Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (74 page)

The recording process went through several stages. First, music supervisor Mike Higham created a backing track without voices. Then, after rehearsing with Sondheim, the cast recorded their solos and duets (the only exception was Laura Michelle Kelly in the role of the Beggar Woman and Lucy who sang live on the film set). Each member of the cast was recorded on a separate track. The solitary sounds could then be refined, retuned, and mediated
sufficiently that a sung whisper could be heard over a mighty orchestra. Finally, this orchestra of sixty-four musicians, more than double the number that squeezed into the Uris Theater in 1979, recorded the voiceless backing track audiences hear in the film.

In borrowing a major production technique from MTV and rock videos, Burton’s
Sweeney
departed from two generations of traditional film practice, in which the actors in the film or the singers who dub the actors in the film lip-synch to a finished
visual
product. Burton’s
Sweeney
reversed the process (with the professional singer Kelly again the sole exception). The recordings came first. After the recordings, the actors, none of them dubbed, lip-synched to the pre-recorded
sounds
, which included the sixty-four piece orchestra and any duet partnerships in a given song. Lip-synching to prerecorded sound, the norm in MTV and rock videos, was rare, if not unprecedented in the production of a film musical. The process seemed to help produce a natural and intimate look to the singing without any operatic signs of strain in the final product.

At every turn Burton applies cinematic techniques, some of which would be difficult to capture in the theater. They appear most often in the narrative songs, “Poor Thing,” where Mrs. Lovett’s tale of the Barber and his Wife is shown in vivid flashback; “A Little Priest,” in which the camera zooms in from Mrs. Lovett’s window on people who represent the various occupations of potential victims described in the song; and “By the Sea,” in which Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney are placed in the locations and situations described in the song. These songs are also set off by adding splashes of color to the grayish tint that pervades the film (other color splashes would appear from time to time such as Pirelli’s garish blue outfit and Sweeney’s specially constructed red barber’s chair). This kind of filmic enhancement of text and story has become more common in recent years, for example, the visual realization of thoughts in Rob Marshall’s award-winning
Chicago
in 2002). A rare early example of the practice can be seen in the visual images that capture the bridge of “Ol’ Man River” in the 1936
Show Boat
(starting with images of stevedores sweating and straining and Joe, played by Paul Robeson ending up in jail looking up at a distorted camera angle). It seems surprising how seldom directors have taken advantage of this cinematic opportunity to tell a story.
⁶⁵
Perhaps the success of Burton’s
Sweeney
will influence future directors.

In a DVD special feature and in other public interviews, Sondheim makes the case that Burton’s
Sweeney Todd
is not only different from the stage
Sweeney
but is different from other film adaptations. He offers this advice to audiences who may be disappointed in this difference: “I’m going to urge them as much as possible to leave their memory of the stage show outside the door, because, as I say, unlike all other movies of musicals that I know, this really is an attempt to take the material of the stage musical and completely
transform it into a movie. This is not a movie of a stage show, this is a movie based on a stage show.”
⁶⁶
In a public conversation with former
New York Times
theater critic and current political affairs editorialist Frank Rich that took place in Portland, Oregon, on March 11, 2008, a few months after Burton’s
Sweeney Todd
opened nationally and one month before its release on DVD, Sondheim went as far as to say that Burton’s transformation was the “most satisfying version of a stage piece I’ve ever seen.”

After
Sweeney Todd
and
Merrily We Roll Along
, Sondheim joined forces with a new, younger creative partner, James Lapine (b. 1949). During the next ten years, Lapine became arguably as important and innovative a collaborator as Prince and his generational peers were in the previous decade and exerted an influence in Sondheim’s post-Prince development comparable to that of earlier collaborators such as Bernstein, Robbins, Styne, and Laurents before the Prince years.

Sondheim’s first show with Lapine was about the art of making art. The first act of
Sunday in the Park with George
focuses on the painter Georges Seurat, and the creation of the painting lent its title to Sondheim’s musical. The first act also creates the imagined lives of his imagined mistress Dot among others who have become immobilized and immortalized in this famous painting in its permanent residence at the Art Institute of Chicago. In contrast to Franklin Shepard, the fictional composer in
Merrily We Roll Along
, Seurat was not only an actual historical figure but one of the least compromising artists in any field of art. In this landmark Pulitzer Prize–winning show, Sondheim and Lapine, who wrote the book and directed, explore the relationship between artistic and procreative legacies as embodied in the contrast between the ephemeral cream pies of Louis the baker versus the timelessness of an artistic masterpiece, and the contrasting legacies of children and art.
⁶⁷
In his dedication to art Seurat has foresworn his relationship with Dot, although through her he will leave a human legacy in their daughter Marie and, two generations later, in another artist named George (without the “s”), Marie’s grandson, whom we will meet one hundred years later in act II.

In the song “No Life,” Sondheim creates more characters who voice criticisms that Sondheim himself has been subjected to throughout much of his career. When viewing a
tableau vivant
of Seurat’s recently completed
Bathing at Asnières
, his rival, Jules, and Jules’s wife, Yvonne, decry the passionless, lifeless, unlyrical, and inappropriate subject matter of Seurat’s paintings.
Yvonne ridicules Seurat for painting “boys with their clothes off,” and Jules responds mockingly that
he
“must paint a factory next.” Similarly, Sondheim has frequently been indicted for writing about cold, neurotic, and frequently unlikable people and for confronting unpalatable subjects ranging from marital infidelity (e.g.,
Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park, Into the Woods
), the loss of youthful dreams (
Follies, Merrily We Roll Along, Woods
), murder (
Pacific Overtures, Woods, Assassins
), and even serial murder (
Sweeney Todd
).

The contrast between accessible and difficult art is powerfully delineated in Dot’s song, “Everybody Loves Louis.” Louis the baker, a man who neither fathers a child nor sings a song in the show, is willing to take Dot and her child by Seurat to America, where the baker can cater to the whims of a wealthy and boorish Texas businessman. In vivid contrast to the unlovable, unpopular, and overly intellectual painter, Louis is lovable, popular, and “bakes from the heart.” “Louis’ thoughts are not hard to follow,” his “art is not hard to swallow,” and, unlike George, the baker is “not afraid to be gooey.” Also in contrast to George, Louis “sells what he makes.” In return, Louis, like his pastries, will perish without producing either art or (in a plot twist) children of his own. Louis also has the potential to become a better father than George, as well as a better provider and companion.

In the final scene of act I, the uncompromising Seurat completes his great painting
Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte
after two years and many months of Sundays, an act marked musically by the completion of the opening horn melody that represents Seurat’s blank canvas (
Example 15.2a
) and its transformation into the song, “Sunday” (
Example 15.2b
).

Act II centers on a contemporary artist, still confronting old dilemmas of popular versus personal, more “sincere” art (remember Hammerstein’s emphasis on this quality in a song’s genesis). But this new George is a lot more like Louis in some respects. In stark contrast to the painter’s exceptional meticulousness, his great-grandson is rapidly turning out a series of similar and risk-free high-tech sculptures known as Chromolumes. The new George also shares with his forefather an inability to connect the dots of human relationships (a central task for both artists), but unlike Seurat, the modern George has managed to successfully negotiate the politics of art and has gained all the trappings of success, including the profit and fame denied the greater artist. Nevertheless, he is deeply dissatisfied with his own work.

Like the characters in
Lady in the Dark
who appear metaphorically in Liza Elliott’s dreams, many characters in Seurat’s life and painting reappear in the life of the present-day George. Seurat’s mistress, Dot, lives on as her daughter, the aged Marie. Seurat’s unsympathetic rival, Jules, metamorphoses into Bob Greenberg, the director of the museum that now houses Chromolume #7. Perhaps most tellingly, the Old Lady who turns out to be Seurat’s hypercritical but supportive mother in act I returns in act II as the perceptive art critic Blair Daniels, who, like Seurat’s mother, is able to see that the emperor has no clothes, but also like her act I counterpart believes in George’s talent and promise.

Example 15.2.
Sunday in the Park with George

(a) Opening horn melody

(b) Opening of “Sunday” based on the opening horn melody

Sunday in the Park with George
, 1986 film of the Broadway show. George, the painter based on Georges Seurat (Mandy Patinkin) (left), finishing his painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” at the end of act I.

The connections between act I and act II are also musical ones, in which key musical material develops character and plot through dramatically meaningful thematic melodic reprises and transformations. One of the most audible examples is the music Seurat uses in the act of painting his masterpiece (“Color and Light”) in act I, which returns in an electrified version that marks the Chromolume music in act II. When the ghost of Dot returns at the end of act II to resolve her personal issues with George and to help the modern George “Move On” artistically, her music shares several prominent motives heard in “We Do Not Belong Together” that Dot sang in act I when she left the great artist in order to start a new life in America with Louis. To cite but one prominent example, “Stop worrying where you’re going” is set to the same music as the title and opening phrase, “We do not belong together.” The gossips in the museum in act II sing the same “I’m not surprised” motive in discussing the Chromolumes (“Putting It Together,”
Part II
) as Seurat’s contemporaries in act I (“Gossip Sequence”). The textual and musical phrase that George uses to express his discomfort at the heat in his studio in “Color and Light” becomes the foundation for the song the characters, now imprisoned and frozen forever at the Art Institute of Chicago, sing to open act II, “It’s Hot Up Here.” The obsessively repeated musical motive of “Putting It Together” (
Example 15.3a
) can be traced to the music associated with the phrase “Finishing the Hat” in the song of that name (
Example 15.3b
), and at the end of act I with its one note extension—from four shorts and a long to four shorts and two longs—as Seurat completes his canvas before the characters in the painting start to sing “Sunday” (
Example 15.3c
).
⁶⁸
These examples are only the most prominent of a much longer list.
⁶⁹