When I saw Susan Stroman’s irresistible revival of The Music Man in New York eight years ago, I reckoned that the piece deserved another look over here and that Brian Conley would be ideal as Harold Hill, the travelling conman.

So it has proved at Chichester, where Conley leads the parade of seventy-six trombones in the rural Mid West and Scarlett Strallen partners him as the prim librarian who sings Till There Was You — the only item of musical theatre ever covered by the Beatles.

Catching up with the show was a real treat this week. Rachel Kavanaugh’s production, brilliantly choreographed by Stephen Mear, is admirably and impressively disciplined, even as it approaches its last week. And Conley, one of our few genuine mega-watt personalities in musicals and pantomime, demonstrates why he’s so wasted on those television quiz shows.

The audience was a sea of white hair, the bars abuzz with delight and anticipation, the sky dappled with sunshine after the inevitable day-time downpours. Luckily, the new-styled Brasserie restaurant was fully booked. One glance at its menu of “cured salmon and horseradish emulsion,” “sea bream and sauce vierge” and so on was enough to propel us over the road to the pub.

Actually, the Bell Inn is not what it once was, but the food is honest and hearty and we enjoyed our shrimp kebabs and steak pies in the company of my old FT arts editor, Tony Thorncroft, and my wife’s former office colleague Cynthia, Roy Hattersley’s secretary, and her ex-vicar husband, John. All of them live locally.

John, I hasten to add, is not a struck-off vicar, nor even a deconsecrated one. He’s merely retired, and very jolly with it. The whole bunch of them have promised to come along to a talk I’m giving on the Redgraves next month at the Chichester Film Festival, so I’d better not let them down.

As for The Music Man: I don’t know of a more surprising opening number than the salesmen’s unaccompanied patter song on a moving train, or a more remarkable cross-fertilising elision than the barbershop quartet’s Lida Rose with the librarian’s touching, melodic Will I Ever Tell You?; the model for this is surely the seductive counterpoint of Irving Berlin’s You’re Just In Love (”I hear music but there’s no-one there”) in Call Me Madam.

The score is continuously charming and quirky, which at least reconciles you to the still suprising fact that it wiped the floor with West Side Story at the 1958 Tony awards.

The Music Man was a one-hit wonder for Meredith Willson, who was  an accomplished and talented musician — as a boy, he played in the brass band of John Philip Sousa himself (a debt he repays gloriously in this show) and, in his twenties, played in the New York Philharmonic under Toscanini and Furtwangler.

But although his follow-up musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, was a fair success (a Broadway break-through for Tammy Grimes, a sweet film for Debbie Reynolds) and he is still remembered for a few popular songs such as It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, The Music Man is the work that made his name and keeps it alive.

And Chichester is certainly playing its part in that: what a season they’re having down there. The Ronnie Harwood plays sold out, The Circle has been well received and is highly popular, and Funny Girl and The Music Man are truly triumphant.

It’s a shame Chichester itself can’t get its restaurants and hotels right. The Dolphin and Anchor opposite the cathedral was always the best place to stay, but it’s now a Waterstone’s.

And the Ship continues its decline every time they turn it more into a boutique destination. The place is hardly clean, the breakfast was a disgrace and the service abominable. You couldn’t even buy a hot drink from the bar at 10.30pm.  Oh, for the days of Sandy the night porter and high jinks into the small hours.

Still, there’s always a holiday mood in the town, I find, an atmosphere only enhanced when I bump into Sian Phillips the next morning en route to her fully-clothed rehearsals for The Calendar Girls, Chichester’s next must-see production. 

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 8:50 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.