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[Dominic McHugh]

I hope nobody thinks I'm going completely off on a tangent but...

As part of my degree last year, I wrote an essay on The Music Man. My professor has said he's willing to help me improve it and publish it in a music journal. There's lots to be done at it though, and plenty can be added, so I wondered if anyone has any opinions on The Music Man in general, or observations or anytrhing I may not have noticed? I've written primarily about the stageshow, but opinions on the film and or the Disney remake are still of use as interpretations of the original material.

The wider context of the essay is the 'Broadway Canon', the main series of the great stage musicals, which traditionally goes from Show Boat to West Side Story in books on the subject. But The Music Man doesn't get a look-in because it opened after West SS - and it's seen as old-fashioned compared to the Bernstein. Yet The Music Man won almost all the awards that year on Broadway, so the Broadway literature promotes WSS to an unreasonable extent - TMM was the more popular musical until the film versions came along, when WSS became the iconic one and TMM old-fashioned.

Anyway, that's a generalisation, but I'd be grateful of any opinions. It was just a thought - but I know how knowledgeable the people that visit this website can be!

Dominic
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Dominic McHugh