From The New York Times:
Pictured: Michael Phelan as Winthrop Paroo and Rebecca Luker as Marian Paroo in a 2000 revival of “The Music Man” at the Neil Simon Theater in Manhattan.
By Amanda Morris, (Amanda Morris is a 2021-2022 disability reporting fellow for the National desk. @amandamomorris)
Many know Meredith Willson’s 1957 Broadway musical, “The Music Man,” as a light comedy centered on a cheeky scam artist who pretends to be a musician and sells the idea of starting a boys’ band to a small town in Iowa. The show is being revived on Broadway starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, and will begin performances this month.
But several
newly recognized drafts of the musical, written between 1954 and 1957, show
that originally, the story focused more on the town’s persecution of a boy in a
wheelchair — carrying a much more serious message than the final draft. At the
time, children with disabilities were routinely institutionalized
in horrid conditions and denied an education.
In the
version that debuted in 1957, the only character that doesn’t fall for the
scheme is Marian Paroo, a well-read single woman who has a shy younger brother
with a lisp, named Winthrop. But the con man, Harold Hill, manages to charm
Marian and wins her over in part by being kind to Winthrop and including him in
the band.
In the earlier drafts, Marian’s younger brother was a character named Jim Paroo, a boy in a wheelchair who, in some versions of the show, has limited use of his arms and could not speak. Wherever Jim goes, townspeople want to lock him up, and in some versions, this drives him to hide and live in the school basement instead of at home.
Then, Harold
comes along and challenges the community’s assumptions about Jim by bringing
him into the band and finding an instrument he’s capable of playing with his
limited range of motion. An early title for the show, “The Silver Triangle,” highlights Jim’s instrument of choice
and contribution to the band.
“I think
that Jim was very much at the heart of the show,” said Dominic
Broomfield-McHugh, a musicology professor at the University of Sheffield in
England who discovered many of the earlier drafts in 2013 at the Great American
Songbook Foundation in Indiana. These discoveries were published in May in
Broomfield-McHugh’s new book, “The Big Parade: Meredith Willson’s Musicals from
‘The Music Man’ to ‘1491.’” The book explores the musical’s journey from “The
Silver Triangle” to “The Music Man” we know today — and has a chapter devoted
to the various early drafts of the show.
“When you
read the first draft, it feels quite thin until you get to the scenes with Jim
or about Jim, and suddenly it becomes very dramatic and serious,” he said. “I
still feel astonished when I look at it.”
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Most of the
songs and scenes in earlier drafts are also significantly different, according
to Broomfield-McHugh. In one deleted song, Jim, who is nonverbal in this
version of the show, starts to sing onstage alone.
“What Willson was trying to do was to sort of say, even though he can’t physically speak, he has all these thoughts and ideas going around in his head,” Broomfield-McHugh said.
Though
Willson’s writing of disability was sometimes gimmicky in ways that could now
be seen as offensive — in one scene, music inspires Jim to stand up for the
first time — Broomfield-McHugh believes that the playwright was trying to spark
a conversation about how people with disabilities were treated at the time.
He found
evidence that the playwright had visited organizations for disabled children
but couldn’t find any other personal reasons that Willson may have had for
writing about this issue.
Just 10
months before the show opened, Willson dropped the character of Jim, replacing
him with Winthrop at the urging of producers who felt there was no place for
serious representations of disability onstage.
“But I sense
such a frustration in him that he really, really tried for years to make it
work like this,” Broomfield-McHugh said.
One memo urged Willson to change the character, stating that “physical disability in a child is impossible to view in any terms but pity and sentiment, the problem is to find some other form of disability besides physical.” The memo is undated and unsigned, but Broomfield-McHugh believes it was written in early 1957 by an employee of a producer. He found it in Wisconsin Historical Society archives, tucked in the back of a script that belonged to the producer Kermit Bloomgarden, who took over production of the show in 1957.
Another letter to Willson, written in 1955 by the playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, says, “The easy solution is to dump Jim Paroo,” but that doing so “might conceivably reduce a major work to the dimension of mere entertainment.”
Today, audiences
can more regularly see disabled actors onstage thanks to efforts by small
theater companies like The Apothetae, which produces works centered on the
disabled experience; and Theater Breaking Through Barriers, an Off Broadway
organization that regularly casts actors with disabilities.
But on
Broadway, which can elevate shows into mainstream commercial hits, authentic
representations of disability are still few and far between, said Talleri A.
McRae, a founder of National Disability Theater.
There have
been some successes. Ali
Stroker made history in 2019 as the first actor in a wheelchair to win
a Tony Award for her role as a flirty fiancée, Ado Annie, in ‘Oklahoma!’; Madison
Ferris, who has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair, played Laura in a
2017 production of “The Glass Menagerie.” There was also the casting
of a disabled actor in the role of Tiny Tim in “A Christmas Carol” in
2019; a 2015
revival of “Spring Awakening” by Deaf West Theater, which featured
deaf and hearing actors side by side; as well as Martyna
Majok’s Pulitzer-winning 2017 Off Broadway play, “Cost
of Living,” about people with disabilities.
Even with
this progress, many disabled characters are not written in well-rounded ways,
and actors without disabilities are often cast in these roles, McRae said.
To her
knowledge, the character of Nessarose in “Wicked” — who uses a wheelchair — has
never been played by a disabled actress on Broadway, and the same was true for
the character of Crutchie, who uses a crutch in the show “Newsies.”
“Look how
far we haven’t come,” said Gregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy and the
founder and artistic director of the Apothetae. “Or how far we have yet to go.”
Part of the
problem is inaccessibility for acting training programs, said Mozgala, who is
also the director of inclusion for the Queens Theater’s program Theater
for All, which helps support and train disabled playwrights and actors. In
his own acting program at the Boston University School for the Arts, he was the
only person who identified as disabled and said many actors with disabilities
have been told to sit out of certain classes, such as movement classes, because
professors felt uncomfortable teaching students with disabilities.
Another
barrier is the perception of audiences. Nicholas Viselli, the artistic director
of Theater
Breaking Through Barriers, said audiences still feel uncomfortable watching
disabled actors or characters onstage. For the plays he stages, he said he
often receives donations from people who say they think the work is important
but don’t want to come see it.
“When you
advertise disability, it becomes a turnoff,” Viselli said. “People are like,
‘I’ll feel bad for them. It will perhaps diminish my experience.’”
In the end,
the version of “The Music Man” without Jim was a hit; it won five Tony Awards,
including best musical, ran for 1,375 performances and was adapted into
an Oscar-winning
movie in 1962.
“The Music
Man” has since been criticized for making light of its con
artist’s problematic, predatory behavior, such as a scene in which he follows
Marian home and tries multiple times to seduce her.
The legacy
of “The Music Man” may have been different if Willson’s original vision had
made it onto the Broadway stage in a way that authentically represented people
with disabilities. Many of the stigmas and barriers it tried to confront still
persist, according to Penny Pun, the managing director of the National
Disability Theater.
“A lot of
these works are being put down before they even see the light of day,” Pun
said. “So how do we know if they have mainstream appeal? They never get a
chance.”
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A version of
this article appears in print on Dec. 16, 2021, Section C,
Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: In Early
Scripts, ‘The Music Man’ Included a Disabled Character. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
