Just as Seurat’s mother evolves from a critical pose to an attitude of understanding and appreciation in act I, the childless Blair Daniels in act II—the act II George is both childless and divorced—rightly points out the meaninglessness and superficiality of recycling past successes and encourages the formerly vital artist to move on to something new. By the end of the evening, young George returns to La Grande Jatte and meets Dot, a deus ex machina figure introduced to help George change and grow as an artist and “move on.” Like the sadder-but-wiser characters in Into the Woods, George learns that he too is not alone, but rather part of a great tradition that includes the artistry of his great-grandfather and the wisdom of his maternal ancestors. Most important, he learns that his duty as an artist is to grow and develop his art and his humanity. The modern George has thus escaped the fate of Franklin Shepard Inc., the composer anti-hero of Merrily We Roll Along.
Example 15.3. “Putting It Together” motive from Sunday in the Park with George
(a) “Putting It Together” motive in “Putting It Together”
(b) “Putting It Together” motive anticipated in “Finishing the Hat”
(c) “Putting It Together” motive anticipated in “Sunday”
It is crucial to emphasize that despite the seemingly endless critical statements about its redundancy, a second act is necessary for George to learn this great lesson. At the end of the first act the painter has completed his great painting and connected fully with his art. Indeed, the completion of the painting (see pages 366 and 367) is a breathtaking conclusion to act I, one of the most stunning visual wonders in Broadway history. But Seurat has not yet connected with his life and the people in it. We know that although Sondheim and Lapine struggled with the second act, the issue was how to follow up act I, not whether this needed to be done.
Increasingly for audiences and critics—although Frank Rich boldly and repeatedly championed the work in the New York Times when it was new—the story of Sunday in the Park with George is not simply the completion of the painting. It is the completion of the artist as a human being. Sondheim clearly states his personal interpretation of the work in his interview with Savran: “He takes the trip. It’s all about how he connects with the past and with the continuum of humanity. The spirit of Dot in the painting is exactly what makes him do it. But he’s the one who comes to a recognition at the end. If you don’t connect with the past, you can’t go on. People who say the second act’s not necessary misunderstand the play. The second act is what it’s about. The first act’s the set-up.”70
A Few Words on Into the Woods
For their next show, Sondheim and Lapine continued to explore the topics of personal growth and maturation in another musical with two quite different, but complementary, acts. They decided to explore the deeper psychological properties of such popular fairy tales as Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Cinderella, among others, combined with several new fairy tales of their own, most notably a story about the Baker and his Wife. In the first act, the characters, each with a wish, intersect in complicated ways and everyone gets what they wish for. In act II, the characters—in this case the same characters in each act—face the often unethical and unsavory paths they have taken to fulfill their wishes and the negative consequences of attaining them, problems that their original fairy tale counterparts did not have to confront. The intricate and interactive dramatic connections among the characters from many tales demonstrate the aptness of John Dunne’s Meditation XVII: “No man is an island, entire of itself.” Eventually, after deflecting responsibility for their predicament to each other in the song “Your Fault,” they realize that if they work together they can resolve their collective crisis and grow, both individually and as a group. Sondheim acknowledges his connection to Dunne’s message in an interview with Michiko Kakutani:
I think the final step in maturity is feeling responsible for everybody. If I could have written “no man is an island,” I would have. But that’s what “No One Is Alone” is about. What I like about the title is it says two things. It says: no one is lonely, you’re not alone—I’m on your side and I love you. And the other thing is: no one is alone—you have to be careful what you do to other people. You can’t just go stealing gold and selling cows for more than they are worth, because it affects everybody else.71
Not surprisingly, Sondheim came up with a musical idea that not only metaphorically but literally realizes the dramatic implications of the idea that we are connected and not alone. Put simply, he links the themes with an Ur theme ultimately common to all, the theme which the characters identify early in the story as the Bean Theme.
