78. "The Music Man" on Broad Street

COPYRIGHT © PETER SCHMITZ 2024. All Rights Reserved.

[AITH OPENING MUSIC]

Welcome once again to Adventures in Theater History! Where we bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m your host Peter Schmitz. Our original theme music - those sumptuous chords you hear at the beginning and end of each and every episode of this podcast - is composed by Christopher Mark Colucci.

This episode is yet another one of our shorter, single-subject episodes, and again we’re going to focus on the out-of-town tryout period of a classic American musical that had its world premiere in Philadelphia: The Music Man.

The Music Man, of course, was the creation of the writer and composer Meredith Willson. Willson (two LLs in there, please) was a musician, composer, band leader and radio personality. Although he was born and raised in Mason City, Iowa, his career had been spent primarily in New York and Hollywood, where he had composed the score for such movies as The Great Dictator and Little Foxes. He also did a lot of work for the US military during World War Two, turning out patriotic numbers for the Armed Forces Radio Service. And he created an innovative late radio program called The Big Show, starring Tallulah Bankhead  - but as a young man, Willson had made his chops – or rather his pucker – playing in John Philip Sousa’s band, all of which he detailed in his best-selling book And There I Stood With My Piccolo. His love of marching band music can be heard in many of his scores, and most especially in the iconic song from The Music Man, which we can hear here in the orchestral prelude from the original Broadway cast album, 76 Trombones. 

Now as with the show Guys and Dolls, you would think, at first, that the story of The Music Man just has nothing to do with Philadelphia. Even if - as we shall see - its “out of town” run was done in Philly, almost all of the original creation and development work was done elsewhere. Interestingly, Willson actually got the idea for writing a Broadway show from Frank Loesser - another Hollywood/New York songwriter who he used to team up at a lot of parties. Both guys would write songs at the drop of hat, just for fun, just to keep everybody happy, to show off a bit. Which makes me think that parties used to be a lot more fun, back then - everybody just gathered around the piano to see who could write the funniest song - or the most beautiful song, like Willson’s “Till I Met You” - which actually was transformed from a party song to a song that he did on his radio show to one that was recorded and released by Decca Records - back in 1950. But after he himself had found success on Broadway, Frank Loesser got his producers Martin and Feuer to go and encourage his pal - ol’ Meredith - to come up with something himself - maybe, you know based on his Iowa background. Broadway audiences LOVED nostalgia, he knew, loved shows that told a story about “real America.” But unlike Loesser, Meredith Willson wanted to write the whole show, he decided: not just the music, but also the lyrics - and the book, even though he’d never written a play before in his life.

And so Willson started work - He typed “Act One, Scene One” on a piece of paper, and then developed a case of “writer’s block” that lasted three years - that fifth word, he said, was really hard. His original idea was something about marching bands, and he called it “The Silver Triangle” - it was gonna feature a character of a kid with cerebral palsy, he knew that – and maybe also a piano teacher, you know, like his mother had been back in Iowa. Yes, he would definitely get his mama in the show there somehow, but he hadn’t quite figured it out yet. But once he also threw in the idea of a traveling salesman who comes into a small Iowa town and who sold . . . oh, who knows . . band instruments! . . .  Feuer and Martin excitedly told him that hey was a good idea, but they had a better name for the entire show: The Music Man. 

Well, Willson liked that title fine, Feuer and Martin lost interest, though, and moved on to other projects. Over the next few years Willson and his wife Rini and various friends all kept encouraging him to keep on going through all the drafts and re-writes of his original idea that followed. During this long process he wrote and discarded hundreds of pages of dialogue, two dozen full songs and about fifty of his experimental “rhythm poems” - pieces that were more speech than sung. He shaped and crafted the book further with screenwriter Franklin Lacey, who helped Meredith to really work out the mechanics of the plot. It really is a testament to Meredith Willson’s persistence that he could stick with a project for seven years and hundreds of different drafts and rewrites and lose producers and publishers along the way but he never give up - have I mentioned that I’m writing a book myself, lately? These last few days, as I’m reading about all this period of Meredith Willson’s work in my research, I’m thinking: “Attaboy, Mere, stick with it, it’ll pay off in the end!” Oh, anyway, where was I? . . . oh yeah - When he lost the thread, Willson would write “starter essays” - to prime his pump, as it were – memoirs about his boyhood in Iowa – and at one point he was thinking about a moral panic that could develop in a small town about something as small as a pool hall opening on Main Street in the town that in his mind was now called “River City”.  . . Hey, hey, hey. . there’s a song - or better yet, a rhythm poem - in that idea! And immediately he jumped to a piano, and dashed it off, in one go: 

