It’s not only the townspeople of River City, Iowa, who are charmed by Harold Hill in “The Music Man.” So are actors.

Many performers have been drawn to playing the iconic role over the years. Hugh Jackman is stepping into Hill’s shoes for a Broadway production in the fall of 2020. Robert Preston made his name originating the role on Broadway in 1957 and starred in the 1962 film.

And, at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Edward Watts is slipping into Hill’s likeable-con-artist persona for a run starting Friday.

Hill is a huckster whose scam is this: He drops into various towns and promises he’ll form marching bands for boys. He takes money from unsuspecting parents for the bands. And then he disappears with the dough. On a stop in Iowa, though, he finds himself beguiled by the townspeople and by a certain skeptical librarian named Marian.

Watts — who has portrayed characters ranging from Thomas Jefferson in “1776” to the Grinch in “Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” — has played Hill in several productions of “The Music Man” before this one. He says that Hill “sells dreams” and “is one of my favorite characters to play, he really is. He’s the antihero in many ways. I guess I made a bit of a career playing these kinds of characters. I equate him to the Frank Butlers and the Adam Pontipees of the world. (They are characters from, respectively, ‘Annie Get Your Gun’ and ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’.) When you first meet them, they’re not the kind of people you really should be rooting for. But by the end, you have to be rooting for them. They’ve made a nice journey, and the character arcs are great.

“I just love (Hill’s) journey. I see him as a bit of a broken guy with a lot of walls. He is down deep a really good person who, through whatever issues he had — you know, the whole backstory thing that we actors do — got him to the place where he’s OK bamboozling people out of money and not really caring about consequences and things. It finally catches up. In my estimation, anyway, he’s able to tear down those walls that he’s built up ... and find the man he always should have been.”

“The Music Man” features book, music and lyrics by Meredith Willson, and Watts says that, with the score, Willson “sets the bar right from the top, with the opening song, ‘Rock Island,’ that it’s going to be different and interesting and very wordy.”

Wordy brings us to the fast-patter tune “(Ya Got) Trouble,” which is one of “Music Man’s” iconic pieces, along with “Seventy-Six Trombones.”

Watts says he loves “Music Man’s” songs, “not only because they’re a little different from your standard leading man musical theater baritone-y kind (of thing), which I enjoy singing, too, but because they are just these big storytelling songs.”

He adds that Willson is “painting you such vivid pictures with these songs, and each character has their voice and their kind of music. Marian is that gorgeous high coloratura soprano almost, and it’s perfect for her. For Harold Hill to be the charismatic traveling salesman, for him to have that fast patter song that everybody gets a little bit of it, he’s around everywhere, and he gathers everybody in with this amazing song. It’s hard not to tap your foot and lean in.”

The love story between Harold Hill and Marian the Librarian is another key appeal of the show, and Watts says, “In many ways, they are a yin and yang, but I think they also open up sides of themselves because of their interaction that you need to be a whole person. He’s a very solitary (person), doing his own thing, and so is she, in many respects. ... He opens up sides of her that are very closed off, and she does the same thing.”

A musical career

Watts, who grew up in Ohio and eastern Pennsylvania, did some singing in his younger years, after a middle-school choir teacher listened to a number of students sing to find who had good pitch and invite them to be part of the choir. But he was more of an athlete; he, for instance, ran track in high school.

“I thought it was kind of fun (seeing shows), but I never thought, ‘I want to do that!’ Even though I did some of this stuff in school, and by high school, I was the lead in plays and everything, but at that point in my life, it wasn’t something where I thought, ‘Oh, that’s something you can do (as a career).’”

When he was a student at Ohio State, he met some graduate students who had worked in theater in New York and were back getting their advanced degrees. He began to realize that, yes, he might be able to do this as a job.

And he certainly has. Watts has guested on such TV shows as “NCIS: New Orleans” and “The Sopranos,” and he has had a rich career playing a wide range of characters onstage, including Javert in “Les Miserables” and King Triton in “The Little Mermaid.”

