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You make a nice point. This was indeed comprehensible to audiences in the late 50s and early 60s (the Broadway version opened in 1957, I think, with the great Barbara Cook as Marian. Cook, now in her 70s, is still delighting audiences with her singing, and somewhere, the Music Man is always playing.)

Book, lyrics and music all by Meredith Willson -- a rare three-bagger on Broadway. The show has THREE pairs of songs that were sung in harmony. Both Broadway and Hollywood versions had the great barbershop champions, the Buffalo Bills, to harmonize! The whole thing was amazing. The song "Till there was you" won every award in sight and I believe it was the only Broadway song ever recorded by the Beatles. The hard-boiled NY critics came away muttering to themselves, talking about "corn" and loving the show despite themselves. (You can see, I'm very fond of the show :-) )

But consider. Gilbert & Sullivan, writing for popular audiences in the Victorian era, eighty years earlier, got away with lyrics like this:

I know our mythic history, King Arthur's or Sir Caradoc's,
I answer hard acrostics, I've a pretty taste for paradox,
I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus,
In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolus.
I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies,
I know the croaking chorus from the Frogs of Aristophanes,
Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore,
And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.
...
Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform
And tell you every detail of Caractacus's uniform;
In short, in matters animal and vegetable and mineral
I am the very model of a modern major general.

Some people still understand this, too :-)