Word: willson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Broadway's top producer this season, 53-year-old Kermit (Look Homeward, Angel] Bloomgarden (TIME, April 21), had the good fortune to form a team of three men with widely varied experience in show business: Composer (You and I, Two in Love] and oldtime Radio Performer Meredith Willson, 56, the jovial lowan who in his first try for the theater wrote book, music and lyrics; Director (No Time for Sergeants, Auntie Mame) Morton Da Costa, 44, who gave the show its sparkle and pace; and the Music Man himself, longtime Cinemactor Robert Preston, 40, known vaguely to millions...
...years, nicknamed him "Glory" because he always had a smile on his face. Rosalie acted in amateur plays-a daring hobby at the time-and grew lilies of the valley on the north side of the house. She kept Lorna Doone and Tennyson within easy reach of the Willson children, and dressed curly-haired Meredith in a black velvet Fauntleroy suit on the occasions when he spoke a piece at the Congregational Sunday School. Willson admits that The Music Man's heroine Marian is modeled after his mother; he wrote a warm, lyrical ballad for Soprano Barbara Cook that...
Home for a festive Iowa wingding was Composer Meredith (The Music Man) Willson, who jovially greeted some 20,000 of the Mason City homefolks, grabbed a baton and proudly led a 208-piece band (with, naturally, 76 trombones and no cornets) down the main street, later uncorked lus ire at rock 'n' roll: "It's a plague as far-reaching as any plague we've aver had. My preoccupation with this creeping paralysis is not with the lascivious quality, the suggestive dancing that goes with it. This is bad, and it's been condemned before...
...gouger. Suspended for ten days was the city's No. 1 agency, the combined Tyson Operating Co. and Sullivan Theatre Ticket Service. Out of a job was $40-a-week Clerk Theresa Hale, who extracted $10 from Businessman Philip Stogel for four tickets to Meredith Willson's cornfest, The Music...
Bloomgarden sometimes snaps up a show the first time he hears it. "When Meredith Willson telephoned and asked me to produce The Music Man," he recalls, "I said to myself, 'Who the hell is Willson?' It had been so long since I'd heard him on the radio I'd forgotten all about him. He played the show through for me the next day, and we signed a contract that night...