There’s no trouble with this ‘Music Man’

Con man cons himself. Gullible townspeople get what they deserve. Love conquers all. A valentine. A satire.

You can look at “Music Man” lots of ways. But with “Rock Island” and “Ya Got Trouble” and “Good Night, My Someone” and “Seventy-Six Trombones” and “Good Night Ladies” and “Shipoopi” and “Gary, Indiana” and “Till There Was You,” the Shoreline Community College music department has got the right idea.

It’s not clothes, it’s the music that make this “Man” — but music in a sense broader than songs sung by the human voice and orchestrations played by strings, brass, winds and percussion.

There’s a kind of rhythm to the story of a traveling salesman who hoodwinks townspeople into buying their kids uniforms and instruments for a band that doesn’t exist but runs into roadblocks. And there is a kind of montage in motion to the way a cast of two score plus acts and interacts in period costumes within era-researched sets. The effect is a kind of point and counterpoint. It gets you into the swing of things in small town, U.S.A. and before you know it, absorbed.

And Monkey (Eric Clark) as Harold Hill, incarnates the impossible salesman who generates dreams impossible to realize or resist and the trouble that goes with them. In a way, Monkey is at the heart and soul of all things going on and their inspiration. And if so, the angel’s voice of that inspiration is love-interest Jessica Smith’s, a soprano that soars.

Also, there is a moment, as when a light bulb turns on, when Roland Ken Sabalza, Chris Mitchell, Taylor Weston and George Moua discover they can sing together. They hit on the words “ice cream” and “sincere,” repeat them a few times, hum them a little, harmonize and eureka! The best blended version of “Ice Cream &Sincere” you ever heard! A barbershop quartet is born! The moment’s hilarious; also, true to life.

And then there is Lori Pugh leading others of the Town Ladies in interpretations of a Greek vase. How elegant. How intelligent. How so very ridiculous, you can’t help but laugh.

And there’s Bryan Hanner on Thursdays and Fridays and Paul Heffner on Saturdays when one or the other of them as Winthrop, sings “Gary Indiana.” Winthrop as he sings, is the kid in the act of finding his voice after losing it for two years because his father’s sudden death traumatized him. He gets you where you feel.

There are other cast members and other moments and other highlights, too many to mention. And there is Deonn Ritchie’s directing and Susan Dolacky’s music-directing and Teresa Metzger Howe’s conducting and Erin Mitchell’s choreographing and on and on.

But the show and the show folks who put it on, all add up and into one single effect: the music. You can’t see Shoreline Community College’s “Music Man” and not hear the music. It’s like the Energizer Bunny. It keeps going and going.