Stratford triumphs with The Music Man
Photo Cylla van Tiedemann
The Music Man.
STRATFORD, Ontario — You start having a good feeling about the Stratford Festival’s latest revival of The Music Man from the very beginning.
That‘s because of how brilliantly it brings off that audacious opening scene on a train bound for River City, Iowa, in 1912. It’s a guy setting — a lot of traveling salesmen here — and they can’t stop talking and attempting bits of one-upmanship with each other. But it’s no normal conversation — no music, just snippets of dialogue snapping back and forth to the jiggling rhythms of the passenger car and reaching an almost fugal complexity. …