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

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 genesis 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