Chp.

13 & 14 Quiz

1A. Company was an important show in the development of American musical theater,
because it did away with a linear storyline as its governing principle. It was more of a circular
storyline where all the action begins and ends at the same point. It is formatted as more of a
revue that deals with every aspect of marital life. Because of the absence of a linear storyline, the
show moves as a set of variations on a theme. It took as a concept musical with an ongoing
discussion about the nature of love and marriage. Neither celebrating it or disparaging it,
Company takes a hard look at the difficulties of being married and the difficulties of being
single. However, beneath its funny surface lays a sobering and unifying darkness, a sense of
depersonalization and loneliness. In the words of Sondheim, Checkhov once said: If youre
afraid of loneliness, dont marry. Most succinct. In the deepest sense, thats what Company is
about. Boris Aronsons set construction for the show served as inspiration for Sondheims score.
The opening number of Company is about the set. Aronsons construction reconceived the
metaphor in spatial terms and made it visible. The apartments in the Manhattan high-rises where
each of the couples live are separated by a Plexiglas jungle gym with an elevator down the
middle and platforms isolated at different levels on the sides. The couples occupy their own
space, oblivious to each others presence. The songs within the show reveal Sondheims
astonishing range and penetration. For example, the song You Could Drive a Person Crazy,
sung by Roberts three frustrated girlfriends, is filled with fun, wit, and wordsmithery that
resembles much of the sound that was on Broadway during the 1920s and the 1930s. On the
other hand, the song Sorry-Grateful articulates the ambivalences of marriage and yields a
searing honesty that does not settle for easy answers. Company essentially explored the new
uses for songs that concept musicals made possible. With the characters primarily presented in
vignettes, it would be a mistake to expand the characters through song. The songs are used as
comment and counterpoint. Throughout the show, songs might precede a scene, punctuate it in
pieces, frame it, freeze it entirely, or involve no discernible scene at all. A Company song
could also dive into the ambiguities and psychological complexities of its theme since its freed
of the need to advance a plot. As Sondheim put it, There are, of course, plots, but they are
subtextual and grow out of the subconscious behavior, psychological stresses, inadvertent
revelations. That was essentially the key to Sondheims musical dramaturgy throughout all his
works that beneath the surface lied a subtext of feeling or the absence of feeling.

2. Stephen Sondheim began his career in musical theater as a protg of Oscar Hammerstein II.
In 1969, he began an eleven-year collaboration with Hal Prince. Through these works, Sondheim
emerged to be the leading musical dramatist in the American theater of his generation. While
Prince and Sondheim had the same point of view while creating new works, it was where they
disagreed violently that a lot of good work happened. As a pair, Prince was more of the
impulsive and social one, where Sondheim was the quiet and logical one. Their relationship very
much resembled a type of marriage. Throughout their eleven-year collaboration, they created a
variety of shows vowing never to repeat themselves in form or content. Their later works
abandoned the overt concepts and contemporary American concerns of their first two shows
for period pieces that moved more traditionally along the narrative lines; other pieces pursued
more abstract conceptual paths. Their style reconfigured the musical itself into a self-reflexive
medium that used theatrical metaphors and production concepts to examine themes of social and
cultural import. It did that by blending book, music, and movement in ways that obliterated
traditional distinctions between them. The Prince-Sondheim collaborations sparked a Broadway
revolution: out of bold ad hoc responses to new and problematic material, not on the basis of any
theoretical precepts. Once their collaboration was over, Sondheim turned to Off Broadway and
the regional theater to create his later works. These shows were way more emotional than his
earlier ones, but they also reveled less in the typical show business schmaltz. This makes them
more direct in their appeal and more abstract in their conceptual approach. Sunday in the Park
with George, however, marked a turning point for Sondheim. Its use of a painting rather than a
text as the engine for the show reflected a major shift in values on the late twentieth-century
musical stage. Sondheim musicals, however, failed to run long enough to recoup its investment.
Therefore, Sondheim is known for being the first major figure in Broadway history to have a
career made up of flops. However, his shows gained popularity in their afterlives. His work
repositioned the musical on the cultural spectrum between amusement and art.

3. Any Broadway dance style of some distinction took most of the first half of the twentieth
century to develop. In the first three decades, Broadway dance was robust but rudimentary,
limited to steps and movements inspired from social, stage, and jazz-based dance styles of the
period. These were arranged into standardized routines for production numbers that ranged from
tap to class acts. It involved precision-dancing kick lines of all-girl troupes. However, these girls
were generally poorly paid and had little professional ability as dancers. The dances acted as
embellishments to a show. The choreographers of these dances werent actually recognized as
choreographers at all, rather as dance directors. These dance directors specialized in certain
genres, so contribution came from several dance directors within a show. By the 1930s, concert
dance was becoming popular on the commercial stage. Chester Hale and Albertine Rasch
blended show-style movement and ballet, or toe dancing. However, it was choreographer
George Balanchine who gave the strongest impetus to the growth of ballet on Broadway. He
demanded at that point that such commercial work be recognized as choreography. At this
time, modern dance was also taking root in American soil. But dances of any kind still served a
limited function in the structure of a show. Their appearances were discrete, not ongoing; their
purposes energizing, not narrative. In the chain of command, the dance director was always
beneath the stage director. Stage directors worked with the individual actors, and coached them
on delivering lines and gave them their blocking. Dance directors worked with the big dance
ensembles to act as visual ornaments to the songs. Music was indispensable when creating these
compositions. This division between a director and choreographer reflected the textual division
between a book and a score. A book required blocking; a score, choreography. A score also called
for other modes of stage demeanor like song, mime, and stage movement, which were
characterized as musical staging. However, in the 1940s, there was a rallying cry of
integration for a closer blend of book and score. Therefore, the line between the responsibilities
of the stage director and dance director were blurred. By the start of the 1950s, choreographers
started to take over the musical staging entirely. Later in the decade, choreographers started
succeeding in staging a show from start to finish, and that is what started the trend of
choreographer-directors like Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse.