I Always Think There’s a Band, Kid

This spring I finally fulfilled a long held wish. After decades of waiting, I finally landed the role of Harold Hill in The Music Man.

Once I had the role, though, the rehearsal process turned out to be pretty rough. We had a great director who my wife and I have worked with many times before, but we lacked a musical director. We tried doing it Karaoke-style. The Music Man does not work well Karaoke style. When we got further into the rehearsal process, it became evident that dancing is not my strong suit.

 I’ve always been a bit stiff onstage, and this extended not only to dancing, but to my awkward first attempts to kiss the young lady playing Marian. I was also not great at throwing a punch at Charlie Cowell. After one particularly weird attempt at a punch, my director said, “Well, you’re a lover, not a fighter.” I immediately thought back to my awkward kiss from just a few minutes earlier, and said, “Actually, I’m not so hot at either. I’m beginning to wonder why you cast me…”

I’ve talked to people—including members of our cast—who aren’t super fond of The Music Man. They found it corny. A bit sexist. Old fashioned. Out of date. They had originally planned on being in The King and I, but when the theater lost the rights because a Broadway revival was opening, The Music Man became the backup plan.

I started to wonder—exactly why had I wanted to play Harold Hill all these years? I knew part of it was my somewhat limited ability to sing and my rather unlimited ability to talk. Harold Hill is a patter-part where you talk your way through a lot of the songs. I loved the songs. But reading the play again, I began to see that it had a dark side if you actually thought about the characters. Although it’s played for laughs, throughout most of the show, until the last 15 or 20 minutes, Harold is not just a con man, but a particularly heartless one. In particular, he befriends a little boy with a lisp named Winthrop, brings him out of his shell, and becomes a surrogate father to him, all the while planning to leave town with his ill-gotten gains, leaving Winthrop devastated and disillusioned. And yet audiences like Harold Hill.

 Why had a wanted to play Harold? How was I going to play Harold? Who would he be for me?

The key to Harold Hill became, for me, the scene near the end of the play when he finally fesses up to Winthrop. Harold confesses that he can’t lead a band, that he’s a liar, that he’s a no-good rotten crook. But then he tells Winthrop that “I wanted you in the band so you’d stop moping around feeling sorry for yourself.”

“What band?” Winthrop replies.

“I always think there’s a band, kid.”

That line became the key to the part for me. Harold always believes there’s a band. What does that line mean? It raises the question: Who is the real Harold Hill? Is the real Harold the con man named Greg who is cynical, heartless, and willing to spend weeks cozying up to people he plans to swindle? Or is the real Harold Hill the act Greg puts on? Does he really, somehow, believe there’s a band while he’s pretending he’s going to lead one? I played it as the latter.

Harold really believes there’s a band, even though it’s just make-believe. The way I thought about Harold, he had to pull the cynical shell of Greg back on when it was time to go. But while the con is in full swing, he believes every word he says, and his belief is the thing that makes him a great con man.

I have always had an affinity for stories of make-believe, but especially for stories of supposed lies that somehow come true. I’m not sure why. I guess I often worry that faith is a lie. That a lot of what I tell myself to get through a day is a lie. As a teacher, maybe I’m not really impacting my students as much as I’d like to be. Maybe my creative endeavors aren’t really worth the attention I lavish on them for not much tangible reward. Maybe I’m not as good a father or husband or friend as I’d like to think I am. Maybe the things I spend so much time and attention on aren’t really worth doing.

But the only way out of this conundrum is to act like they are, act like I am. I can’t really prove most of what gives my life meaning, religious or secular. I can prove that my eighth graders achieved high standardized writing scores last year. I can’t prove that those scores will make their lives any better in the long run, or that the scores mean they will be better writers in real life. I can prove that my own children have had high test scores all through their schooling. I can’t prove that the years of reading books to them every night from the time they were 3 and 4 until they finally asked me to stop reading aloud sometime half way through Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince many years later will make them better people as adults.

And so much of the time, we are con men and women ourselves. Are we really doing things for other people, or are we doing them so we can feel good about ourselves? But despite my own flaws and my endless need to know I’m doing a good job at this or that or the other thing, while I’m doing these things, I really believe in them. I have to, or I couldn’t do them. I have to believe my creativity, my teaching, my family, matter even if I can’t prove they do.

At the end of the play, Marian the librarian knows Harold is a sham, yet she gives him the piece of evidence that she could have used to condemned him. She is willing to let him go. From a rational point of view, she is being willfully stupid, aiding and abetting a criminal and allowing him to run off with hundreds of dollars of her fellow citizens’ hard earned money. Taken at face value, Marian has become as morally bankrupt as Harold.

And yet…

When Winthrop asks Marion, who is his older sister, if she believes Harold, she says she believes every word he ever said. She tells him that everything he said would happen had happened—and that you could see it in the way every kid and adult in town had behaved all summer.

Harold’s lie had transformed River City from a place full of “Iowa Stubborn” to a town full of creativity and high spirits. They mayor’s wife is dancing. The juvenile delinquent has become a positive role model. The gossipy women are reading more. Most importantly, Winthrop, who had been morose and withdrawn on account of his father’s death and his lisp has become a happy kid again. It may have been a lie, but it came true. And perhaps what Marian realized is that the Harold who transformed the town and her brother was the real Harold in the end.

At the end of the play, of course, Harold is caught because he realizes he is in love with Marian, and lingers to tell her so. He gets his foot “caught in the door.” They are taking a vote on whether to tar and feather him. The ever-suspicious mayor points out that after all these weeks, they have never heard a bit of music or seen the band actually perform. “Where’s the band? Where’s the band?!” he asks.

And then the band enters. The kids have put themselves into their uniforms, gathered together with their instruments, and come to the professor’s rescue.

Each night, as I stood in handcuffs downstage, trying to feel Harold’s despair at having been caught, the sight of the band entering from the opposite side of the auditorium gave me goose bumps. I can’t quite explain why. The deus ex machina effect?

The band played the Minuet in G as an out of tune cacophony, and the citizens of River City loved it anyway, and my handcuffs came off. 

This ending is a little baffling in some respect: it simply concludes with a terrible performance being hailed as brilliant. Will Harold learn to be a real musician? Will he and Marian actually be happy together? Who will pay him to continue leading the band? Will he get away with all his past crimes, despite Charlie Cowell’s evidence against him? The answer, it appears, is yes.

Early in the show, the mayor’s wife, Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn, scratches a bunion on her foot and Harold pretends that this scratch is a movement of ballet-like quality. “What grace!” he declares, lying to flatter her.

The Music Man is a show about lies, but it is mainly a show about grace. Real grace. The grace that allows for a swindle to transform a town, a child, a librarian, and, in the end, the swindler himself. Sometimes the pretense becomes the reality. Sometimes there is love hidden all around, but you have to pretend you have it before you can see it for real.

I can only hope and pretend I’m being as good a teacher, husband, father, or actor as I pretend to be, but with some grace, perhaps I am. Our production had a graceful ending as well. A wonderful piano player who had just finished playing another production of the show came to our rescue and her presence was the final element that made it all gel. I learned to fake dancing just enough to get by, and by the last show a fellow cast member told me he could tell I wasn’t counting under my breath anymore. High praise. And we added on a final coda to the show that apparently doesn’t usually happen—several of the kids in the show actually played a rendition of “Seventy-Six Trombones” right before the curtain call.

I always believe there’s a band, kid.

I think that’s way I wanted to play Harold Hill. And I’m glad I did.

 All photos by Nadia Schult