It’s a cross-county Central Florida collaboration on a Broadway classic in a brand new format: Central Florida Vocal Arts is teaming up with the Space Coast Symphony Orchestra to perform "The Music Man in Concert.” The concert/musical hybrid takes over the Pugh Theater at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, and it places the actors along the edge of the stage with the orchestra smack in the middle.
“The Music Man,” in a nutshell, follows traveling salesman-slash-conman Harold Hill, who rolls into a small town ready to swindle but instead has his heart stolen by the plucky town librarian.
Director Brandy Eleazer says the story still has something to teach us, and the trailblazing music of “The Music Man” is more than worthy of the center stage treatment it gets in an “In Concert” version.
“As I've gotten to know this show more and more and preparing for it, I keep being impressed with [show and music writer] Meredith Wilson and what a musical genius and sort of groundbreaker he was for someone writing in the 1950s,” Eleazer said. “Some of the things that he's doing with music in this show was brand new, and so I think it's a great format for this particular piece, because the music deserves to be highlighted. It's what makes this show so unique and special.”
For example, she references the opening song, “Rock Island.”
“A group of traveling salesmen are all on a train, in the song bemoaning how difficult it is to make a living as a traveling salesman, but the patter of the song is spoken in rhythm to the train’s movement,” she explained.
“It feels to us today very much like rap, but you know, Meredith Wilson didn't know what that was,” said Eleazer. “And so it feels very sort of like Hamilton-esque for us, but he was doing it 50 plus years ago!”
And she noted that some of the show’s themes and characters were also ahead of their time, like the town’s plucky librarian and female lead, Marian Peroo, who was the stuff of small-town rumors for being unapologetically smart and forward-thinking. For the 1950s, that was nearly scandalous.
The story is also a window into some things that don't change. “Definitely a theme that we can still relate to today, Eleazer said, “[is] that music speaks to all of us in a certain way and so we find that common ground with people who we might consider different from us.”