Example 15.4. The Bean Theme from Into the Woods
(a) The Bean Theme
“Baker drops five beans in Jack’s hand” followed by the Bean theme as an accompaniment figure to “I Guess This Is Goodbye”
(b) Rapunzel’s theme (based on the Bean theme)
Although we hear the Bean Theme for the first time when the Witch mentions her garden (where the beans grow), a clearer example to open our discussion is the significant moment a little later when the Baker gives Jack five beans (“keeping the sixth for his own pocket”) in exchange for his cow (Example 15.4a). The isolated xylophone that clearly sounds out one note for each of the five beans makes the connection between the Bean Theme and the beans themselves memorable and unmistakable. In the next measure the Bean Theme is then used as the main melodic material for a lyrical vamp that accompanies Jack’s poignant farewell to his cow, “I Guess This Is Goodbye.” One of the central manifestations of the Bean Theme is embodied in Rapunzel, who as the Witch’s daughter—but audiences won’t find this out for some time—is naturally a direct outgrowth of the beans. Throughout the story we will hear her singing a lyrical extended and unchanging version of the Bean Theme offstage and without words (Example 15.4b).
Space does not permit a full-scale description of how the Bean Theme evolves from here. A few highlights from the first act must suffice. In “Maybe They’re Magic,” the orchestra underscores the music sung by the Baker and his Wife with the Bean Theme and follows the clever punch line (“If the end is right, it justifies the beans”) with an isolated statement of the five-note theme. A few songs later in “First Midnight,” Rapunzel starts with the same five notes when she sings her elongated transformation of the Bean Theme. In fact, for the entire first act this is the only music Rapunzel sings; in the second act she does not sing at all, although we continue to hear her music. Audiences may not realize that Rapunzel’s Theme and the Bean Theme are the same, but they know that Rapunzel is repeating her music ad nauseam. On the words “giants in the sky” Jack introduces the song of this title with the Bean Theme before it submerges as underscoring. Fittingly, when Rapunzel’s Prince sings his “Agony about the unreachable woman in the tower with the long hair,” he quotes her theme. Also fittingly, Rapunzel’s mother, the Witch, uses her daughter’s theme as the starting point for the song “Stay with Me.”
Sondheim and the Broadway Tradition: Two Follies
Although Kern died before all the revisions were made, the 1946 revival of Show Boat—from then until the 1990s the only version regularly performed—gave Kern and Hammerstein an opportunity to rethink the work together in the light of a new present. Audiences accustomed to reworked versions of the pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and to relatively fixed versions of musicals composed in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s may be surprised to discover that the sometimes extensive changes made in revivals of Sondheim shows parallel the revival histories of several musicals treated in the present survey, including Show Boat, Porgy and Bess, Anything Goes, and On Your Toes.
The 1985 La Jolla Playhouse revival of Merrily, for example, dropped “Rich and Happy,” the high school scene, and the idea of casting adolescents. More radically, the 1987 London revival of Follies precipitated a revised book with a new ending and both new and discarded songs.72 The Follies section in the online website encapsulates the gen
esis of the show from The Girls Upstairs in 1965 to the tryouts in 1971 and lists the songs of the 1987 London Follies.
The Follies revival in particular offers a striking modern example of a process that has much in common with the pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals examined in the first part of this survey.73 After a long gestation period that included the composition and production of Company, Sondheim & Co. were ready to return to a drastically revamped James Goldman script, The Girls Upstairs, originally drafted in 1965. According to Prince, the new Follies, begun in earnest 1970 after the completion of Company, could salvage only six of the songs from the earlier version.74 Prince biographer Carol Ilson summarizes the radical metamorphosis from The Girls Upstairs to Follies:
The realistic and naturalistic The Girls Upstairs became the surrealistic Follies. Originally, Sondheim and Goldman wanted the show to be a backstage murder mystery with an attempted murder being planned. The idea was dropped. Prince, working with his collaborators, decided to use only the two couples that had been written to be the major characters, and to use the theatre locale. He encouraged the authors to utilize the younger selves of the leading characters. Four new cast members would represent the leading characters as they had been thirty years earlier.75
All involved agree that it was Prince’s concept to mirror the younger unmarried versions of the two unhappily married couples, Phyllis and Benjamin Stone and Sally and Buddy Plummer (we have already met Sally and examined her act I ballad, “In Buddy’s Eyes”). The collaborative minds of co-directors Prince (stage director) and Michael Bennett (musical director) led to many additional dramaturgical changes, including an unusually large number of nine song replacements during rehearsals.
