76 Trombones? Save one for Wopat

Tom Wopat won't have to strain his imagination to muster an effective sales pitch as the title role in N.C. Theatre's "The Music Man." Harold Hill, the swindling salesman character, doesn't mean it when he promises to enliven a small town with music lessons. But Wopat knows full well what a positive force music can be. "Knowing how to play an instrument colors your life a little bit," says Wopat, 55, who played trombone and sang as a child. "Just to be able to express yourself through an instrument, it gives you a little different point of view."

Though he's best known as an actor -- on Broadway and as Luke Duke in the 1980s television action series "The Dukes of Hazzard" -- Wopat says music has always been his first true love.

In college, he sang and played trombone in a band fashioned after horn-inflected hit-makers Chicago. He also taught himself guitar and wrote songs, including "Shadow of a Doubt," which was a top 10 hit for Earl Thomas Conley in the early '90s. Wopat has released four country albums over the years. And he recently recorded two CDs of pop standards, "Tom Wopat Sings Harold Arlen: Dissertation on the State of Bliss" and "The Still of the Night."

"Getting into vocal music changed my life totally," Wopat says. "I sing every day of my life. It's one of those things that's as natural to me as breathing."

Music as Technicolor

Conversely, music doesn't come naturally at all to Wopat's "Music Man" character Harold Hill, the salesman who travels from town to town raising money for music lessons and then absconding with the dough. Harold can't play a note, so he sells townsfolk on his alternative "Think System," in which learning notes and practicing are replaced with positive thinking.

But Harold doesn't count on thinking positively about someone else, let alone with the most discriminating bachelorette in town, a local librarian and music teacher. And he's caught off-guard when she likes him back, despite his lies.

"There's a built-in vulnerability to a guy like that, whether he's aware of it or not," Wopat says of Harold. "In his dialogue, they keep trying to make him callous, but you can tell that he's not a bad guy. He's got a good heart. He's just trying to get by."

Harold's impact on the town is formidable. The school board erupts into barbershop quartets. A young troublemaker gets a chance at a new start. And by play's end, Harold's groundless vision of a musical future seems possible.

Director Richard Sabellico, a Broadway veteran who also directed the 35th anniversary tour of "The Music Man," describes Harold as the catalyst that turns the town from black and white to Technicolor, Wopat says.

"But I don't think Harold sees it in those terms," he says. "I think Harold sees it just in terms of Harold. Making other people happy is instant gratification for him. It's a little sad, it's a little lonely. But those things are all a part of the flawed lightning rod that you like to be in a show."

Trombone by chance

As for Wopat's own musical catalyst, that was his mom.

"She would order instructional albums," he says. "I remember an album about sailors, and they would play all the sailing songs and you'd get background noise from a sailing ship."

Wopat grew up on a dairy farm in a small Wisconsin town. His mother died in a car wreck when he was 7. And music helped him cope with the loss.

"Through doing vocal music, and through the teachers in the school system that kind of took me under their wing, that really helped me emerge from all that," he says. "It was hard. It was really hard, especially being the middle kid in the midst of that, with no mom. What had been such a vivacious atmosphere before, this really pulled the heart out of it."

Trombone didn't come until junior high school. And it was an arbitrary choice.

"It was kind of whatever instruments the school had," says Wopat, whose sister and six brothers also played instruments. "I got trombone because there was a trombone there."

Wopat took up the trombone again in 2003. The Broadway musicians' union had gone on strike and Wopat -- who belongs to the union and was portraying Julian Marsh in "42nd Street" -- refused to cross the picket line to help rehearse the replacement musicians. The union gave Wopat a trombone as a gesture of gratitude.

"I'd been bragging on my prowess," he says. "So at the end of bows every night, I would run downstairs, grab my trombone, go in the pit and play the last three pages of the playoff music. ... It was a lot of fun, and it was interesting to discover I could still play."

Harold won't play any instruments in "The Music Man." But he inevitably sells audiences on the transformative power of music.

Wopat wishes boards of education across the nation could be similarly convinced.

"They're more interested now in balancing the budget, and arts and physical education are being cut out," he says. "How stupid is that?"