Joan Crawford Musicals

Stephen Sondheim based the lyrics to the song I'm Still Here around the career of Joan Crawford. 

First you're another

Sloe-eyed vamp,

Then someone's mother,

Then you're camp.

The FX show Feud reminds us that Hollywood treats many of their actresses the same way. While she played dancing flappers in the 1920's I'm going to focus on two works from the 1950's.

Johnny Guitar

Music by Martin Silvestri. Lyrics and Music by Joel Higgins. Book by Nicholas van Hoogstraten. 2004 Off Broadway.

The 1954 film is campy because it took itself so seriously. It wants to be a feminist Western about McCarthyism. It's better remembered for Joan Crawford's outfits, Mercedes McCambridge's scenery munching and the barely repressed lesbian subtext. The 2004 musical flopped because it tried to be a zany Forbidden Broadway style spoof. The subtext became text which misses the point.

Torch Song

Screenplay by John Michael Hayes and 

Jan Lustig (de). 

Music by Adolph Deutsch. 1953 film.

Here's another film that didn't need a parody. (Though Carol Burnett made a go of it). Joan Crawford dancing in blackface while lip synching to India Adams is camp enough. 

Company v.2

A recent production of Company inspired me to revise this comic slightly. The original was in pencil and marker. The revised was drawn with digital pen, keeping the same models but cleaning them up and giving Elaine Stritch more prominence (never a bad thing!).

Gypsy

I've tried to avoid the classics on this blog unless I could find an interesting take on them. In this case I've decided to compare Gypsy and Funny Girl.

Arthur Laurent's libretto for Gypsy has been heavily analysed and highly praised. The show lived past Ethel Merman's original star turn for three revivals, two films and counting. Funny Girl's book was dismissed as weak. The film was heavily edited to focus on it's star Barbra Streisand and subsequent attempts at revivals have yet to secure backing.

Some similarities: Both musicals have backstage rise-to-fame plots, VERY LOOSELY based on real-life stars and scores by Jule Styne. Fanny and Louise both clash with their mothers. Nicky and Herbie both abandon their leading ladies after a dressing room confrontation. Both shows end act one with a rousing song of unhealthy determination.

Later this week I'll look at how the shows differ, and why a Funny Girl revival may be better in our imaginations than in reality.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

And my Sondheim series concludes with his first commercial hit.

"It's noisy, coarse, blue and obvious like the putty nose on a burlesque comedian. Resist these slickly paced old comic routines if you can." ~ Howard Taubman. New York Times. 1962.

"Yet for all of its disguises, mistaken identities, pratfalls and leering jokes, "A Funny Thing" is as sophisticated as anything now on Broadway. In its own lunatic way, it's both wise and rigorously disciplined. Easy sentimentality is nowhere to be found here; in its place: the kind of organized chaos that leads to sheer, extremely contagious high spirits." ~ Vincent Canby. New York Times. 1996.

Pacific Overtures

But no amount of performing, or of incidental charm, can salvage "Pacific Overtures." The occasion is essentially dull and immobile because we are never properly placed in it, drawn neither East nor West, given no specific emotional or cultural bearings. The evening is a Japanese artifact with a stamp on the back of it that says "Made in America." And perhaps turnabout is fair play. But it does raise a basic question, for us if not for the Japanese. Why tell their story their way, when they'd do it better? ~ Walter Kerr. New York Times. 1976.

Eschewing visual spectacle, director Gary Griffin employs a formal, minimalist approach perfectly suited to the show's key influences, Kabuki and haiku... The result is riveting theater--and a thought-provoking illustration of how a society sure of its own righteousness and invulnerability can be reshaped, even undone in a moment. ~ Albert Williams. Chicago Reader. 2001.

Sunday in the Park with George

Sunday in the Park with George sits precariously on the edge between traditional plot-driven musicals and the concept musicals developed mostly by Stephen Sondheim and director Hal Prince. Like concept musicals, Sunday explores an idea more than telling a story, and yet it does still tell a story. The difference is that the exposition and conflicts are established in the 1880s but the resolution comes a hundred years later to a protagonist who is a different man and yet the same. ~ Scott Miller

Seurat, the authors remind us, never sold a painting; it's anyone's guess whether the public will be shocked or delighted by ''Sunday in the Park.'' What I do know is that Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine have created an audacious, haunting and, in its own intensely personal way, touching work. Even when it fails - as it does on occasion - ''Sunday in the Park'' is setting the stage for even more sustained theatrical innovations yet to come.' ~ Frank Rich, New York Times, 1984.

