Tackling a bunch of different things in this post, bear with me. b12b, answers to your questions on the bottom.
it's always going to be flawed where the other two have been deemed "classics" if you will. Well, yeah. That was exactly my point. Company and Sweeney are so
strong, on multiple levels, that there's more for such conceptual storytelling to grab onto with them than there is in Merrily. There were moments in Merrily where it clicked really strongly, in ways very similar to things we saw in Company and Sweeney, but overall, I don't think there's enough for it to latch onto as fully and as, like I said before, vitally, as it was able to for the other two.
Interesting that Leenya Rideout's got the bass. If I remember correctly she played it in Company, too. A lot of these actors (from all three of the shows) are actually also very highly trained instrumentalists, too (and a lot of them have instrumental performance degrees), so in many cases, it's not like they were just arbitrarily assigned instruments. (Not to say some didn't learn new things, they did.) It's totally no surprise that she's playing bass again, or that Fred is playing cello again, or that Matt Castle (also the music director for Merrily) is playing piano, etc.
I don't know Merrily well enough to know which version it was, but it's an hour and forty five minutes, no intermission. My friend who knows it better said that most of what was cut was transitional material.
I'm not going to get engaged in whether it's a gimmick or whether it works or whether it's stupid because everybody knows how I feel, and if you don't, do a search for my posts re: Sweeney and Company circa 2006 and 2007. It benefits nobody to re-hash the arguments, BUT, in the interest of factual accuracy, two things:
To my knowledge, Doyle's theater company in the UK didn't necessarily exist for the express purpose of actor-musician shows, though he did a significant amount of work using it way before his production of Sweeney, for which it was, in part, a financial necessity. I have read just about every interview the man has ever given, and he has never said or suggested that he's invented or pioneered this way of storytelling -- he just happened to go high profile with it when Sweeney took off.
To say that Doyle continually employs this concept because he has no other ideas is willfully ignoring the significant amount of work (whether you like that work or not is irrelevant to the numbers) he has done without it. And, I think it's only fair to remember that Company and Merrily were both commissioned; Cincinnati sought him out to do these productions specifically. If I remember the story correctly, after Sweeney, Cincinnati asked him to direct another Sondheim show that same way and let him pick which one. I don't know how Merrily came about exactly other than that he had done it before and was not completely satisfied with the result, and that Ed Stern, the Cincinnati Playhouse Artistic Director, is leaving this year and asked Doyle to come back and do one more as part of his final season.
Moving on.
In terms of the issue of sex, I agree about the tension and the sensuality between Anthony and Johanna in Doyle's Sweeney, absolutely. I think that's a good point, and made even stronger by whoever mentioned the fact that they both play cello, and where the cello sits on the musician's body. That's actually not something I had ever thought of before.
I studied Company for years, though, so I think I am definitely better equipped to speak to that. I think it's important to remember that Sondheim is so much about disconnection and failure to connect, and that was definitely tremendously emphasized in the Doyle production. I tend to think of the Bobby/April sex scene in his production as an echo of the karate scene in the first act -- a married couple goofing around together, doing something that's
about physical contact, and not touching. That's why the clothed sex scene always worked for me. Was it as "obviously" raw and sexually charged as everybody taking off their clothes? (Which they did actually try in rehearsals.) No. But, I think, in a much more cerebral, conceptual way, the way Doyle chose to stage it says the exact same thing about who Bobby is as would a Bobby who hastily removes all of his clothes without listening to a word the girl says. It's as someone else said, not love-making. It's disinterested, disconnected, careless sex. The fact that the staging put a literal physical barrier to the intimacy of it completely emphasized that.
Anyway, more on Merrily.
The set (yes, very blue along with the costumes), seems like sheet music pages in stacks, etc. Am I seeing it wrong in the photos? Is this some sort of failed concept? Yes, it's stacks of paper, presumably sheet music, and some like... banker's boxes or something. The boxes were sometimes used sort of like the cubes were in Company, but they also had more paper in them. By the end, there's paper in places it wasn't at the beginning.
I'm curious about the set and the boy who watches the show from the sidelines and occasionally participates. I actually really loved what they did with that. That's Frank's son (in a blue Juilliard t-shirt, if you can't see it in the photos). I think -- and this is coming from a fairly un-educated-about-Merrily perspective -- that this production really made the show Frank's show, and went for the focus on father/son imagery to go hand-in-hand with past/future tensions, etc. Youth is about promise; and so by the end of the show, that particular future is totally hanging over what we see.
I too have been toying with whether he's only Frank's son or also becomes an image of a younger Frank and it's actually both. I'm still on the fence, and sometimes wonder if it should have been clearer, but I like that it can be seen in multiple ways.
I'm not much one for "reviewing" anymore these days, but if people have specific questions I can try to answer them, though my Internet time is super limited these days.
A work of art is an invitation to love.
Updated On: 3/9/12 at 06:18 PM
