June 24 – July 24, 2022

Larry Toffler

Larry Toffler stars as the charismatic conman, Harold Hill. Toffler is a writer and actor, who started his career as the host of the children’s game show, Finders Keepers, and later became a regular on the 1990s teen soap opera Tribes. His play, Death Benefits, was the basis for the 1999 feature film The Settlement starring John C. Reilly and Kelly McGillis. He also wrote, co-produced and starred in 2002’s, 5 Card Stud, a modestly budgeted film that won high praise from film festival audiences across the country.

Darrienne Lissette Caldwell

Darrienne Lissette Caldwell (also known as Darrienne Gross) is a home-grown Ojai talent, whose soaring soprano and onstage warmth have been captivating Ventura County audiences since she was a little girl. She appeared in featured roles at Ojai ACT in both Show Boat and Kiss Me, Kate, while she was still a teenager, and won high praise as Elton John’s Aida at Moorpark’s High Street Art Center. She studied voice at Cal Arts and teaches voice and music.

1957 – Cultural Context

Meredith Willson‘s The Music Man is both an homage to the small-town Iowa life of his childhood, and a keen observation that, as innocent as that time appears to be in our collective memory, it was also a time of cultural rigidity and ethnic intolerance. At the time of its premiere in 1957, America was slowly shaking itself free from the fear of the Red Scare, promulgated by U.S. Senator Joseph R McCarthy and House Un-American Activities Committee. Americans saw in The Music Man the idealized America they wanted to recapture.

The Music Man became an instant hit when it opened on Broadway in 1957, and ran for more than 1,300 performances. It swept the Tony Awards for that year, winning six in the category of Outstanding Musical, including Best Musical, Best Actor (Robert Preston), and Best Featured Actor and Actress in a musical (David Burns and Barbara Cook). Its most notable musical rival that year was West Side Story, which, although a hit then and now (it ran 732 performances), didn’t serve up the light-headed happiness America craved at the time.

The original cast recording of The Music Man won the first-ever-awarded Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album. It was number-one on the Billboard charts for 12 weeks and stayed on the charts for nearly five years. The score includes “76 Trombones,” a standard on the play list of every high school and military marching band in the country, and the poignant love song, “Till There was You,” which has been covered by hundreds of artists over the past sixty years—most notably by The Beatles in 1963. Other notable numbers from the show that took America by storm include “Marian the Librarian,” “Gary, Indiana,” “The Wells Fargo Wagon,” and “Trouble.”