The Story of Lucy X and Jessie Y Question — Page 2

"If Lucy and Jessie could only combine,
I could tell you someone
Who would finally feel just fine!"

A woman wants to own both the wide-eyed innocence of her youth and the confidence and savvy and self-understanding she has gained with experience.

Its a show that for the last two hours has been about people looking back at who they were, what they wanted and what went wrong. That's a big clue.

It's an act in which the four principles are, one after the other, singing their hearts out about themselves, about the crises that define them (Phyllis's song comes third). That's another.

"In the theatre, does one have much time to "think about" the lyrics as they're being sung full steam ahead?

And if they need to be parsed after the fact like some hermetic poem to figure out what they mean, they have no business being sung in a musical.

And as we see in this thread, after forty years worth of "thinking about" them, there is still no unanimity of opnion about their meaning.

Frankly, it's not worth the effort."

After Eight, I'm not a huge fan of Follies, but I admire the effort and think it was a worthwhile one. I am not interested in unanimity of opinion or about crystal clarity about the meaning of a theatrical work. And I certainly don't think the immediacy of watching something on stage precludes poetry, depth, ambiguity. Thinking about what I'm seeing by exploring lyrics is something I enjoy.

If I demanded dramatic entertainment without thinking about the words I was presented with and what they meant, if I required immediate and total transparency of authorial intent upon first hearing, with no room for disagreement or variety of audience interpretation, then, sure, Lucy and Jessie might not be worth it.

Neither would Hamlet, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Cherry Orchard, Waiting for Godot, The Maids, Joe Turner's Come and Gone or Miss Julie.

again not Sondheim's brightest moment.

Can easily be confused. Especially if you're listening to the song for the first time watching the musical.

The show is about 2 women, and the song starts about "two unhappy dames".

Perhaps, Sondheim INTENDED the early confusion. Maybe he wanted the listener to think.

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Well, if you havent listened to the first ten lines, then yes I suppose you might mis-interpret.

I"m not being rude or catty here, but honestly, I've heard this lyric since the show premiered in the 1970s, and there's never been a question to me what it was about. I dont really care for the lyric construction, but I dont find it difficult to follow. Lucy is 21, Jessie is "mature". And deep in the song, another reminder:

Lucy wants to do what Jessie does,
Jessie wants to be what Lucy was.

I dont consider myself one who's fast on the uptake sometimes, but this one just seemed obvious. :: shrug ::

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It's perfectly clear.

They are "two unhappy dames" because to say "one unhappy dame at two different periods of her life, at each of which she was unhappy for a different reason" would be ungainly. And un-fun.

It's a parable. Once speaks in figurative terms in a parable, not in literal terms.

One expects literalism in Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals.

Not in Follies.

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That's PalJoey's baby!






I'll let him present it.

Updated On: 4/9/13 at 12:10 AM

I heard once there was an actual screenplay for that movie version, but I've never been able to find it.

My own association with the original production is only through the memories of others and the assorted recordings, so any feelings I have on that are only scholarly. But it's my favorite musical in the world, and I'm always hoping I'll see the perfect production of it in it my lifetime. Every one I've encountered usually gets something, often many things, right. But I've yet to encounter one that I would consider perfect, and my perfect I mean my own subjective vision of what the perfect Follies is, of course. The Encores production is my favorite of the ones I've seen live.

Updated On: 4/9/13 at 12:28 AM

again not Sondheim's brightest moment.

No, just brighter than anybody else's moment.

I love some of the same shows that After Eight does, but thank God that Sondheim has not found it necessary to write down to the level demanded by A8.

So one has to pay attention to understand "Lucy and Jessie." As Sean and Henrik have pointed out, it continues themes we've been hearing for 2 hours and there is plenty of repetition in the lyrics (all that "unnecessary" cleverness and all) so that if you miss one line, you can catch a similar idea later.





Well, okay, "precis" may be a bit much, but it won't kill us to learn a new word now and then.

Updated On: 4/9/13 at 06:31 AM

Oh, balderdash and poppycock! Pal Joey and I, at least, were teenagers when we saw the show (not together) and, in my case, the album had not yet come out so I knew nothing about the characters or the show except that Prince had been inspired by a photo of Gloria Swanson. (I read that in NEWSWEEK or TIME.)

If I wasn't confused--and I was not--then there's no reason the average adult couldn't follow the basic theme and story. (To me, the one exception was Ben forgetting his lyrics. But the mayhem that followed made the point clear.)

What complaints about Sondheim's lyrics rarely mention is the minimalism of his music. He doesn't write the longer musical lines that Rodgers or Kern sometimes favored.

Sondheim writes music so that his more complex lyrics come at us in small groups of a half-dozen words or fewer, so we have plenty of time to comprehend them before the next clever couplet comes along.

That and, as you know, singers used to enunciate.

Silence! You have angered the Sondheimian gods.

To appease them today, we will have to sacrifice a chorus boy.

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"You have angered the Sondheimian gods. "

Now I'm scared. Maybe they'll force me to sit through Passion again.

>> Maybe they'll force me to sit through Passion again.

Dont kid yourself.

It would be Bounce.

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