`MUSIC MAN' LEADS PERFECT MISMATCH

To find a pair as mismatched as Jeffrey Jackson and Danna Dockery, only look to "The Music Man" and the relationship between a slick huckster and a stuck up librarian.

So it's fitting that Jackson and Dockery will play Professor Harold Hill and Marian Paroo when the University Theatre's production of "The Music Man" opens Friday night at Forrest H. Rose Theater.

Jackson is a special enrollment adviser for the Southeast P.M. program, 40 years old and the father of two teen-agers. Dockery is a sophomore music education and vocal performance major who proclaims, "I don't plan to get married until I'm at least 35."

Dockery sings operatically. Jackson's vocal style owes more to Maurice Chevalier.

Where the two meet is in the theater. Jackson is an unpublished playwright and veteran of many productions who nonetheless hadn't appeared on stage for 13 years until he landed the role of the professor in last year's University Theatre production of "Ghosts Still Speak."

Dockery hopes to become a musical theater performer or opera singer after she finishes her schooling.

She was a confident performer even during her very first solo, a Sandi Patty song sung in the third grade. In high school at Fox of Arnold, she played Guinevere in "Camelot" and basketball on the team coached by her father.

At Southeast, she was a member of the chorus in "Amahl and the Night Visitors" and performed in last year's "Swingtime" revue at the Show Me Center.

She is the only vocalist from the university's annual Concerto and Aria Competition chosen to perform with the Southeast Missouri State University Symphony Orchestra at its concert March 11.

Dockery tried out for the role of Marian but says, "I would have taken anything."

So far, "The Music Man" has taught her much about the technical aspects of production and about acting.

"You are reacting to the little things and acting every second," she says. "You're always making sure you're here."

Reactions are the juice in performing for her.

"(It's) having an audience in the palm of my hand. Them hanging on every word. Seeing how they react to you," she says.

"And the ovation -- when they do it -- is a big high."

Jackson had a reason for wanting to re-experience the smell of the grease paint and the roar of the crowd.

"I've been trying to write plays and I wanted to remind myself what it's like to be on stage," he said.

He also has wanted to play Professor Harold Hill since boyhood. He recalls one of the television networks showing the movie version every year after Thanksgiving and buying the soundtrack when he was in college.

Jackson is much closer to being a real professor than Harold Hill is. He has two master's degrees and lacks only the dissertation to complete his doctorate in English at SIU.

Playing the glib Hill is very different from the acting Jackson is accustomed to, a style he characterizes as "The Bob Newhart School of Stuttering."

His involvement in "The Music Man" has indeed taught him something important about writing plays.

"I think about the movie version and how wonderful it is and how the lines seem so natural," he said.

That naturalness wasn't movie magic, it came from the script, he said.

"That was all there. The actors somehow took what Meredith Willson had written and made it so natural."

There probably was some grumbling around the Grauel Building when he landed the leads in back-to-back productions, Jackson reasons. "I imagine some students looked at me and said, 'Who is this old guy coming in and getting two pretty good parts?'"

He thinks the students have gotten used to him being on stage with them by now, but not everyone is.

"I had to warn my children that I would be kissing a woman on stage," Jackson said. "My daughter said, `I just won't look.'"