Sondheim and Prince dissed Chorus Line?- Page 5

[Unknown User]

Posted: 5/29/07 at 5:07pm

Try to track down Mendelbaum's book A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett--I got a used copy from Amazon for a penny plus shipping. It has a chapter on Scandal that was workshopped very thoroughly and sounds *wonderful*--people claim (but of course people like to claim stuff like this) that it was some of the most amazing stuff Bennett had staged.

It was put on hold partly due to his illness but partly too as baker's were afraid to back a musical that was so graphically and blatantly about sex and sexuality during the height of the AIDS crisis. Jimmy Webb's score (I'm a huge Webb fan and he has tons of love and respect for musical theatre--SOndheim in particular so I wish he'd try again to make a musical) was apparantly wonderful too though unrecorded--

Swoozie Kurtz (sp?) starred in the workshop (she stared as Claudia the American woman who goes to Europe for sexual promiscuity and experience)--there was a 14 minute "brilliant' An American Woman in Paris ballet intro

"The dance high point of Scandal! and possibly Bennett's career was the "Menage a Trois" ballet fantasy when Claudia experienced a successful encounter with two men after an earlier disaster. She finds to her surprise that the encounter with the two strangers leads to a sense of spirituality. As she dreamily remarks on the delicate frescoes decorating the old pensione, the frescoes come to life. RObin Wagner devised a ceiling that owuld lower to reveal three dancers, angels from theceiling, who float thorugh a delicately erotic dance of ineffable beauty.

Wagner: 'The ballet was breathtaking. It was Michael's best choreography and could be put on the stage of any opera house in the world.'

There were at least two other wildly inventive extended sequences. Above all the opening fantasy which was conceived as a contemporary version of Alice in Wonderland crossed with James Joyce, and on which they worked for 6 weeks alone. When completed it had the seeming arbitrariness that the unconcious express in a dream.

The curtain rose on a stage in flames, Claudia's dream of the fire that revealed and symbolized her husband Robert's infidelities. She attempts to enter the hotel but, as in a dream, she keeps shifting back and forth her perceptions. She believes she is either getting married or divorced in the hotel and at the same time wants to be the Mrs. Miller in the fire. As she attempts to get past the police cordon, she is not certain whether Robert is her husband, soon-to-be husband, or her soon-to-be ex-husband. She breaks through and wanders through the hotel until she finally drifts into the ballroom and hears the wedding march. The ceremony turns into a divorce; the man who is giving her away is not her father but a lawyer encourageing her to take Robert for everything he's got; and the men in the procession turn into the dancers from Chippendale's. At the end of the sequence, which employed continuous movement, spoken dialogue, song and dance, Claudia is rising into the air on her bed, trying to stop everything going on around her, as the celing beam collapses and the fire engulfs the stage and she wakes up.

There can be little doubt that this opening would have had audiences reeling from its complexity, hilarity, and sheer brilliance. Equally wonderful was the courtroom fantasy, composed in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan (a favorite of Webb's) in which Claudia was on trial for having a lesbian fantasy. The "Other Mrs Miller" was the prosecuting attourney; Andrew was the defence attorney; and all of Claudia's various lovers were rought into the courtroom to join with the judge and jury in singing "She's a dyke!"

(others involved in the workshops which were fully staged in 1984 with full sets were Treat Williams as Robert, Jerry Mitchell in the chorus, etc)