Anyone Can Whistle

Anyone Can Whistle is really two musicals, two very different, not entirely compatible musicals. It's part absurdist social satire, breaking the fourth wall, acknowledging itself as theatre, rejecting naturalism and sometimes even logic; and part romantic musical comedy, complete with love songs and a happily ever after for the hero and heroine (and even the villains). So many people have tried to stage the show but have crashed and burned because they couldn't reconcile the two distinct styles. ~ Scott Miller


The idea that it’s the wackos who are sane, and vice versa, was a cornerstone of 1960s counterculture. (That was a decade when “You’re crazy” became the highest of compliments.) And I suppose that it could be argued that “Anyone Can Whistle” was ahead of its time in advancing this notion, given that movies with similar themes, like “King of Hearts” and “The Graduate,” would soon become talismanic favorites of young Americans. ~ Ben Brantley, New York Times.

Road Show

“Sooner or later we’re bound to get it right.”

Stephen Sondheim devoted over a decade to writing a musical about the Mizner brothers. He’d read their story at age 22 and held onto the obsession till the rights were available. The piece went through several collaborators, tones and titles (Wise Guys, Gold!, Bounce) before settling into Road Show. What was once intended to be a vaudeville tinged musical comedy became a somber piece and received mixed reviews.

Some critics felt the brothers were underdeveloped and that Addie’s devotion to Willy remained unexplained. Others saw the characters as archetypes representing conflicting sides of the American dream. Another group saw the beleaguered gay artist Addison as a stand in for Stephen Sondheim battling a lifetime of inner demons.

Will the next revival of Road Show convince critics they finally “understand it?” Will songs like "The Best Thing That Ever Happened," “Talent” and “Isn’t He Something” get the same concert and cabaret attention as Sondheim’s other ballads? Will this be Sondheim’s last musical?

“And doesn't he sparkle?

See how he glides!

Isn't he something!”

Saturday Night

"... his novice professional effort, "Saturday Night," written before "West Side Story" and abandoned when its producer died. The show had been consigned to a trunk for nearly half a century, though the experience of writing it, and of its young author's first efforts to break into the theater, were at the core of "Merrily."

"I don't have any emotional reaction to 'Saturday Night' at all -- except fondness," Sondheim says. "It's not bad stuff for a 23-year-old. There are some things that embarrass me so much in the lyrics -- the missed accents, the obvious jokes. But I decided, Leave it. It's my baby pictures. You don't touch up a baby picture -- you're a baby!""

~ Conversations with Stephen Sondheim

Do I Hear a Waltz?

The fiercest critic of this 1964 American musical is one of its co-creators. It was Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics to Richard Rodgers's score, who dubbed it a "Why?" musical, meaning a perfectly respectable show that has no reason for being. Actually, it's rather better than that and, in this rare revival by Charles Court Opera, exudes a pleasant, watery charm...

But it is Sondheim who provides the salt to go with Rodgers's sugar, and although the relationship between the two men was notoriously fraught, you periodically find the young lyricist pushing the old composer into new territory.~  Guardian. 2014.

Merrily We Roll Along

Three artists become friends. One becomes rich and the other two turn on him. Is Frank a villain, a cipher, or a victim of of his clingy friends' unrequited crushes? The 2013 London broadcast made a case for the latter with a surprisingly sympathetic Frank, torn like Company's Bobby between some nasty friends and lovers. However Frank's solo "Growing Up" is spent complaining about his friends. He never gets an "I want" solo to tell us exactly why his career path changes, so we're left to view him through the unreliable lenses of Charley and Mary. 

AS we all should probably have learned by now, to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one's heart broken at regular intervals. ~ Frank Rich, New York Times, 1981. 

In Harold Prince’s original staging the ensemble was notable for its youth and lack of professional experience. Mr. Prince has said he envisioned the show as a sort of “Babes in Arms”-like frolic for fresh-faced performers. But Mr. Sondheim, being Mr. Sondheim, streaked even the show’s sunniest songs with chilling shadows of melancholy. ~ Ben Brantley, New York Times, 2012.

Merrily, for most of its length, chides Frank for "selling out," and this could be the prime reason why audiences don't take to the show. Face it: Most theatergoers must feel as if they've sold out in some capacity. ~ Peter Filichia, 2005. 

The Frogs

“In Aristophanes' account, Dionysus must choose between Aeschylus and Euripides as the playwright to revitalize rotten old Athens. Shevelove, whose first (nonmusical) version of ''The Frogs'' was performed in 1941 when he was an instructor at Yale, subsituted Shaw and Shakespeare. When the show was resurrected in 1974, Shevelove enlisted Mr. Sondheim, with whom he had collaborated on an earlier, happier slice of singing antiquity, ''A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”… Though the (1974) production, which starred Larry Blyden, ran only a week, it has since acquired a mythic, Brigadoonish haze in the land of showbiz, thanks in part to its exotic (and acoustically disastrous) aquatic setting and a student chorus that included Sigourney Weaver, Meryl Streep and the playwright Christopher Durang.” ~ New York Times

A Little Night Music

“A Little Night Music, which opened at the Shubert Theater last night, is heady, civilized, sophisticated and enchanting. It is Dom Perignon. It is supper at Laserre. It is a mixture of Cole Porter, Gustva Mahler, Antony Tudor and just a little of Ingmar Bergman. And it is more fun than any tango in a Parisian suburb… Good God! – an adult musical!” ~ Clive Barnes. New York Times. 1973.

I was introduced to A Little Night Music by the 1977 film. The cast featured three members of the Broadway company, a game Elizabeth Taylor and a star turn from Diana Rigg. I loved it and was surprised to learn the film is widely despised by fans of the show (which is despised in turn by fans of Bergman’s original film). Looking back on my first visit to the Sweeney Todd film I can sympathize.  Even the popular Into the Woods has caused some to clung to their PBS DVD’s and weep bitter tears. While the Night Music film cut the Greek Chorus and a considerable portion of the score it inspired some lovely new material from Sondheim.

Follies

With the success of Into the Woods hope has rekindled among the die-hard fans that we'll see a film of Follies. If such film should ever occur it is nearly guaranteed to be a glorious and fascinating failure. The original Broadway production received mixed reviews and a truncated cast album, leaving the fans to spread the legend of the perfect cast and ghostly set. When concerts, revivals and extended recordings began to emerge they were held against the enhanced memories of the original.

At one point Follies was to have connected it's showbiz reunion vignettes with a backstage murder mystery. The plot was dropped in favor of a dream scape where the guests at the party interact with the ghosts of their younger selves. Imposing a stronger plot upon the film could be as problematic as the screenplay for Nine, yet leaving the film shapeless would be an even riskier experiment. Regardless, when and if it happens I'll be there opening night with a front row seat!

My Dream "Into the Woods"

The following post contains major plot spoilers for Into the Woods.

Into the Woods mixes the characters of four classic fairy tales into an original story. Everyone pursues their wish in a fast, funny, tightly plotted act one. Act two shows the sour side of happy ever after. The wishes have ugly consequences and half the cast dies. Like Candide and The Fantasticks the survivors sing an older but wiser ballad and replace adventure with domestic life. It’s messy, depressing and unfulfilling… which some say is the point.

I’ve seen about eight live productions, thus far, and the second act has never satisfied me. One director will be slavishly following the original Broadway staging. Then I read their program note… BAM… Cinderella’s Castle is the World Trade Center! The Giant is Global Warming! Wait… what? Before seeing the new film I thought I’d jot down some thoughts for my dream production.  

Who are your protagonists?

Little Red, Bakers Wife or Witch can steal the show but they can’t carry it. Their arcs wrap up too quickly. I’ve seen many productions hit their emotional climax at the Witch’s “Last Midnight.” Show’s over folks, you can all go home…

Only we can’t. There are three more ballads and a reprise to sit through. If your Cinderella hasn't grown a spine and your Baker is charmless the energy sinks like a lead balloon. No one wants to hear Louise reprise “Little Lamb” after Rose has sung “Rose’s Turn.”

The film has cut The Baker’s “No More” and I know Anna Kendrick can play Cinderella’s arc. I’ll be curious to see how this shifts the balance.

What’s your favorite theme?

Sexual Awakening. Little Red, Jack, Cinderella and the Baker’s Wife each get seduced. Their flings lead to heartbreak, violence and self-growth. When the Baker’s Wife sings “Momentsin the Woods” the conclusions she draws can be a culmination of the lessons all four characters have learned. If your Jack and Little Red are cast too young, or your Wolf/Prince Charming is staged too chaste, the theme can be buried.

Death. Lots of people die in Into the Woods. I’ve seen a production where the actors built a grave for each death till the stage was covered in them… but Cinderella’s mother became a ghost in a tree so where does spirituality fit in? And what happens to the witch when she vanishes? Some productions turn her back into a crone. Some have her kill herself or be killed by the curse.

I’d like to see a production where she turns into a tree. Perhaps when the dead characters come back in the epilogue they are all trees and the survivors are holding a memorial ceremony. Which brings me to…

Community Building. Is “No One Is Alone” your thesis statement? Are the characters moving from separate journeys to pursuit of a common goal? If it results in two mob murders (The Narrator and the Giant) is it a good thing? It’s easy to lose this thread among all the late show exposition. When do your actors consciously decide to change their ways and work together? Can it be physicalized? Perhaps we see them rebuilding the broken homes, burying the Giant or holding the aforementioned tree funeral in the final scene?

