Word: willson
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...Best musical: Meredith Willson's The Music...
...Just lately there have been numerous cases of parents bringing their babies for baptism aged a year or even 18 months. This is entirely wrong and contrary to the church's teaching." So, in his parish bulletin, writes the Rev. Horace Willson, Anglican rector of St. Mary's Church of Rosettenville in Johannesburg, South Africa. "It is only reasonable to expect a child twelve months of age to be frightened and resist the priest's attempts to pour water over its head. Some of the recent administrations could be likened to an all-in wrestling match, with...
Behind his Harold Lloyd glasses, Willson still looks much like the round-eyed boy wonder who packed up his flute at twelve and left Mason City for New York and a career as a versatile but erratic musician. At 19 he was good enough to play with John Philip Sousa, at 22 was playing under Toscanini with the New York Philharmonic. In 1929 he defected to radio, for the next two decades whipped up foamy musical souffles and sprightly chatter for such shows as Maxwell House Coffee Time, The Big Show. Along the way, he tried his hand at anything...
When he sat down two years ago to turn his recollections of Mason City into rhythm and song, Willson found the going slow. His trouble: too many memories and too many tunes. He rewrote the whole show, he vows, at least 20 times, turned out 38 songs that eventually were whittled down to 17. Finally he found he did his best work about 5 a.m. "I'd wake up and lie there and suddenly something would come clear," he says...
...show business. You aren't a success in show business until you do something that makes the people dig down in their pants pockets and buy a ticket." Last week so many people were digging down for tickets to his rollicking smash hit musical that Music Man Willson was a victim of his own success, had to watch one performance from standing room in the rear of the theater...