[NOTE: LYRICS NOT TRANSCRIBED. COPYRIGHT 1957 MEREDITH WILLSON]

Now the reason we even have that recording of Willson performing this early version of the number himself is that by this point he was on fire with inspiration, and he and his wife Rini - a Russian-born opera singer - were sending tapes around to various producers and doing live pitches all over Manhattan. They were over the moon when after one particular harrowing midnight pitch session they got the eminent Kermit Bloomgarden - who had just produced his friend Frank Loesser’s musical Most Happy Fella to sign on, but they still needed a director. Bloomgarden suggested that they ask either the famous Moss Hart (who had just had a HUGE hit with My Fair Lady) or that new kid on the block, someone named Da Costa. Well at first they pitched it to Moss Hart - again, Willson and his wife put on the whole live dog-and-pony show for a room full of 20 people, but Moss Hart just stood quietly in the back of that crowd, and then quickly passed on helming the show. Seems he didn’t care either for the Iowa corniness of the overall  thing, or specifically the the crippled boy in the wheelchair subplot, Bloomgarden later told him. And that was an element Willson was still insisting on. He was quite fierce in his advocacy - he felt like disabled characters should be onstage. 

Well, so how about that other guy, well . . . what’s his name . .  Da Costa? They didn’t know Da Costa, didn’t even know what he looked like - sounded like some dark and mysterious Spanish guy. So Bloomgarden says he’ll send him over, along with a bunch of other folks and designers who might want to get involved in the project. So once again, in Bloomgarden’s apartment, Willson sets down to sing, and narrate and play through the whole show, for a room of strangers. At the back of the crowd is this tall, angular man, looking very stern - never smiles once - Da Costa, no doubt. Willson is thankful that at least there’s this one happy fair-haired little man in the front row smiling his head off through the whole thing. This guy really digs the whole barber shop quartet idea they’d worked in . .

But when Willson and Rini reach the end of the presentation – that guy he’s worried about, the tall angular man at the back – just heads for the door. Willson goes to head him off at the pass before he goes and asks: What did he think? 

“Oh, oh, great. Best thing I’ve heard. I’d like very to do it. Good night.”

“Wait, wait,” says Willson, “Mr. Da Costa, I’d just like to ask you one thing. . “

“I’m not Da Costa,” says the man. “Bay, Howard Bay. Set and lights. I’m late. Good night.”

Well, at least they’d got one of the best designers in New York to sign on, but it looked like Da Costa, whoever that was, had just not come at all. Willson made the round of the rest of the room, saying hi to Bob Fosse, hi to Vincent Donohue, hi to Joe Anthony - all of them well-known or up-and-coming Broadway directors, maybe one of them would agree to do it . . he also talked to a young man named John Shubert, the son of Jake Shubert, who now ran the entire Shubert Organization. John Shubert tells Meredith “I’m an old fan of yours from his radio days,” and said he would be happy to guarantee the Majestic Theatre on 44th Street, which the Shuberts still owned, for this production. So great, fantastic, the night has not been a total loss - in fact, a huge success! Willson now had a producer, a designer, and a theater lined up. And then Rini calls him back over to the piano, and introduces him to this happy smiling guy - you know, the one with the light colored hair and a spray of freckles across his face. Oh, the guy was going on and on about how he loved the speak-singing in the show. The whole thing was so fresh and so charming. Thanks, thanks, said Willson absently, what was your name again? Well this was, of course, Morton Da Costa. It’s late, he has to leave, so sorry – but, he says to Willson, fervently.

“I’ll be seeing you, Meredith. Very soon.”

So that was how Morton Da Costa got involved in The Music Man.

Let me run quickly through his Philly Origin Story: Those who knew him in his young days still called him "Tec" (TEEK) because they remembered him as "Morty Tecosky" - the kid with the bright red hair - from North Philadelphia. Morton was the last of ten children of the antique furniture dealer Samuel Tecosky. The Tecosky family lived on N. 8th St, in the neighborhood just beyond what was then the small Temple University campus, and then they moved a little farther on to Duncannon Street, from where Morton commuted over to Germantown High School.

Even as a kid, he liked performing in plays, and fell in love with theater at the Germantown Theater Guild, a sweet community theater group in a converted barn at 4821 Germantown Avenue, under the tireless leadership of Violet Minehardt and her daughter Kitty Minehardt. Tecosky went to Temple to study teaching (his father wanted him to be a dentist). But, inevitably, he joined the student drama club, called “Templayers,” as a freshman, and soon Tec was designing the sets for the student musical Katey-Did - as well as acting in the show and assisting the faculty director "Pop" Randall. By the time he graduated from Temple, he was Pop Randall’s right-hand man.