Flawed Parents. Is “Children Will Listen” your thesis statement? Most of the characters are abused or abandoned by their parents. The Baker and his Wife want a baby. When they get one, they neglect it. The Narrator was killed for telling a harmful story to the cast but we end with the Baker telling the same story to his son. I always see this staged like it’s a positive thing. Are we supposed to believe the Baker is going to try to do better now? Your Baker had better have given us a reason to like him before that point or it will ring hollow.

And about that Narrator... I hate that his death is handled as a throw away gag. I’ve never seen a production where his absence has any consequence. Some directors deconstruct their set at intermission. Maybe save your big reveal for when the Narrator dies. Without him your set/structure/woods begin to fall apart.

I’d also like to see a production where Cinderella acknowledges the Narrator is gone. He steered her to her mother’s tree in act one. She’s offstage when he dies. Her next scene is at the fallen tree. Give her a moment to look to the narrator’s corner. The spot light comes up. No one is there. This is new. His death is real. Now she has officially lost her last parental figure and has to write her own story.

What does this all add up to? Maybe nothing. These are a collection of “moments” that have bugged me after watching multiple productions. They may go over the heads of other audience members. But I wanted to write them down before the movie becomes a new generation’s definitive version.

Look, tell him the story

Of how it all happened.

Be father and mother,

You'll know what to do.

Hot Spot

Judy Holliday had the misfortune to follow her hit musical Bells Are Ringing with the flop Hot Spot. The show closed after 4 months on Broadway and a disaster prone tryout.

No director was credited in the program… During the tryout, the show even lost its musical director… Hot Spot was in such disarray that the New York Times reported Holliday jokingly remarked that the musical would have to be frozen for a least the five mintues prior to the New York opening night curtain. ~ Dan Dietz. The Complete Book of 1960s BroadwayMusicals

During previews in New York a new opening number for Holliday, called “Don’t Laugh,” was added. Quite the best thing in the show it was mostly the work of Stephen Sondheim, a close friend of Mary Rodgers.’ ~ Kevin Mandelbaum, Not Since Carrie.

“It’s a shame. There’s a bright idea for a satire in Hot Spot, but it is still in crude outline form.” ~ Howard Taubman. New York Times.

“You can only live through one or two Hot Spots in your life.” ~ Judy Holliday

Sweeney Todd

100th Comic! That's 300 panels of musicals!

My favorite horror musical manages to surprise on a first viewing and provide new discoveries on repeated viewings. We're very fortunate that the controversial film is not the only record as Lansbury, LuPone and Thompson have all had their stage productions broadcast.

Sweeney Todd Sketch

I was thrilled to catch the Broadcast of Sweeney Todd at the NY Philharmonic starring Emma Thompson, Audra MacDonald and Christian Borle. I was less thrilled by the one note performance of Bryn Terfel as Sweeney though part of that is my personal bias against the traditional opera performance style.

Passion

Now that my Elaine Stritch series is complete I'll be catching up on some requests. First up Passion. 

Stephen Sondheim: "'Passion' is about how the force of somebody's feelings for you can crack you open and how it is the life force in a deadened world."

David Richards (NYT): In "Passion," however, Mr. Sondheim has dropped his defenses. With the playwright and director James Lapine, he has written an unalloyed love story, one that wants to penetrate the heart's deepest mysteries. Ironically, he has come up with his most somber musical since "Sweeney Todd."

Charles Isherwood (NYT): Indeed, arguments surrounding "Passion" have often focused on whether Giorgio is redeemed or destroyed by Fosca's love. Look for the answer in Mr. Sondheim's music, and you'll find only more questions. The musical's final trio has a soaring, rhapsodic sound, but the very last note reverberates with doom.

Company

Larry Kert: Who do you have to f**k to get out of Company?  

Stephen Sondheim: The same people you f**ked to get in it. Happy birthday, Larry.

Dean Jones: I went out there in Boston and sang this song ‘Happily Ever After’ and I could feel the audience asking me, ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ I saw their eyes widen as they asked, ‘Why do you hate us?’”

Company gave Elaine Stritch her signature song, frightened off its first leading man, and kicked off Sondheim’s most prolific decade.

Ethan Mordden: No show was as misunderstood as Company. This is odd, because its theme is very clearly stated: the absolute intimacy of marriage is very difficult but very necessary…. Sondheim spend the 1970s producing five consecutive masterpieces… yet was, at that time but not after, the most contested major talent in the musical’s history…. Rodger’s and Hammerstein were accepted masters at that time and after- taken, even, for granted. Sondheim was argued.

*** Update 7/18/2016

A recent production of Company inspired me to revise this comic slightly. The original was in pencil and marker. The revised was drawn with digital pen, keeping the same models but cleaning them up and giving Elaine Stritch more prominence (never a bad thing!).