Friday 24 April 2020

Back to Sondheim

Dedicated readers of this blog--and a spring good evening to you, Aunt Hail and Uncle Rain--will know of my admiration for the composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim. I go back to his work all the time--the filmed stage versions of his plays (well, two of them: Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods) and his splendid two volumes of annotated lyrics called Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat. (I keep going back to everything I like--The Crown, for instance, or Brooklyn, or the core 25 books on my shelf. And Sondheim.) I go back because there's always more to see and learn.
There's always something different I need from them, something new I'm ready for. In the case of Into the Woods, I'm thinking about Act One. It's a mash-up of fairy tales including Rapunzel, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and others. Though the pace is occasionally frenetic and the poly-vocal structure complex, the piece stays true to the elemental simplicity of the tales: happy ever after. But that's only Act One.
Anyway, there's a narrator who pops on- and off-stage. I'm back to my Charlotte's Web, wondering if I could use a narrator to simulate that function that appears in E.B.White's prose. In Sondheim's play, the narrator pops out stage left or right, dressed like a contemporary older man, casual business style. Everyone else is in their fairytale costume. How, I wonder, might this work in my Charlotte's Web.
The other note I've made is about the cow. 
Charlotte's Web, of course, is full of animals. The one certainty I have about my adaptation is that the animals CANNOT be mascots. That is, they must be able to move like real animals, live the lifestyle of real animals, submit to the destiny of real animals. But they're played by human actors. So what do they wear, what do they look like? I know I will find a designer to answer these questions, but for now, Into the Woods presents a useful notion via the cow.
The cow, about the size of a real calf, is a rigid creature, milky white in colour. Little attempt at naturalism with this design. When the cow must move, it is pushed forward or backward on its teflon-coated (I'm assuming) feet. If the movement must be quicker, the actor can simply grab the suitcase-like handle fixed to the creature's spine and carry it away. This gets a laugh from the audience. But not enough to take them out of the story. That business-casual narrator is like that too. It's a bit of a cheesy choice, but it's not overdone and it works.
A lot of things can be done. A lot of things work, though the abyss is ever at hand. The thrill, the challenge, is to risk and find solutions.

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