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Broadway for Beginnners

From now to Christmas, I'm making an effort to catalogue every thought I've had about Broadway. Uninterested in musical theater? Check out now.

The thoughts won't be in any particular order, but just as they come to me. My model here is--bizarrely--"Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man," which is also just a collection of thoughts and memories.

So: here goes.

-This morning, I wrote about "The Glamorous Life." There's something else I want to say about Sondheim's work in that song. The girl seems often to be pointing out the artifice in her mother's work: Desiree is "brought on by inches," "coughing for hours" while remaining poised, sporting a glass broach, struggling with unraveling costumes. It seems to me that the threadbare nature of Desiree's work parallels the threadbare lie in Desiree's home. The girl is on the brink of unearthing a painful truth. The mother/daughter relationship is not what she insists it is. The broach is really only glass. The costumes are about to "unravel." The "glamorous" life is perhaps something other than glamorous: Maybe other adjectives are needed.

-Sondheim very much loved DuBose Heyward, and especially "Summertime." He loved the word "and" in the first line of "Summertime." "Summertime....and the livin' is easy...." The "and," argues Sondheim, sets up an informal, stream-of-consciousness, uneducated tone. A lesser lyricist--maybe Sondheim himself--would have written something more "correct" and stilted: "Summertime, when the living is easy...." Sondheim could make a few other observations about this song. He could notice the theme of climbing/ascending: "Fish are jumping, the cotton is high," and "You'll spread your wings, and you'll take to the sky." He could note a sense of menace underneath the surface. "There's nothing can harm you" *till* adulthood. "Your daddy's rich, and your ma is good-looking..." But wealth and looks can be fragile; human life can be fragile. Seasons change. Heyward knows this, even if his speaker (in this moment) does not.

-Audra McDonald speaks about meeting Barbra Streisand. Streisand was icy, and McDonald exhibited a kind of nervous, needy defensiveness, which was irritating. Zoe Caldwell scalded McDonald: "When you act that way, you sacrifice your power." And so McDonald learned to be cool even in the presence of Streisand--to behave as an adult.

-I don't know if "Company" is the first concept musical, but I suspect that, without "Company," we wouldn't have "A Chorus Line" or "Cats." I think this is a mixed blessing. I like an old-fashioned plot. It's scintillating to me how "Chorus Line" tries to sneak in conventional-plot satisfaction within an apparent evening of formlessness. That's through the story of Paul. We see him at the start, in a solo: "I need this job. O God, I need this show." We see Paul again, at the climax: He explains that performing is his life, that he is more or less cut off from his own family, and that he doesn't have a safety net. And, of course, we see Paul in the upsetting denouement: a shattered dream, a twisted ankle, a career (possibly) cut short. So we have rising action, and we have a resolution, even in a musical that seems to be defying Rodgers-and-Hammerstein norms.

-Gena Rowlands would speak about a character "fighting to win"--about a sense of subtextual struggle even in apparently mundane scenes. If there weren't continuous struggle, then we in the audience might as well simply leave the theater and reenter the plotlessness and aimlessness of actual life. I think you see the idea of continuous struggle very clearly in Kerry Washington's current performance--in "American Son." Say what you will about the schematic writing: This show gives us a heroine who is relentlessly in peril, in tension with herself and with the people around her. For Washington's character, everything is at stake. An interaction about an old drinking fountain can mean comfort and sanity, or it can mean something like the start of a nervous breakdown. It's exciting to watch Washington walk this tightrope for ninety minutes--to witness her struggling to get what he wants.

More later! Maybe we'll look at Bock and Harnick....

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