Setting and Popular Culture References
The Music Man is set in the fictional town of River City, Iowa, in 1912. The town is based in large part on Willson's birthplace, Mason City, Iowa, and many of the musical's characters are based on people that Willson observed in the town.. The "river" in River City is probably the Mississippi River near Davenport, Iowa: the Rock Island conductor's announcing "River City, Iowa! Cigarettes illegal in this state" implies crossing the Mississippi from Rock Island, Illinois into Iowa. The year 1912 was a time of relative innocence, as recalled in 1957 after two world wars, the Great Depression and the arrival of atomic weapons.
The musical includes numerous references to popular culture of the time. For example, in making his pitch, Harold Hill lists popular musicians and composers: "Gilmore, Pat Conway, Giuseppe Creatore, W.C. Handy and John Philip Sousa". Some of the cultural references are anachronistic: "Trouble" contains references to both Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, a monthly humor magazine that didn't begin publication until October 1919, and the nonalcoholic "near-beer" Bevo, which was first brewed in 1916. In addition, Rafael Méndez (referred to by Hill as "O'Mendez," a great "Irish" trumpeter) would have been six years old in 1912.
Read more about this topic: The Music Man
Famous quotes containing the words setting, popular and/or culture:
“A happy marriage perhaps represents the ideal of human relationship—a setting in which each partner, while acknowledging the need of the other, feels free to be what he or she by nature is: a relationship in which instinct as well as intellect can find expression; in which giving and taking are equal; in which each accepts the other, and I confronts Thou.”
—Anthony Storr (b. 1920)
“Parents’ ability to survive a child’s unabating needs, wants, and demands...varies enormously. Some people can give and give....Whether children are good or bad, brilliant or just about normal, enormously popular or born loners, they keep their cool and say just the right thing at all times...even when they are miserable themselves, inexhaustible springs of emotional energy, reserved just for children, keep flowing unabated.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)