Theater’s most affable swindler brings River City to Sin City in ‘The Music Man’

One fine night they leave the pool hall, headin' for the dance at the armory; libertine men and scarlet women and ragtime, shameless music that'll grab your son and your daughter, with the arms of a jungle animal instinct -- MASS-TERIA! Friends the idle brain is the devil's playground ...

Take the chorus, kids! ... C'mon, you know the next lyric ... Something ya got right there in River City? With a capital T? Rhymes with P? Stands for pool?

" 'Trouble' is an amazing piece," says Patrick Ryan Sullivan, the Broadway actor portraying theater's most beloved bamboozler, Professor Harold Hill, in Nevada Conservatory Theatre's production of "The Music Man" at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"I didn't realize how brilliantly crafted and how difficult it is until I tried to learn it. Once you jump on that train, you just don't get off."

The full title is "Ya Got Trouble," sheets of words flying from the bunko motormouth of this flimflammer with the instruments he peddles to the rubes of River City, Iowa, promising a boys' band and planning to bolt after he fleeces this flock with that crock. That's before he succumbs to the virginal lure of librarian Marian Paroo, bemoaning how he finally "got my foot caught in the door."

"Harold Hill is the most likable crook in the American canon," says guest director Michael Barakiva about the character charmed into theater lore by Robert Preston. "Someone said to me that anybody who is swindled -- romantically, financially, professionally -- part of them knows they're being swindled, another part wants to be swindled. We look the other way, which is what this town does with Harold Hill. But this willful ignorance leads to bliss."

New York-based Barakiva joins a Great White Way triumvirate -- Sullivan, Teri Bibb (Marian) and choreographer Mimi Quillin -- merging with the conservatory cast, extending the UNLV tradition of importing pros to work alongside students, shifting theater theory from class to stage.

"With this cross-pollination, each group learns from the other, and I certainly am," says Barakiva, who's "not a musical guy per se," but says he swooned over "The Music Man" after seeing other productions and hearing cast albums.

"Ya Got Trouble" -- Hill's breathlessly syncopated snow job to buffalo the yokels into believing a pool hall will corrupt their kids, whose salvation will be his band -- tops the Meredith Willson score that sparkles with such other tunes as "Gary, Indiana," "The Wells Fargo Wagon," "Till There Was You" -- a ballad so gorgeous even the Beatles recorded it -- and that sacred staple of school-band repertoires, "Seventy-Six Trombones."

As all-Americana as the songs seem, Sullivan says many are musically complex and conceptually unique. "Rock Island," sung by a gaggle of traveling salesmen from which Hill emerges to kick-start the plot, is an inventive spoken-word piece set to the chugging, changing rhythms of a train. "I've never encountered anything like it in musical theater, it's so radically ahead of its time," says Barakiva about the number Sullivan praises as surprisingly contemporary. "It was done in 1957," Sullivan says, "and it's a rap song."

Beyond "Ya Got Trouble," Sullivan was similarly challenged by "The Sadder But Wiser Girl," in which Hill professes to reject "some dewy young miss who keeps resisting, all the while she keeps insisting," preferring the title type of gal. "The toughest line for me is from that song: 'No bright-eyed, blushing, breathless baby doll, baby!' It's one of my favorite pieces to do, but really hard to get."

Still, it's that speed-singing, tongue-twisty tune that gets to the lovably larcenous heart of Professor Harold Hill, as he reminds us with brilliant musical bull:

The minute your son leaves the house, does he rebuckle his knickerbockers below the knee? Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corn crib? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Capt. Billy's Whiz Bang? Are certain words creeping into his conversation? Words like, like ... 'Swell'? A-HA! And 'So's your old man'? Well if so my friends ...

Take the chorus, kids! ...

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.