Mason City, Iowa's most famous citizen is Meredith Willson (1902-84). He celebrated his home town humorously and nostalgically in lightly fictionalised form as River City in his 1957 debut Broadway musical, The Music Man, which was a long-running, award-winning hit. It was later made into a 1962 movie with the show's original star, Robert Preston, and has been produced many times since. The show, featuring songs such as Seventy-Six Trombones and Till There Was You, is coming to the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre in a production by Queanbeyan Players on Friday.

The Music Man is the story of Harold Hill (played by Gordon Nicholson), a con man who arrives in a close-knit Iowa community with a scheme to form a boys' band, pocket the cash for uniforms and instruments, then skip town. But not everyone is taken in by his smooth talk, especially the town librarian, Marian Paroo (Deanna Gibbs) – though Harold finds himself increasingly attracted to her, and he seems to be having a positive effect on the town despite himself.

David Vikturek, the chief executive of the Mason City Foundation, which runs The Music Man Square, says The Music Man reflects Willson's childhood memories of growing up in Mason City. He says Willson called the show a valentine to his home town and River City has returned the compliment with The Music Man Square, built in 2001-2, which includes the Meredith Willson Museum and is a tribute to the composer's life and legacy. It draws 60,000 visitors from around the world every year and contains 4000 pieces of memorabilia from the Willson estate (themusicmansquare.org).

"It includes a streetscape modelled after the movie set from Warner Bros," Vikturek says. The city bought the copyright from the film studio and recreated the design. But it also engaged in restoration as well as recreation – Willson's childhood home, built in 1895, where he was born and lived until he graduated from high school in 1918, was refurbished and is open for touring.

"The house is built in a modified, simplified Queen Anne style – there are many, many examples of that type of house in Mason City."

After high school, Willson studied music at Juilliard in New York and went on to a wide-ranging musical career. He played flute and piccolo with John Philip Sousa's band, was a musician with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini and was nominated for Oscars for the scores of the films The Great Dictator (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941). He wrote symphonic works and was musical director of NBC radio and television.

"He worked on a lot of variety shows, with George Burns and Gracie Allen and Tallulah Bankhead, and he always referred to himself as 'Meredith from Iowa'."

He had another Broadway hit in The Unsinkable Molly Brown in 1960, that ran for 532 performances. Willson's popular song hits included You And I in the late 1940s – "it was his first million-dollar hit, it was No.1 in the country for 19 weeks" and May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You, which was inspired by something his mother, a Sunday school teacher at the Congregational Church in Mason City, would say to her pupils in farewell each week, as well as the Christmas perennial It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, which would later turn up in his third and final Broadway musical, Here's Love, (1963) an adaptation of the film Miracle on 34th Street. A fourth show, 1491, about Christopher Columbus, never made it to Broadway but had a Los Angeles production in 1969. Willson also wrote a song, Chicken Fat, that Preston recorded in 1962 as part of president John F. Kennedy's youth fitness program; it was used a couple of years ago in an Apple fitness app.

But The Music Man is Willson's magnum opus. Although he once said, "I didn't have to make up much, all I had to do was remember" – many of the characters, incidents and turns of speech were based on memories he had of Mason City – this belies the very real effort that went into the show's creation. Vikturek says it took the author several years and dozens of revisions to create the show, working on the original story with writer Frank Lacey to tighten it and trying out many different songs.

Vikturek says, "Meredith wrote 40 songs; I think 24 of them were used."

Getting an actor to play Harold Hill also proved to be a challenge. Bandleader Phil Harris turned down the part as did stars Gene Kelly, Danny Kaye and Ray Bolger. Preston – previously a non-singing second-lead film and stage actor – was finally cast in the role that made him a star. The show won several Tony Awards including best musical and the cast album won the first Grammy for best original cast album.

Willson and stage director Morton DaCosta, who also directed the film, had to fight to get Preston cast in the movie – studio boss Jack Warner wanted Cary Grant, who turned down the part – but it became a hit.

Vikturek says The Music Man is only produced every few years in Mason City, but it's certainly central to the town's identity. He says Willson captured something of the identity of that part of the Midwest that still holds true – people can be stubborn, with an attitude, but are essentially good-hearted.

"It's reflective of how we live in Iowa," he says, quoting the lyrics to one of the songs: "'We'll give you the shirt off our backs if your crops should happen to fail' – we're very, very community-minded."

Mason City has a significant connection with Walter Burley Griffin, the architect who designed Canberra.

Vikturek says, "Seven or eight years ago an international Walter Burley Griffin Conference was held in Mason City and there were several homeowners and architects from Australia and folks who enjoy Prairie-style architecture from Australia and from Canberra."

Griffin was a protege of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who in the 1900s had been commissioned to design an enclave of houses in Mason City. When Wright abandoned his wife and went to Europe with another woman before finishing the job, the city called on Griffin to complete the project. Griffin, however, became caught up in the competition to design Canberra, which he won. The River City work was completed by other proteges of both Griffin and Wright.

And speaking of Australian connections, Vikturek notes that at the Tony Awards in 2014, Hugh Jackman, along with T.I. and LL Cool J, performed part of The Music Man's rhythmic opening number, Rock Island, with a beat from The Roots' Questlove and joked that Willson had written "one of the very first rap songs ever back in 1957".

Jackman, he says, had played Harold Hill in an Australian production of The Music Man – and it's not so far-fetched to see him playing the role again, on Broadway or in a new film version.

But for now, Queanbeyan Players is giving local audiences a chance to see The Music Man, with its array of colourful characters and its variety of songs, from barbershop quartets to counterpoint duets to the same tune cunningly played as both a brisk march and a dreamy waltz as different songs sung by both Harold Hill and Marian, making a character point in musical terms. There's more to this show than may first meet the eye, or the ear.