An opening montage that consisted of a medley of five songs, one of which was dropped during rehearsals, was also abandoned, and two additional songs were replaced during tryouts.76 The first of these songs, “I’m Still Here,” was added because Yvonne De Carlo “couldn’t do” the song originally intended for her, “Can That Boy Foxtrot!”77 Out of this necessity Sondheim invented a song that more closely fit the evolving concept. De Carlo’s character, Carlotta Campion, like De Carlo herself, was an actress who stayed in show business for many years after her prime and endured the ravages of time. A clever musical conceit of Sondheim’s in the song is to have her sing an ascending major triad nearly every time she sings “I’m Still Here” (E-G-B).78
The device of repeating a simple motive parallels torch songs such as “In Buddy’s Eyes” and would occur in other obsessive situations in subsequent Sondheim shows, for example, when Seurat sings about “Finishing the Hat.” Sally’s song expresses a defeatist attitude and a disconnection with reality, exemplified metaphorically by her inability to find a root or tonal center when she sings the oft-repeated “in Buddy’s eyes” in her first song and her descending melodic phrase that matches “I think about you” in her second song. In bold contrast, Carlotta’s mantra, a major triad invariably ends each time in ascending and affirmative melodic triumph on its fifth, like a bugle call. Sweeney Todd may be about obsession, but compared with Sally and later George in Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney’s musical obsessions are relatively tame.
Two songs were added to Follies late in the process. The first was Phyllis’s folly number, “The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” a song that replaced “Uptown, Downtown”; the second was Ben’s folly song, “Live, Love, Laugh.” Both were apparently composed and staged during a frenetic final week of rehearsals. In their published remarks Sondheim and Bennett disagree about why “Uptown, Downtown” was discarded. Sondheim remembers that he wrote it after he had worked out Ben’s breakdown number and gave it to Bennett one day before the Boston tryouts. Sondheim also recalls that Bennett resented being rushed, “turned against it,” and asked for a new number: “I don’t think there’s really any difference between the numbers, but because he had more time to think about it, I think he liked it better.”79 Bennett recalled the situation somewhat differently: “I quite honestly don’t understand why Steve had to write ‘Lucy and Jessie’ for Alexis [Smith] to replace the other number. I like ‘Uptown Downtown’ so much better. It also lost me a phrase to hang her dance on. I was originally able to differentiate the character’s two personalities by having half the phrase strutting up and the other half strutting down.”80
In a view that lies between these contrasting recollections, Prince commented tersely that “Uptown, Downtown” was “the right idea” but that “The Story of Lucy and Jessie” was “a better number.”81 Jeffrey Lonoff’s notes to A Collector’s Sondheim offer a thoughtful comparison that places these disparate memories within a critical perspective: “In the show we see two Phyllises—the young, open, vibrant girl and the cool, distant woman she carefully molds herself into. Her song in the Loveland section was to reflect her schizoid personality. But ‘Uptown, Downtown’ presented Phyllis as a two-sided character whereas she was, as the show presented, really two separate people. It was dropped, and ‘The Story of Lucy and Jessie’ was written to better portray this.”
