Liars and Saints

 "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 ...

At times, I feel I have two sons, not one. My older son is my husband. He--Marc--doesn't get much time with the baby during the day, so at bedtime, he is hungry for fun. I want to wind down; Marc wants to tickle the baby. I want to sing soft lullabies; Marc wants to give high-decibel renditions of "Seventy-Six Trombones." For a long while, I could read a book while my baby slowly grew tired. I believed that the deep calm in my soul was somehow flowing out of me and into my baby, who would then fall asleep on his own. Those days are over. My son has discovered that I still exist behind the book, even when the book is blocking a direct line of view. So, as I try to read my gruesome mystery, my son slowly cranes his neck until he is peering at me around the corner of the hardcover; my son has a look of undiluted self-delight. He does not grow bored with this game. My husband learned the game, and now he does it, too; sometimes, I have an infant peering a...

"The Music Man" is returning! It will be at the Kennedy Center, with Jessie Mueller front and center. So it's important to review some facts: -"The Music Man" famously defeated "West Side Story" for the Best Musical Tony. -People think Sondheim wrote the first rap in musical theater history (for the Witch, in "Into the Woods"). But Sondheim himself says this is wrong: The first musical theater rap, he argues, comes at the start of "Music Man," with "Rock Island." -It's been said that there are only two stories: I go on a journey and A stranger comes to town. "Music Man" makes this literal; the title character is quite literally a stranger, entering the insular community of River City. -A story needs a detailed setting, and Willson is careful to make Iowa vivid and almost fairy-tale-esque: "Oh, there's nothing halfway about the Iowa way to treat you, when we treat you, which we may not do at a...