In Chicago, the top theater award is for ensemble work, Mary Zimmerman is renowned for her big-cast interactive spectacle, and Meredith Willson wrote a story about a band, facryinoutloud, complete with a score orchestrated for brasses, reeds, percussion, and a single lonely violin—so is it any wonder that the two star players at the Goodman Theater look like refugees from some other production (and in a nation where virtually every town, down to the smallest village, boasts a marching band, that's a lot of “others")? This is no problem, since the tale Willson recounts is not so much a bad-boy-meets-good-girl love story as it is a fable of a remote tribe whose quality of life is enhanced by the introduction of ART, however spuriously initiated. By final curtain, our joy is not founded upon lovers capitulating to the moral status quo, but the communal enlightenment arising from exposure to global culture and the creative participation engendered thereby. The virtuous librarian standing by her man is commendable, yes, but the mayor's wife rising in opposition to her husband's narrow-minded intolerance hints at a brighter future. For audiences still ready to dismiss Willson's genius as feel-good midwestern corn, evidence of classical influence in the evolution of our American regional aesthetic may be detected in the barbershop-quartet chorale harmonies, the integration of song and spoken word declamation as a forerunner of our modern hip-hop, the terpsichoric roots of dances in both the Martha Graham and Michael Kidd modes and the scenic design based in the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton. (If you don't believe me, see for yourself—the Art Institute is only a few blocks away. So is the Harold Washington library, where you will find plenty of Chaucer, Rabelais, and Balzac.)