After graduation, Mort Tecosky changed his name to "Morton Da Costa"  – now where he got the name is not exactly clear, although he later claimed that this was actually the true ancestral name of his family – that instead of being Russian Jews from the poor shtetls, they were originally a Sephardic family who had fled from Spain and ended up in Odessa. Now whether that’s true or not I don’t know, but I gotta admit that’s a great name change - “Da Costa” has the same number of syllables, and the same rhythm, as “Tecosky.”  And although all his friends and colleagues continued to call him "Tec" (TEEK) for the rest of his life.

Tec began his career in various small theater companies in Wisconsin and Ohio, where he first began to act professionally. After touring with a children's theater company, Tec got a small role on Broadway, as the Announcer in the original 1942 production of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. (But he left that show to go on and do bigger parts in a small summer stock theater north of Chicago.) Then he began working with the great British actor and director Maurice Evans, and appeared as the flighty overdressed aristocrat Osric in Evans’ production of Hamlet, which was specially cut and staged to appeal to American GIs during the war. Eventually Tec became Evans’ assistant, and then with Evans’ encouragement he started to direct himself - first at City Center in Manhattan and then for two summers he was the principal director at “The Muny,” the enormous outdoor summer theater in St. Louis, Missouri. There Da Costa really learned how to stage big musical productions. In 1954, he was back in Philadelphia, directing in the early years of Playhouse in the Park. 

By 1957 Morton Da Costa was now 43 years old. He had three big Broadway hits under his belt: Auntie Mame, No Time for Sergeants, and Plain and Fancy - the latter was a very interesting (if now mostly forgotten) show that was set amongst the Amish community of Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, just a few hours travel west of Philadelphia. In fact, something about this show Music Man seemed to strike a chord of recognition in Da Costa, too.  "It all seems very familiar to me," he would say later, "The small Iowa town of 'The Music Man' and the Philadelphia in which I grew up are surprisingly alike."

So the Wells Fargo Wagon was finally coming in for the long-brewing musical. At a meeting with Meredith Willson the next day at Kermit Bloomgarden’s office, Morton Da Costa said he was ready to clear his schedule for this project - with two stipulations: the show had to be made shorter, and the crippled kid had to be cut.

Bowing to reality, Willson had a solution for Da Costa. The transformational moment that he wanted to find when a boy with challenges in life finds meaning through music could be instead transferred to another character that was already there, and he could develop that - it was a single little boy that showed up in the middle of a song - a lisping boy that would become the librarian’s little red-haired brother Winthrop . .

[NOTE: LYRICS NOT TRANSCRIBED]

Really, Meredith Willson later admitted, this was the solution he had been avoiding all along - putting a ten-year-old version of himself in the show. A kid - kind of a weird kid - whose whole life was gonna be saved by music. [MUSIC OUT]

So, now the book of the show was mostly settled, the contracts were signed - including a lucrative record deal with Capitol Records, and the auditions started. Barbara Cook - who had been Da Costa’s lead actress in Plain and Fancy - was hired to played Marion the Librarian, and to sing the now slightly re-written number that Willson had now worked into the show for her character.

But who would play the lead? The confidence man Harold Hill? Well, on Da Costa’s strong recommendation, Willson agreed to audition an actor named Robert Preston who had only really done Westerns up to this point, and never had been in a musical. But Da Costa had made sure that Preston had been sent the songs from the show beforehand, and so the actor confidently strolled in to Willson’s living room, told him to start playing the piano, and nailed the “you Got Trouble” song on the first try.

Others joined the cast, Pert Kelton as Mrs. Paroo and David Burns as Mayor Shinn, and little red-haired Eddie Hodges as Winthrop - and from his days on Armed Forces Radio, Willson had recruited that barbershop quartet from upstate New York: The Buffalo Bills.

Despite this show being all about Iowa, there were no Iowans that I’m aware of in the original company of Music Man, but - and you had to know this was coming, folks - there were quite a few Philadelphians in the cast. Somehow Philly people just seemed to understand the piece - maybe Da Costa was right and there was something well, Philadelphian, about Iowa’s proud and quirky sensibility. 

