Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical Quotes

“Based on a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Merrily We Roll Along tells the story of three friends—Franklin Shepard, a composer; Charley Kringas, a playwright and lyricist; and Mary Flynn, a novelist—who meet in the enthusiasm of youth, when everything seems possible. The play traces what happens to their dreams and goals as time passes and they are faced with life’s surprises, travails, successes, and disappointments. The trick here is that the play moves chronologically backward. It begins on an evening in 1976 at a party for the opening of a movie Frank has produced. The movie is apparently a hit, but Frank’s personal life is a mess. His second wife, Gussie, formerly a Broadway star, was supposed to have starred in the movie but was deemed too old; she resents being in the shadows and suspects, correctly, that Frank is having an affair with the young actress who took over her part. Frank is estranged from his son from his first marriage. He is also estranged from Charley, his former writing partner—so estranged, in fact, that the very mention of his name brings the party to an uncomfortable standstill. Mary, unable to re-create the success of her one and only novel and suffering from a longtime unreciprocated love for Frank, has become a critic and a drunk; the disturbance she causes at the party results in a permanent break with Frank. The opening scene reaches its climax when Gussie throws iodine in the eyes of Frank’s mistress. The ensemble, commenting on the action much like the Greek chorus in Allegro, reprises the title song, asking, “How did you get to be here? / What was the moment?” (F 387). The play then moves backward in time as it looks for the turning points, the places where multiple possibilities morphed into narrative necessity.”
― Robert L. McLaughlin, Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical

“The “some people,” of course, the ones Rose says “sit on their butts” (F 58), are the people devoted to the dream of home and family. For them, having a secure place to live and secure family relationships is the goal at which their work and dreams are aimed. In the early-twentieth-century context of the completion of Manifest Destiny and onset of the Great Depression, during which most of the action of Gypsy takes place, the dream of home and family seems to be a watered-down version of the frontier myth—the process of moving west and claiming and settling land replaced by stasis and the desire for safety. This replacement suggests an entropic degeneration whereby the myth that for good or bad created the United States became empty, a myth without meaning.”
― Robert L. McLaughlin, Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical

“Rose’s dreams are primarily visions of a personal future, but they are linked to a social vision and to a larger mythos of America by an offhand remark Herbie makes. He tells Rose that when he first saw her, she “looked like a pioneer woman without a frontier.”11 The frontier thesis, as articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner, is a particular manifestation of the American Dream in which the continual movement west in the nineteenth century was a means both of personal advancement (owning land, expanding business, starting over, striking it rich) and of societal evolution (claiming territory, controlling it, exploiting it—all justified and mandated by the guiding master narrative of Manifest Destiny). But by the 1920s, when pioneer woman Rose and her brood set out in pursuit of her dream, there is no more frontier—the West Coast, where the action of the play’s first scenes takes place, is settled. It seems significant that Rose’s father worked for the railroad, that key player in the expansion westward, but is now retired.12 No longer able to head west toward a frontier, Rose loops back into already settled America, Manifest Destiny’s straight, east-to-west line now giving way to a circle, the vaudeville circuit. Gypsy makes use of dreams in multiple senses to articulate a vision of an American society folding back on itself entropically and becoming an image—a dream—of its own myths.”
― Robert L. McLaughlin, Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical

“In the original production, after the first factory whistle, almost the entire cast appeared onstage to sing the opening song, the first words of which are, “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” (F 333).44 These words immediately establish that what we are to see over the next two and a half hours is not the story of Sweeney Todd but the narration of the story of Sweeney Todd, presumably by the actors assembled on the stage.45 That we are watching a narration, a performance, is reinforced by the periodic reprises of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” that assist the transitions between scenes and comment on the action. This emphasis of the storytelling aspect of the play, its narrativity, gains importance if we recall some of the connections between narrative and time discussed in the section on Company. Narratives, because of their connection to time’s arrow, move toward death. The desire for completed narrative-epistemological structures implies specifically a desire for death and, more generally, a desire for the transcendent, the ideal, absolutes that exist outside the completed structures and, implicitly, outside of time.”
― Robert L. McLaughlin, Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical

“Frank’s notion of success is transformed from creating work of artistic integrity that contains the potential to change the world (act 2, scene 5) to the kind of worldly success that is marked by money, possessions, and status (act 1, scene 1), a transformation that occurs gradually through his relationship with Gussie. Gussie represents the worldly idea of success, and she positions herself with men who she thinks can help her get it. She moves from being Joe’s secretary to being his wife so as to have a producer to cast her in shows. After five flops, she desperately needs a hit that will establish her as a star, and so she initiates her seduction of Frank. This begins a triangular tug-of-war with Frank in the middle: Mary (not the oblivious Beth) trying to pull Frank back from Gussie’s sexual seduction; and Charley trying to pull Frank back from her idea of worldly success. This tug-of-war plays out through many decisions, some big, some small, not all of them Frank’s: Frank and Charley’s decision to do Musical Husbands as a vehicle for Gussie and then to do one more fluff musical, Sweet Sorrow, for Joe; Beth’s decision to leave Frank with Gussie on the opening night of Musical Husbands; Charley and Mary’s miscalculated decision to encourage Frank to go on the cruise; Gussie’s decision to leave Joe; Frank’s decision, seemingly a small one, not to join Charley and Mary at the Downtown Club on the night he returns from the cruise. Where exactly Frank could have or should have said no so as to have changed his life story is not clear. Rather, the cumulative effect of his and others’ decisions is described by the ensemble in the title song: How does it start to go? Does it slip away slow, So you never even notice it’s happening? (F 383)”
― Robert L. McLaughlin, Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical

“In this sense the play’s impulse is essentially an (auto)biographical one. Remember, creating a life narrative involves establishing a narrative standpoint (an endpoint toward which the life events will move), selecting the key events of the life, and finding the cause-and-effect-based pattern of events that lead to the endpoint. Note that this process is governed by the premise of before and after. Each selected life event can be seen as a cause of some subsequent effect and thus can be considered as a turning point, a dividing line between before and after. In telling the story in reverse order, however, Merrily We Roll Along shatters the illusion of narrative coherence. The pattern of events, the cause and effect, and the significance of turning points lose their naturalness, their impression of inevitability, when regarded backward instead of forward. The play’s backward structure, like the ghosts in Follies, fragments the coherence of individual identity.”
― Robert L. McLaughlin, Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical

“The drama and the development of the play’s ideas arise from a triangular tension implied in the above structure. The fundamental conflict of the play, even more important than the conflicts among the characters, is among the three organizational paradigms at work in the play’s structure. The first paradigm is the reversed chronology of the plot or the play’s basic, backward-moving narrative structure. The second is directly opposed to the first: the implied, ineluctable forward movement of time. The third overlays the other two: a cyclical structure based in the play’s method of repetition and variation. The backward-moving narrative structure emphasizes two ideas we have already seen elsewhere. The first is a more elaborate development of the life-is-a-journey metaphor that Ben Stone employed in “The Road You Didn’t Take.” The second is the idea of a life’s meaning being governed by the anticipated completion of a goal, the point of narrative closure that makes a complete, meaning-providing structure for a life story. Both ideas are established in the opening number, “Merrily We Roll Along,” which is reprised throughout the show as a means of segueing from scene to scene and year to year. The song introduces the image of the dream as the goal one’s life is aiming for, the end of the journey and, more than that, the thing that gives the journey its purpose and meaning. The ensemble sings: Dreams don’t die, So keep an eye on your dream [….] Time goes by And hopes go dry, But you still can try For your dream. (F 383) Like Ben, the ensemble has conflicting feelings about life’s journey. In a counterpoint section, one half of the ensemble sings “Plenty of roads to try,” while the other”
― Robert L. McLaughlin, Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical