Serious fun

Trinity Rep plays The Music Man

by Bill Rodriguez

The Music Man at Trinity Repertory Company? At first the notion sounds a bit startling, like hearing that the Providence Performing Arts Center is staging King Lear. But at second thought, you might think: why not? It's not Cats. And if Huckleberry Finn can be placed on the shelf with the literary canon, why not this beloved American musical classic?

The story is schmaltzy but, thanks to Meredith Willson, the theatricality is brilliant. The show captivates from the opening curtain number, in which the music and lyrics are synchronized precisely with the bouncing and lurching of a steaming train. Traveling salesman Harold Hill has come to River City, Iowa, to bilk the rubes out of payments for band instruments and uniforms. It's not a con game as snazzy as Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner, but while we're looking at the story line, Willson goes and steals our hearts.

Trinity has recruited dozens of middle and high school marching bands, each performing once or twice for the finale rouser. That might be the coziest merging of form and function since the Eames chair, considering that the musical is all about community. And it's also a canny box office draw, considering how many relatives student musicians have.

Playing the role Robert Preston made famous in the 1962 movie version is Fred Sullivan, Jr., who also played the fairy king in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the title role in Peer Gynt earlier this season. In recent years, Sullivan has gotten musical experience at Matunuck's Theatre-by-the-Sea, playing Oz in The Wizard of Oz and Liza Doolittle's father in My Fair Lady. The 15-year Trinity veteran has also performed in musicals on Cape Cod at the Barnstable Summer Family Theatre, which is run by his brother, John.

Between rehearsals, Sullivan spoke recently about playing perhaps the most amiable villain in musical theater.

Q: I understand that you've been heard singing songs from The Music Man for fun, even before Trinity Rep was thinking of doing it. Word got out.

A: It was one of my father's favorite musicals. My brother and I grew up listening to it and thinking that Robert Preston was a demigod, if not a full one. And we had memorized most of the songs when the two of us were growing up.

Q: What sets The Music Man apart in your own estimation, aside from those personal associations?

A: What makes Music Man so great? What I've learned working on it is that the character arc is more interesting than I even thought it was. And Meredith Willson's music was so revolutionary in that he used musical forms so well. You can't get any of the tunes out of your head. And then "Good Night, My Someone" and "76 Trombones" are the same song. All that stuff fascinated me even when I was little. And Robert Preston was just so kind of slick and charming and funny and just great.

Q: What was your first reaction when [artistic director] Oskar [Eustis] said that he was going to stage it here?

A: I was surprised. I was overjoyed! I had wanted to play that part since I was eight! His first idea concerned the high school bands and to involve as many community high school students as possible. He was very excited about it. He told me about it on the corner of Hope Street and Arnold Street -- because we live around the corner from each other -- and I literally was jumping up and down! He had me so excited. He says that our business is about creating excitement -- and he's very good at it. He was talking about how "76 Trombones" would be performed by the entire company kind of a cappella because they were thinking about the music, that the band was in their heads the first time that we perform it.

We're so preconditioned to expect less from musicals because we see amateur productions or summer stock where you can only have two weeks to throw this massive thing together and you don't have a lot of time to add detail or depth. We're so used to seeing these things hammered out. What's great about having a professional, four-week process at Trinity is that Oskar's treating it with as much seriousness as he would anything else.

Q: What do you like about musicals as a genre -- if you particularly do -- and what are your favorites?

A: That's a hard question. I always kid about that, that I love to play Captain Hook in Peter Pan, because I'm a big Disney fan and I love all those villains and over the top performances. But I don't think musicals are my favorite thing in the world or that I like them more than Shakespeare or Molière. It's just such a wonderful, valid theatrical form.

In college when my student counselor asked me what my goals were, I said that I wanted to be a member of a repertory company, because I wanted to become the most versatile actor that I possibly could be. The fact that we do Shakespeare and Ibsen and O'Neill and Tony Kushner, and then we suddenly do this classic American musical -- and seemingly do it pretty well -- I feel like I'm in the right place.

To tell a personal story: I had never been interested in performing musicals when I was in high school and college, because I took studying theater so seriously. I was kind of a snob and wanted to be only in Waiting for Godot and Long Day's Journey Into Night -- in repertoire. My brother is an incredible musical comedy fan and directs all the time in theaters on Cape Cod, and just loves it. So with his influence, I've dedicated my performance in this to him. When he came to see Doolittle at Theatre-by-the-Sea, he was beside himself he was so happy.

The Music Man is at Trinity Rep through June 7.