The OSF, Music Man, and the (necessary) delights of Escapism

by Debra Murphy

Back in January, before the 2009 season got underway, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival hosted a Town Hall meeting in the Bowmer Theatre. Although the topic of conversation on everyone’s lips that evening was the potential effect of the Great Recession on the Festival, another (not entirely unrelated) topic was the inclusion of Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man on the 2009 docket, to be directed by none other than the new AD, Bill Rauch. When Rauch asked the largely townie audience how many were surprised by his choice, I was one of many to raise a hand.

Bill Rauch then went on to ask how many were “pleased” and how many “disappointed” by the inclusion of an American musical, albeit a “classic” one, in the OSF season; I was in the former group, though never a huge fan of The Music Man. My chief cause for joy in the selection was the thought that a successful staging of a musical, any musical, given all the song-and-dance talents among the Festival’s stable of artists, might inspire the OSF to try its hand at other musicals or comic operas. (Me, I long for a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan. The Stratford Festival in Ontario, for instance, with only one or two operatically-trained singers, did a Mikado in the eighties to die for. Clan Murphy watches it on video at least once a year. But I digress.)

Back to the Town Hall: there were naysayers in the audience that night, too, and over the last few months I have occasionally heard comments or read op ed pieces in the Tidings espousing a negative interpretation of this little turn. These remarks were invariably accompanied by commentary on the evils of commercialism and concluded with dark allusions to the Decline of Western Civilization. Reading these aloud over the dinner table, I was frequently moved, in the bosom of my family, to quote the crude young Mozart of Amadeus about the musical establishment of his day—overly serious fellows who wrote in so lofty and tendentious a manner that they sounded as if they must (forgive me) “shit marble.”

Well, dang me, I believe I’m as devoted a fan as anyone of what Tony Curtis in Spartacus so deliciously referred to, in perfect earnest (and in a priceless Brooklyn accent) as “de Classics”. Before Clan Murphy lived in Ashland—when we could only come for a week to catch a few shows—we would invariably and unapologeticallly buy tickets to De Classics first, especially Shakespeare. But the notion that Rauch is leading the Festival down the primrose path by offering a musical–count ‘em, one–is beyond preposterous, especially when coupled with the suggestion that this is pandering to some lowest common (boxoffice) denominator.

God forbid that box office should be a consideration in any arts organization not underwritten by Warren Buffett. God forbid a theatre should hope to sell lots of tickets (and stay solvent) in the middle of the biggest economic crisis since the Depression. And God forbid that it should be so at a Shakespeare festival, considering that Shakespeare was himself by all accounts dissed for similar considerations by his Oxbridgian contemporaries. I mean, I ask you, is The Music Man really that much fluffier than Comedy of Errors or Two Gentlemen of Verona?

Either way, Bill Rauch’s Music Man is not only helping keep the Festival solidly and perhaps surprisingly in the black this difficult season, it is also terrific good fun and a creative, lively, warm production. Rauch comes across in person as a mensch, and his temperament seems to color his work with an infectious humanism. Besides, what a showcase for Festival talent! Michael Elich, whom we in Clan Murphy like to refer to as the Hugh Jackman of the OSF, because he can do it all–sing, dance, make you laugh, cringe, cry, and all whilst looking pretty darn cute—was a perfect choice for con man Harold Hill, that walking (talking, whooping, jumping, cavorting) advertisement for The Secret. My personal favorite moments in the show involved Hill’s transformation of the bickering-school board-boys into barbershop-quartet buddies by means of Sleight of Hand and the Power of Positive Singing.

For more detailed discussions of the production’s particulars, which I will not get into here,  I invite readers to check out some of the review links at the end of the article. The main point I wanted to address about this particular show, which carries something of the fairy tale in its DNA, is that for the two and a half hours I was sitting in the audience, I didn’t think about the tanking economy once.

Escapism, you say? Well, it is my fervent view that Escapism (like—oh that word—Entertainment) is one of the primary purposes of theatre; of every manner of storytelling, in fact. It is not, as some think, a negligible species of time-killing at best and at worst, irresponsible pandering. It is the sine-qua-non flip side of the dramatic process of “holding the mirror up to nature”. In my experience, those who don’t get this usually suffer from incorrigible misanthrophy or else have, in pursuit of Wisdom, acquired Foolishness where they misplaced Foolery. Either way, like Puritans of old, they seem to mistake virtue for that famous dread that someone, somewhere, might be having fun.

For all such curmudgeons, a reading assignment:  J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic essay On Fairy Stories. A brief excerpt:

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Fürher’s or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics, to make confusion worse, and so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt. Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the ‘quisling’ to the resistance of the patriot.

In these lean times, a little imaginary escape to River City might be just the vacation we all need.

Links:

to buy tickets to The Music Man, click here.

Daily Tidings review of MM by Robert H. Miller

Vicki Aldous DT article on Bill Rauch

OregonLive’s initially “skeptical” reviewer has a change of heart