He has been at Goodspeed before, too. He was in 2005’s “The Girl in the Frame” at the Norma Terris Theatre in Chester, and he was in “1776” in 2007 and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 2017, both at the Goodspeed Opera House.

We asked him about a few of the many musicals he’s been a part of.

‘The Grinch’

He played the Grinch in “Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” at the Old Globe in San Diego during the last two Christmas seasons. When he originally got the offer, he wondered if he could play that role, since he’d never done anything quite like it.

“It’s so physical and (you’re) obviously encased — every square inch of your body either has a giant three-layer fur suit on or half an inch of green and yellow makeup. But it turns out to be one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. I’ve now been offered my third year in a row,” he says.

‘The Book of Mormon’

He played multiple characters, including Joseph Smith, in the first national tour of “The Book of Mormon.”

“It was an amazing show to be part of. It’s like a rock concert. People go crazy for it, and they packed every (venue) we got into,” he recalls.

That said, the show was different for him in that he played five characters — “any older white guy in the show, that was me” — that were all small roles.

“There was more for me to do backstage changing clothes than there was really onstage. … I, as an actor — and this is nobody’s fault, it’s just the way it’s set up — playing five different characters in tiny little bits, there was no arc of any kind for me, there was no journey of a character. I was there to facilitate other things,” he says. “I was privileged to do it for a year, but it was also nice to say, ‘Great, I loved that, moving on.’”

Kathie Lee Gifford’s ‘Scandalous’

Watts had his first major role on Broadway in 2012’s “Scandalous: The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson,” with book and lyrics by Kathie Lee Gifford. The show, about the famed spiritual leader mentioned in the title, featured music by David Friedman and David Pomeranz.

“It’s a complicated one. It was a brand new musical, which is always something that I’m interested in being a part of. A lot of times in this business, people will ask, ‘What’s the role you’ve always wanted to do?’ They want to hear you say, ‘Oh, Jean Valjean’ or something like that. While I loved playing Javert and I loved playing Harold Hill, if I had my druthers, it would be a brand new character that I get to create. So ‘Scandalous’ was wonderful for that,” he says.

In fact, he got to create not one but two characters for the show — Aimee Semple McPherson’s first husband, an evangelist, and her third, an actor.

“Friends of mine didn’t realize I was the first-act guy because I had on a big chestnut wig and I had an Irish accent, and I was a preacher who dies. Then, in act two, I came back, and I had blonde hair and was basically in a loin cloth the entire time. So it was a lot of fun,” he says.

“It’s also very difficult and a very different experience than doing (an established musical) like, say, a ‘Music Man’ because you’re trying to figure out what story to tell, how to tell it, what characters to use, and that’s where Kathie Lee, who remains to this day a lovely friend of mine … she tackled a lot with that.”

‘The Fantasticks’

Watts joined the off-Broadway revival of “The Fantasticks” in 2010, which happened to be when the famously long-running show marked its golden anniversary. (It opened in 1960, ran until 2002, and then was revived off-Broadway from 2006 to 2017.)

He played El Gallo, and that’s the character he has played more than any other.

“I wish I could tell you exactly how many performances (I did). Over those five years, I would venture to say probably 1,500 times or something. It was not something I really realized when I got the offer, but, two months later, it was the 50th anniversary, and there was all this press around it. I sang ‘Try to Remember,’ the song that everybody knows from it. I sang it at the Obie Awards that year,” Watts says.

Even after leaving that show, he returned periodically.

“Every time it seemed I was about to finish a show and I didn’t know what was next, I’d get a call: ‘Hey, can you come back in (‘The Fantasticks’)?’ … I loved it. It was also such a little family. We had this tiny little green room, and we’d all come to the show 15, 20 minutes before the half-hour call just to hang out in the green room.”

If you go

What: "The Music Man" 

Where: Goodspeed Opera House, 6 Main St., East Haddam

When: Starts Friday and runs through June 20; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, (with select performances at 2 p.m.), 8 p.m. Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays (with select performances at 6:30 p.m.)

Tickets: Start at $29

Contact: (860) 873-8668, www.goodspeed.org