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Meredith Willson: "The Music Man"

 "The Music Man" is a classic rom com -- classic in the Shakespeare/Austen/Nora Ephron tradition.


Boy meets girl; hatred bubbles up; hatred becomes love.

Meredith Willson's heroine enlists our sympathies in a canonical "I Want" song:

My white knight....
Not a Lancelot, nor an angel with wings....
Just someone who loves me, and who's not ashamed of a few nice things....
My white knight...
What my heart would say if it only knew how!
Please, dear Venus....
Show me now.....

Marian wants to notice the world: "Let me walk with him--where the others ride by." She'd like to ponder "what makes Shakespeare and Beethoven great." She'd like a guy "to sit with me in a cottage somewhere in the state of Iowa." Shrewdly, Meredith Willson makes the final big number a number *about* noticing: Once Marian has committed herself to Harold Hill, she can note "the bells on the hill," "the birds in the sky," "the love all around." 

I never heard it singing....
No, I never heard it at all....
Till there was you....

I love Sutton Foster, but if you ask me, "My White Knight" belongs to Rebecca Luker, now and forever. (Sorry, Barbara Cook.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT_EdH6YcP8
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