‘Music Man’ strikes up the fun in Super Summer Theatre production

Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man” is a perfect entertainment for a picnic under the stars at Super Summer Theatre at Spring Mountain Ranch State Park.

Though jaded eyes might search for irony in this classic American musical celebration of small-town life, the play’s earnest sentiments are presented without tongue in cheek in this well-performed production directed by Steve Huntsman for Huntsman Entertainment.

The show opens with the surprisingly raplike traveling salesmen song, “Rock Island,” which is comically choreographed using the salesmen’s feet to propel the train car a la Fred Flintstone. Con man Harold Hill, played with easy charm by James Horrocks, hits River City, Iowa, posing as a boys’ band leader to sell the naive townsfolk band instruments that he has no idea how to play. He is planning to skip town with their money shortly after the instruments arrive.

As the fast-talking “Professor” Hill, Horrocks is amusing when he makes his pitch to save the children from the corruption of the town’s new pool table with his rapid-fire “Ya Got Trouble.” As it turns out, the town’s Mayor Shinn owns the billiard parlor; however, Horrocks stirs the townspeople and the audience with his pitch of a shining marching band in his well-sung “Seventy-six Trombones.” He is able to charm the town’s bumbling school board by converting it into a barbershop quartet. He even cons the mayor’s wife, Eulalie, broadly played by Andee Gibbs, into his swindle.

Horrocks is perfect as a handsome cad who plans to win over the resistant town librarian (“The Sadder-But-Wiser-Girl”) by turning on his considerable charm in the hypnotic “Marian The Librarian.” Tia Renée Konsur plays Marian with a winsome intelligence that makes her falling in love with Hill despite her knowledge of his fraud emotionally convincing. Her lovely voice is especially fetching in the lullaby “Goodnight, My Someone” and in the popular ballad, “Till There Was You.” (Unfortunately, her duet with Horrocks was spoiled by uneven miking, which also plagued other moments in the show.) Hill, in turn, realizes that he, too, is falling for Marian and might not be able to skip town with the money quite as easily this time as he has in the past.

The supporting cast also performs their roles well. Will Haley is appropriately adorable without being cloying as Winthrop and shows precocious ability as a dancer and singer (“The Wells Fargo Wagon” and “Gary, Indiana”). Amaryllis is played by a wistful Sara Rose Andreas, and Gail K. Romero makes a pleasant Mrs. Paroo (“Piano Lesson”). Rob Kastil delivers Mayor Shinn’s malapropisms with comic self-seriousness. Gibbs, as Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn, and her Pick-A-Little Ladies practically steal the show whenever they are on the stage. Their millinery excesses alone are laugh-out-loud funny. (Steve Huntsman’s costume designs are delightful). Gibbs’ impersonation of a Greek fountain is hilarious.

Olin Britt, Oliver Hix, Ewart Dunlop and Jacey Squires make a harmonious and comic barbershop quartet. Joshua Wride as the young Tommy Djilas and Diana Osborn as Zaneeta Shinn are graceful dance leads for the capable ensemble of young (some very young) dancers who shine in Kathy Mancuso Ortiz’s colorful choreography. Bill Flynn as Hill’s sidekick, Marcellus Washburn, brings down the house with his whimsical nonsense in the Act 2 showstopper, “Shipoopi.”

Steve Huntsman’s simple set design captures the Americana mood of the musical and is enlivened by the lovely lighting design by Michele Harvey. The spotlight used during the leads’ solos casts a shadow on the backdrop creating an appropriate vaudevillian feel. It was disappointing that the talented singers had to perform to a track rather than with a live orchestra.