Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

(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.