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

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.”

Ben’s new folly song, like his new duet with Phyllis, constitutes the most radical change of tone between 1971 and 1987. Rather than breaking down as he did in “Live, Laugh, Love,” with newly acquired equanimity Ben tells his 1987 audiences not “to disclose yourself” but to “compose yourself” as he sings