First there was the actress Helen Raymond, who was cast as the Mayor’s wife, the formidable Eulalie Shinn. Helen Raymond had been born in Philadelphia in 1878, and had gone on to study piano at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music - a predecessor institution to the University of the Arts (may it now rest in peace). Raymond had gone on to have a long career in Vaudeville, in musical theater and in the movies. Crucially, she has worked with Da Costa during his years directing at the Muny Opera in St Louis several years previously - and having been properly brought up in Philadelphia society in her youth, knew exactly how the WASP-y old guard of either the Quaker City or River City, Iowa would have treated some morally suspect girl who was Beyond the Pale  . . 

And then there was Iggie Wolfington  . . .

Iggie Wolfington (born in 1919) was the youngest of nine children of the Wolfingtons of Overbrook. All the rest of his siblings went into the family auto body business, but Iggie had caught the acting bug after attending shows of the local actress Mae Desmond at the William Penn Theatre. Iggie didn't let his round face and portly figure discourage his ambitions at all. "I thought I was the Orson Welles of West Philadelphia," he quipped. By the early 1940s Iggie was performing on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City and in summer stock in Yardley, PA.

But then in 1942 duty called, and Wolfington joined the US Army and served with distinction in the 102nd Infantry Division at the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. He received a battlefield commission as a first lieutenant, and was awarded the Silver Star for his bravery and leadership, and also a Purple Heart after being twice wounded.

Wolfington returned to show business after the war, and he became a member of the Actors Studio, and he appeared in many of those early live television shows then being broadcast from New York City. In September of 1957 he got a call from his agent to go and audition for his fellow Philadelphian, Da Costa, and soon after he was hired to play Marcellus Washburn, Harold Hill's sidekick

Lastly, in our Philadelphia cast there were the Mariano kids, who were in the ensemble of River City children who were in all the big group numbers throughout the show. The Marianos had traveled to their auditions for the show in New York from their comfortable home in the Quaker-named township of Plymouth Meeting, out in the Philadelphia suburbs. Even at their age, they were just as seasoned professionals as Da Costa, Raymond, and Wolfington. Bobby Mariano (age 13) and Patty Mariano (12) would eventually remain in the show for most of the Broadway run.

But before we get to that point, first there was a few weeks of rehearsal Downtown in an old catering hall on Second Avenue - the same building that would one day be taken over by New York University Acting Program and that I would eventually go to Drama School in, actually - and then there were more formal rehearsals on the old roof top theater at Florenz Ziegfeld's old New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street. There was a final ‘Gypsy Run-Through’ there - without sets, lights, costumes and orchestra - those things were all waiting for the company at the Shubert Theatre on Broad Street in Philadelphia.

But now comes the part where the whole production actually moves down to Philadelphia - and you all must be thinking that here comes the part where Peter waxes poetical about the Philadelphia audience, and how the whole city somehow became interwoven with the texture of the eventual show. But, you know, I gotta say - that didn’t really happen. Sure the audiences were supportive, loved the show, and the Philly critics raved about it. But by this point in time - Fall of 1957 - the supposed magic of the Philly experience was beginning to wear off for show-biz folk. By that point, it wasn’t that they hated or disliked the Quaker City. It was just a phase of any show’s production you went through to make a Broadway hit, or flop, or whatever the show ended up being. Years later, in April of 2000, the actress Barbara Cook was interviewed about her memories of being in the original production for the TV show Theater Talk, which used to be broadcast on New York Public Television back in the day. The tape of the program still exists and Cook starts by describing that amazing Gypsy Run at the New Amsterdam:.

[NOTE: Barbara Cook interview not transcribed]

Notice at now point does Cook say “Philadelphia” - just ‘out of town’ - it could have been four weeks in New Haven or Boston or Washington, as far as she was concerned. Now it’s amazing that the famous opening bit, the other one of Willson’s great talking pieces - the Rock Island number really clicked for the first time in Philadelphia. And they came up with the idea of having the actors shake to give the idea of the moving train. But there is no reason that couldn’t have happened somewhere else. The Shubert Theater - the by now 40 year-old tryout house on Broad Street, just to the south of the Academy of Music - was generally seen as being too big for the show (bigger than its eventual Broadway house, actually) and the Shubert’s sound system was terrible - they were several performances in before they realized that some of the speakers in the theater were disconnected and some were just turned to the wall. Willson wrote an entire new number for the show at one point, in the ladies restroom of the Shubert (the only place where he could get some privacy, he claimed, during rehearsals). But then it was, as we just heard Cook say, discarded. And at another point Robert Preston lost his voice, and his understudy Larry Douglas had to go on for Preston at short notice, and with the support of the whole company  and crew behind him, he absolutely nailed it.

