One of the most annoying songs from the American musical theatre of the mid-last century is “Gary, Indiana,” from The Music Man. This was a show I first saw in Winnipeg, at Rainbow Stage. My Aunt Audrey took me. (Audrey was married to my father’s brother, Hugh. They lived on a farm, and we boys, the city cousins, went for summer visits, not together, individually. Audrey recognized that I wasn’t made for rural rough and tumble, and she would always take me to see the Rainbow musicals, as a kind of reprieve. She was very sensitive, I’m sure she found my tealeaves easy to read.) I remember that it starred Evelyne Anderson as Marian, and Bill Walker as Professor Harold Hill. (This would have been the 1968 iteration, not the 1962, which featured the same principals.) I got the soundtrack of the movie version, with Robert Preston and Shirley Jones (who was just fine, even though it broke Barbara Cook’s heart when she was passed over for the movie role, having made so much of it on Broadway, and then she got depressed and put on all that weight, and oh, dear). I played the LP over and over — God, how I loved Hermione Gingold — skipping only the track where little boy Ron Howard, as Winthrop, lisps through the Gary, Indiana chorus. I had no patience for it, it riles me still. I’ve been thinking a lot of about The Music Man owing to an unexpected immersion in a story that evolved in Indiana, over the span of about 60 years and is centred not in Gary but in Madison County, in and around the towns — nearby Indianapolis — of Anderson, Muncie, Summitville, Elwood. I stumbled on the Gothic strand by accident, and now I’m obsessed. I started a new substack to tell the story. The Music Man is set, of course, in Iowa, not Indiana, but the small town community it describes, the hypocrisies and the hijinx, are so much like what I’ve been reading about in the papers of that time and that place. It’s charming and alarming by turn. The story I’m telling has to do with a family secret, and I’m very intrigued by how one of the siblings to whom this dark concealment would have been known, squared it with her own calling, which was as a crusading journalist. She died at the age of 22, but the record of her writing -- all of it unsigned, in the manner of the day — is really amazing: lively, funny, insightful, sometimes cynical. Hers is the story I’ll touch on in the next edition of the new substack and I mention it here because she’s on my mind, and she reminds me so much of, who else, Mavis Gallant, who, at just that age, 22, was launching her career as a features writer at The Montreal Standard. Anyway, if you’re interested in the strange goings-on of rural Indiana, circa 1900, by all means, join me! Thanks, all best, Bill
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Indiana wants me, don’t go back there.
Truman Capote wanted Marilyn Munro for Holly Golightly!
Barbara Cook played Ado- Annie in a 1950's stage version of Oklahoma, also passed over for the movie.
Florence Henderson played Laurie in stage version of Oklahoma, passed over for Shirley Jones. It was her first film role.