COMPANY question — Page 2

Can someone explain the Mahler's joke? I feel like I am on the outside looking in. I need to be Company-educated.

Thanks.

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"Can someone explain the Mahler's joke? I feel like I am on the outside looking in. I need to be Company-educated."

i guess i always feel like i could always use a little bit more company education! people even ASK questions that i've never thought of before, which causes me to rethink the show again.

mahler is a classical music composer who wrote famous symphonies that sought to capture "the world". he had lofty ideas about his symphonies, and often his audiences are either classical music purists (true classical music lovers), or people who didn't know anything about classical music but want to be seen as true classical music aficionados. this is sort of the take that joanne takes on the "ladies who lunch", who she sees as going to matinees and pinter plays and mahler, not because they enjoy them, but because they wanted to be seen as cultured.

this was my take, at any rate.

Updated On: 7/5/07 at 06:55 PM

double

Updated On: 7/5/07 at 07:02 PM

"Fag" was in 'You Could Drive A Person Crazy'.

"I could understand a person if it's not a person's bag
I could understand a person if a person was a fag"

Then it became

"I could understand a person if he said to go away
I could understand a person if he happened to be gay"

The F-word (hi, Isaiah! *waves*) was much less unacceptable back in the '70s. ^_^

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Updated On: 7/5/07 at 07:07 PM

Another variation on the fag line sung by Loudon at Sondheim Carnegie Hall:

I could understand a person
if it's not a person's bag.
I could understand a person
if a person was a drag.

Updated On: 7/5/07 at 07:13 PM

Remember that the idea of "seeing in" also comes up when Joanne confronts Bobby: she tells him that he was "always on the outside, looking in the window while everyone else was dancing at the party." It's that "Bobby as observer" thread that really ties so many of the vignettes together.

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Updated On: 7/5/07 at 08:16 PM

A piece of Mahler's.

Some trivia that most of you already know but I thought I'd share it because I'd forgotten all about it until just now. Jonathan Tunick orchestrated a brief snippet of a Mahler composition into The Ladies Who Lunch. It's played by the flute after Joanne sings "...and one for Mahler".

Possibly. But I would assume the rhyme was created around making the reference, not vice versa.

One other little piece of trivia:

In the late 60s, we were going through a bit of a Mahler frenzy: all of his works had been re-recorded, and he was showing up on concerts all over the place (Not sure, but it may have been the centennial of his birth). Yes, it rhymes with "dollars" (well, sorta, and I imagine Sondheim was taking accents into consideration with that), but it was more a comment on our passion for "snob hits", the things people see because they feel they have to.

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