Color literally sprouted on the stage during the remarkable Bill Rauch-directed The Music Man, in which the iconic town of River City, Iowa, was gradually transformed from a bleak, monochromatic, American gothic universe into a colorful, open-hearted community through the intervention of that colorful scoundrel, Harold Hill.
Rauch, in his second full year as artistic director of the festival, believes the American musical comedy is this country's highest contribution to world theater. As such, he sees Meredith Willson's The Music Man as a work of transformation and redemption as much as a light entertainment of trivial cheerfulness.
The play has been a work of personal passion for Rauch, he explained at a Sunday news briefing. He has wanted to direct the show since playing the delinquent Tommy Djilas in a production as a boy.
Enthusiastically received by an opening night audience Saturday, the show was indeed fluffy and cheerful, and yet it was produced with the same care and precision given to such supposedly heftier works as Macbeth.
These Ashland folks are pros, and it turns out that Willson can indeed be performed on the same stage as Shakespeare without the world tipping out of aesthetic balance.
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