Buy it: Scam artists and love in the library ’20s carpetbagging classic ‘The Music Man’ on UMM stage

In the 1950s, when Meredith Willson wrote “The Music Man,” playing through July 8 at the University of Maine at Machias, he could not have predicted just how relevant his small-town tale of carpetbaggery would be in the 21st century business world. Consider the plot: A salesman comes to town, brands his product the “think system,” persuades the residents to invest their money in his scheme, and then walks away with their cash in his pocket. Enron anyone?

OK, maybe it’s a small stretch. Harold Hill, the show’s scamming hero, is a solo operator, not a corporation. But Willson was on to something that never seems to go away: con men – big and small – ripping off regular people. Fortunately, Willson was also on to romance: the con man’s heart softened by the affections of a librarian. Love and money. Does it get any better? Yes: Willson’s score is one of the most cheerful, most hummable in the history of musical theater.

Perhaps that’s because the Iowa-born composer started his career as a flutist and piccolo player with the John Philip Sousa Band in the early 1920s after graduating from the Institute of Musical Art (later The Juilliard School). By the end of the ’20s, he was first flutist with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, playing under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. More than 20 years later, Willson crafted the tunes “Seventy-six Trombones,” “Gary, Indiana,” “Till There Was You” and “Ya Got Trouble.” Willson also wrote two symphonies, the musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” and the famous holiday song “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.”

But “Music Man” was the breakthrough hit of his career. The original production in 1957 ran for nearly 1,400 performances on Broadway, beat out “West Side Story” for the Best Musical Tony Award, was made into two films and had a heavily patriotic and successful Broadway revival in 2000.

Clearly, it takes star quality to pull off this score with the required spunk and punch. Thankfully, the biggest star of the Downriver Theatre Company production is the all-women Sadder But Wiser Girls Band. Music director Vicki NeCastro – on keyboard, oboe and percussion herself – does the music proud. With fewer than a dozen musicians, she cleverly blends traditional orchestral instruments with a toy piano, ukelele and melodica, a wind-piano blown like a horn but played like a piano.

Gene Nichols, a music professor at UMM, and Deb Elz Hammond, a local drama teacher and the show’s director, provide additional star shine. Nichols, whose background includes being in a circus band, brings the right sinewy quality to the role of Hill, and Hammond, as Marian the librarian, adds both clip and tenderness. One of the sweetest moments of the show comes when Hammond shares the stage with her real-life daughter Emma for the duet “Goodnight My Someone.”

But the memorable moments in this production are many: the taming of bickering townsmen (Doug Guy, Rick Tanney, Jonathan Ramsdell and Norman Nelson) by transforming them into an inseparable barbershop quartet, Karen Varian’s percussive choreography during “Marian the Librarian,” and nearly any scene with Nancy Knight, who plays the mayor’s wife, Eulalie.

For anyone familiar with the pacing of community musicals, the opening number of “The Music Man” last Friday was just sluggish enough to raise an eyebrow of concern. Hearing those famed trainlike syncopations of “whatayatalk,” “wheredayagitit,” “you can talk, you can bicker” delivered with any level of hesitation wouldn’t do. One might have even worried: Have we got trouble, right here in River City?

Fortunately, even before the song ended, the cast picked up the pace and never let it lag again. That’s not to say some of the markers of community theater weren’t present. A flimsy set and the occasional missed line or clunky entrance are nearly inevitable with a large cast of amateur actors. But the Downriver troupe, which was launched in 1989 with this same musical, caught Willson’s rhythmic wave and the charm of the both the music and the story. Trouble with a capital T? Nope. And no con game either.

Downriver Theatre Company will perform “The Music Man” at 7:30 p.m. June 29 and 30, and July 1, 6, 7 and 8 in the Performing Arts Center at the University of Maine at Machias.