But that’s really it.  On the Philadelphia opening night - that is, that evening when all the folks from New York could come down and see the show (many secretly hoping to spot the next Big Flop so they could dish about it with all their friends) - and of course it was the night when the show was first opened to local newspaper reviewers. 

“If you like stirring music with the trombone lead, if you have a feeling for nostalgia and gentle humor, if you like to see players giving every appearance of enjoying themselves, and alert stagecraft, ‘The Music Man’ is your show,” wrote Henry Murdock in the Inquirer. In the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Wayne Robinson wrote that the show was a “My Fair Lady in Iowa, or at least an Iowa Oklahoma! . . Morton Da Costa has kept things moving right along in Howard Bay’s settings, from the depot platform to the footbridge in the park where the lovers embrace in a fond duet the orchestra thundering a crashing crescendo of emotion.”

Well, Meredith Willson, gathering with the creative team the next day, was thrilled, and he thought they were home free. He was startled when Da Costa was not at all sentimental about his home town’s enthusiastic response. Said the director: “Meredith. This is a Broadway show we have here, we hope. Regardless of how well they might like us here in Philadelphia . . . it doesn’t cut any ice. Remember Plain and Fancy? We murdered ‘em out-of-town. Cheers, screams, bravos, the works, night after night and twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays. What happened in New York? Over fifty per cent of the critics hated it.”  Kermit Bloomgarden also chimed in: “Yeah. Famous last words, Mere. ‘They love us in Philadelphia. If we were going to stay here a year, great.”

So, Willson, working frantically round the clock many days, often forgetting to even shave, agreed to keep working on improving the show - especially “My White Knight,” the supposedly inviolate “I Wish” song of the first act - the one that was really inspired by his mom back in Mason City, Iowa - that wasn’t quite ‘going over’ the first few weeks. And each day he tried a new version of it, and gave it to Barbara Cook, and she gamely sang the new version. It was the last big change he made to the show to be made in Philly - and he finally came up with the solution on the penultimate weekend of the run. I’ll read Willson’s own words, from his book about the show called “But He Doesn’t Know The Territory. 

“With a sad and reluctant pencil I deleted two ‘inevitable’ pages of my favorite song, and reroutined the rest. When the moment came that night Barbara soared into the ballad chorus first. The audience was with her all the way. Including me–who got something else through my thick head that night. Standing in the back, I caught up with the true Marian–what she was–who she was. She was a certain girl graduate of the Armour Institute in Chicago circa 1880 who took her appreciation for a few nice things into a little Iowa town and spent her life scattering it amongst the kids in her Sunday school class, the kids in her kindergarten, and the kids just passing by the house; not to mention her own flute-playing slightly ‘abnormal’ son. I had had Mama in the show all the time."

Still to come of course, was the triumphant opening in New York, a couple of weeks later, the endless run of the show, the countless touring companies and revivals, the best-selling Grammy winning cast album, the many many jazz tribute recordings to the score, and finally the movie version - also directed by Morton Da Costa, and starring Robert Preston again - at Da Costa’s and Willson’s insistence. The show really was a worldwide sensation at that point, not just Broadway. When the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in New York - what did they use for their romantic ballad of their set but “Till There was You”? In fact their recording of that number, I understand, eventually made Willson more money than the entire run of the Broadway show itself had. But this introduction of The Beatles reminds us that as we go forward in our story, next episode, “The Tryout shows of the 60s and 70s,” popular music was changing, and Broadway shows and the classic “out-of-town” tryout era for Philadelphia was coming to an end.

And that’s our show for today. If you’ve been enjoying this season of the podcast, or have any thoughts or suggestions or compliments - we love compliments - drop us an email at AITHpodcast@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you. I’d love to hear from you.

To support the show, go to: www.Patreon.com/aithpodcast. There will also be additional images and information, as always in the episode blog on our website, www.aithpodcast.com. 

Or, you know, a free and easy way to support us is to leave a review about the show on Apple Podcasts! Or, of course, you can follow us on Facebook or Instagram or even Mastodon, all places where we post new information about Philadelphia theater history every single day. 

So, this is your self-appointed Philly theater history maven Peter Schmitz, signing off. The sound editing and engineering for this episode were all done by My Humble Self, right here in the control room of our glittering golden studio in our World Headquarters, high atop the Tower of Theater History.

Thanks to all of you, for listening to the show today, and for coming along on another Adventure in Theatre History, Philadelphia.

[AITH END THEME]

COPYRIGHT © PETER SCHMITZ 2024. All Rights Reserved.