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

two portraits of artists. In act I we meet a fictionalized but nevertheless once-real artist in 1884, the uncompromising painter Georges Seurat, who refused to sell out. In fact, Seurat reportedly never sold a painting in his lifetime. One hundred years later in act II, we meet his great-grandson, also an artist named George, a man who evolves from a compromising sculptor grubbing for grants and commissions to a genuine artist more like Seurat by the end of the evening.

Since Merrily is told in reverse, the disintegration of this Broadway Faust is all the more disturbing. When we first meet Franklin Shepard in 1980 as the graduation speaker of his former high school (a scene dropped from the 1985 revival), the once idealistic but now artistically sterile Broadway composer tells “young innocents a few realities” and introduces them to the two words that symbolize his abandoned ideals, “practical” and “compromise.” The older Frank says “compromise is how you survive”; the younger Frank answers that compromise is “how you give up.”

Twenty years earlier, but much later in the show, Franklin, his high school classmate and present collaborator Charley Kringas, and their mutual friend Mary Flynn, an aspiring novelist, sing “Opening Doors.” Sondheim has acknowledged the autobiographical aspect to this song: “If there is one number that is really me writing about me, it is ‘Opening Doors.’ That was my life for a number of years. It is a totally personal number. Luckily it fits into the piece.”99 In this song Frank and Charley are creating their first show, auditioning the material, facing rejection and disappointment, and struggling to reject compromising alternatives. Charley is typing and Frank is composing “Good Thing Going,” heard in its completed state earlier in the show when Frank and Charley sing it at a party in 1962. This is the party where Frank tells Mary, now a critic who has forsaken her dream to write a great American novel, that he has not composed the music for his own recent film. In fact, Frank has long since abandoned his creative partnership with Charley, who did not sell out, yet has become a distinguished playwright. Frank may be “Rich and Happy” in 1970, but he is also morally and artistically bankrupt and sad. By the end of Shepard’s career, which real-life audiences witnessed with disappointment near the beginning of the show, the selling of an artistic soul is complete.

In the creation of “Opening Doors,” Frank experiences considerable difficulty going beyond the opening phrase, which, not incidentally, is the phrase that most clearly resembles the idealistic anthem that he and Charley composed for their high school graduation (both at the opening and toward the close of the musical in its original production).100 When Mary calls to tell Frank that she is about to abandon her principles and her novel by taking commercial writing jobs, she sings this same opening phrase. Later in the song Charley and Frank audition the first several phrases of their future hit song for a wary producer, Joe Josephson.

Even without Sondheim’s admission, reaffirmed at the March 2008 public interview in Portland with Frank Rich, it would be difficult to overlook the autobiographical component of Josephson’s criticism, so closely does it correspond to the critical reactions which the modernist Sondheim, a close contemporary of the fictional Mr. Shepard, had by then been facing for more than two decades. Ironically, however, when Josephson tells them that “There’s not a tune you can hum.—/ There’s not a tune you go bum-bum-bum-didum” or that he will let them “know when Stravinsky has a hit,” he sings Frank’s tune. After this initial rejection, Charley and Frank continue to pitch their song. Josephson then abruptly dismisses them and sings his own: “Write more, work hard,—/ Leave your name with the girl.—/ Less avant-garde.”

At this moment the ghost of Rodgers and Hammerstein returns to haunt Sondheim as well as Franklin Shepard. The “plain old melodee dee dee dee dee dee” that Josephson desires is none other than the chestnut, “Some Enchanted Evening,” from South Pacific. Characteristically, Josephson does not know the words to this familiar classic and apparently does not even realize that he is trying to hum a Rodgers and Hammerstein song. In addition to several conspicuously incorrect pitches, Josephson also sings its opening musical phrase completely outside of its proper metrical foundation (with an extra quarter-note within a measure of 4/4 time, one extra beat too many for the measure).

Sondheim is reinforcing what we all know: that in 1958 as well as in 1981 a Rodgers tune was and is the ideal Broadway theater song and the standard by which Shepard—and Sondheim—will be measured. In defiance of this expectation, Charley and Frank refuse to alter their work and write a Rodgers and Hammerstein-type song, and instead join with Mary to create something new and all their own, an original revue. Within a few years the rejected song becomes a hit song in Frank and Charley’s new Broadway show, produced by Josephson. By the 1980s, people everywhere were beginning to hum Sondheim’s songs, too, and by the 1990s and 2000s more and more could be heard out of their original stage contexts in cabaret theaters, recordings, and television.101 And although few, if any, of his songs match the familiarity of “Send in the Clowns,” and of course many songs by Rodgers, Sondheim’s songs have belatedly begun to receive broader recognition. Paradoxically, what was uncommercial has become, to an extent, evergreen (and belatedly commercial as well).

The fin-de-siècle classical modernists are rarely accused of compromising their ideals, but they are, like Sondheim and Seurat, equally faulted for lacking artistic passion. Sondheim also shares with his modernist counterparts a profound awareness of his classic predecessors and self-consciously responds to his tradition in varied and profound ways. Just as the European modernists recreate the past in their own image, so Sondheim pays allegiance to and reinterprets his tradition and makes it his own. At the center of this tradition are the integrated musicals of Rodgers