Although Sondheim credits the influence of Cole Porter on “The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” a more likely model might be Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin’s “The Saga of Jenny” from Lady in the Dark. Resemblances between the Sondheim and Weill songs go beyond their suggestively similar titles and subject matter—a woman responding to the accusation that she cannot make up her mind—and include such musical details as the nearly constant dotted rhythms and frequent descending minor triads, a predilection for flatted (blue) fifths, and a general jazz flavor.82
Earlier it was observed that the successful cast recording of Pal Joey led to a Broadway revival that surpassed its initial run. The abbreviated and what was generally perceived as an uncharacteristically poorly produced original 1971 cast album of Follies (albeit with a great cast) generated the need for a recording that was both more complete and more felicitously engineered. Unfortunately, in contrast to the pre-production Pal Joey recording that led to a full staged revival two years later, the new Follies album with its all-star cast issued in 1985 was not followed with a staged Broadway performance. Although a revised Follies made a successful appearance on the London stage two years later, it was not until a 1998 revival at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, that a staged version would return to the New York vicinity. A modestly staged production finally made it to Broadway for a short run in 2001.
James Goldman’s original libretto for Follies was not only critically controversial, it provoked strenuous debate between the two visionary co-directors, Bennett and Prince. What mainly bothered Bennett was the absence of humor and the general heaviness of tone—in short, its lack of commercial appeal. When Prince vetoed the idea of bringing in Neil Simon, a master of the one-liner, Bennett gave Goldman a joke book.83 Although he remained embittered by Follies’s disappointing box office returns, Bennett felt that his judgment of the book was vindicated by the show’s box office failure.84 Goldman agrees that the show might have had a long run, but that “at the same time we would have disemboweled it.”85 In retrospect, although Prince does not go as far as to say that he likes the book, he valued the book more highly than Bennett and clarifies that he did not “hate the book at all.”86 Sondheim thought the large number of pastiche numbers “hurt the book and subsequently hurt the show” and concluded that if they “had used fewer songs and had more book the show would have been more successful.”87
For the 1985 concert performance, Herbert Ross, hired to stage the show, asked Sondheim to change the ending: “I never liked the kind of hopelessness of the show’s finale…. I think you never really believed that the death of the theater was a sort of symbol for the death of these people’s lives. My view of it was that this was a celebration, and the original ending was too downbeat and not appropriate for this event.”88 Eventually Goldman himself had second thoughts about the ending of his 1971 Follies: “The final scene of the show has always bothered me, I must
admit. There were all kinds of thoughts as to how we should have gone out at the end. I was pleased with the ending that Buddy and Sally had. I think it was honest and on target and about all you could do. I’m not so sure that if I had it to write over again that I would have had Ben and Phyllis together at the end.”89 Two years later Goldman did have it to write again when Follies was staged in London. This time, Goldman produced a new and even more upbeat book than the one implied in the 1985 concert performance.90
The principal deletions from the 1971 Follies (see the online website) are Ben Stone’s philosophical “The Road You Didn’t Take” and, perhaps significantly, the two latest additions to the earlier version, Phyllis’s folly song, “The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” and Ben’s concluding folly song, “Live, Laugh, Love.”91 Sondheim also created a new “Loveland” to replace the 1971 song of the same name to open the quartet of follies (one each for Benjamin and Phyllis Stone and Buddy and Sally Plummer) that brought the earlier show to its depressing close. Perhaps not surprisingly, the superficially successful Ben, who ultimately emerges as the most pathetic of the quartet in 1971, underwent the most surgery in 1987.
The first discarded song, Ben’s “The Road You Didn’t Take,” is replaced two songs later with “Country House,” a duet between Ben and Phyllis. This new song, although it conveys their poor communication and halfhearted attempts to work out their problems, demonstrates a civil and resigned incompatibility rather than their earlier bitterness and hostility. Phyllis’s new song, “Ah, but Underneath,” like “Being Alive” in Company, provides another illustration of a final attempt to capture a difficult dramatic situation. It also marks a return to Phyllis’s two-sided nature depicted in “Uptown, Downtown,” discarded earlier from the 1971 Follies in favor of “Lucy and Jessie.”
Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Page 47
