Theater: Pied Piper of Broadway

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This ear-catcher, signaled by a blast of steam, is The Music Man's curtain-raiser, an invitation for the audience to visit River City, and an underscoring of Director Da Costa's feeling that "the job of the theater is not to feed pessimism but to dispel it."

It is a quality that bombards the customers as they settle down to hear the rousing overture of the show, a quality that wreathes the Majestic Theater with a sunny-day-at-the-farm euphoria. In a fat Broadway season whose successes deal so clinically with such subjects as marital frustration, alcoholism, dope addiction, juvenile delinquency and abortion, The Music Man is a monument to golden unpretentiousness and wholesome fun—one of the happiest chemical explosions to hit the street since John Philip Sousa himself marched grandly into town, as the Music Man says, when

Seventy-six trombones led the big parade

With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand ...