway revival from 2000 he's asking about.) Well, it wasn't all that huge a deal. The cast members marched out in snazzy band uniforms, almost all of them carrying trombones, and played a lusty but amateurish version of "76 You-Know-Whats." It had a certain fun charm to it, but I don't think it lived up to the promises of something unprecedented.
The curtain call of The Music Man is traditionally a real audience-pleaser. To his dying day, composer Meredith Willson used to insist that there had never been a production of the show anywhere at any time where the audience did not break into rhythmic clapping with the playing of "76 Trombones" as the cast took its bows. One suspects that at least once in all the skillions of performances of the show in everything from Broadway theaters to elementary school auditoriums, there might have been one where the audience was too busy walking out or demanding refunds or something…but perhaps Mr. Willson never encountered this. Or maybe he just saw only the good in them. The story goes that he took in the show hundreds of times as staged by various theatrical companies and community colleges and such, and that he sent every single one of them a telegram that said, "That was the finest production of The Music Man I have ever seen." Perhaps they all were.
Anyway, when the show gets staged at a school that has a marching band, it is not at all unusual for someone to get the bright idea to have the band march through the hall as part of the finale. So what they did on Broadway wasn't all that revolutionary.
Incidentally, I can't find it at the moment but there used to be a wonderful website which featured a bevy of production memos about the making of the movie of The Music Man. One which I found intriguing was from the director, Morton Da Costa, saying he'd decided that the role of Marcellus should be played by Stubby Kaye. We of course all loved Buddy Hackett in the role but I sure don't think Stubby would have been bad. Jack L. Warner, of course, once had his heart set on Frank Sinatra as Professor Harold Hill but finally bowed to pressure from darn near everyone on the planet and hired Robert Preston. If he'd wound up with Sinatra and Hackett, he might as well have gotten Shirley MacLaine to play Marion, Joey Bishop to be the Mayor and moved the whole thing to Vegas. As they said when they changed the family in Come Blow Your Horn from Jewish to Italian so they could cast Frank, "It's a small change."
Oh — and while I was looking (to no avail) for the site with the Da Costa memos, I came across this wonderful offering. It's a compendium of obscure names and terms that turn up in the text of The Music Man, along with explanations of what they all mean. They even note, as many of us comic book historians have, that the line in "Ya Got Trouble" about kids reading Cap'n Billy's Whiz Bang is an anachronism since The Music Man is set in 1912 and Cap'n Billy didn't start whizzing or banging until 1919.