The Music Man

Published Friday 4 July 2008 at 13:25 by Nick Smurthwaite

If ever a musical needed a stonking great star performance to justify its existence it is The Music Man. The very title offers a promise few performers are going to be able to meet.

So it is good to be able to report that Brian Conley does the business as Professor Harold Hill in Chichester’s likeable and exuberant revival of Meredith Willson’s 1957 show directed here by Rachel Kavanaugh.

Interestingly The Music Man opened in New York in 1957, the same year as West Side Story, and it was the former show that won the lion’s share of that year’s Tony awards.

The passing years have shown West Side Story to be way ahead of its time, while The Music Man was very much a show of its day - innocent, folksy, and American as apple pie.

It both celebrates and satirises (albeit very gently) life in a small mid-western American town, shaken up by the arrival of a charismatic conman, posing as a professor of music, who persuades them that the best way to deal with juvenile delinquency is to allow him to recruit the town’s wayward youth into a boys’ band.

Not much of a premise for a two and a half hour show, it has to be said. But the time passes amiably enough, with some vigorous chorus numbers such as Seventy Six Trombones, Ya Got Trouble and Iowa Stubborn, some well executed comedy numbers, notably Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little, and a handful of winning performances.

Rolf Saxon makes an excellent loudmouth Mayor of River City, with Jenny Galloway as his wife, who makes up in spirit what she lacks in stature. Andy Hockley, as the professor’s loyal friend Marcellus, expends the energy of ten men, while Scarlett Strallen strikes a fine balance between steeliness and sweetness as the bookish Marion, on who Hill sets his romantic sights.

It takes Conley a while to crank himself up to full power, but once he is motoring there is nobody quite like him for full-on, high energy star power, plus he has a melodious singing voice.

His trombone playing was less impressive, but in a finale that featured everyone decked out in bright red band uniforms, giving Seventy Six Trombones the full monty, nobody was complaining.