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

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 4/8/13 at 11:10pm

Funny, Sondheim has said pretty much the same thing. Regardless, even if someone does hear it as being about her and Sally, I don't think it makes the song's intention at that point too different or confusing to take away from the show.

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 4/8/13 at 11:11pm

"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.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/8/13 at 11:41pm

I really don't think it's confusing at all.

Here's a little story that should make you cry,
About two unhappy dames.
Let us call them Lucy "X" and Jessie "Y",
Which are not their real names.

Now Lucy has the purity
Along with the unsurety
That comes with being only twenty-one.

Jessie has maturity
And plenty of security.
Whatever you can do with them she's done.

Given their advantages,
You may ask why
The two ladies have such grief
This is my belief,
In brief:

Lucy is juicy
But terribly drab.
Jessie is dressy
But cold as a slab.

Lucy wants to be dressy.
Jessie wants to be juicy.
Lucy wants to be Jessie
And Jessie Lucy.

You see, Jessie is racy
But hard as a rock.
Lucy is lacy
But dull as a smock.

Jessie wants to be lacy,
Lucy wants to be Jessie.
That's the sorrowful précis.
It's very messy.

Poor sad souls,
Itching to be switching roles.
Lucy wants to do what Jessie does,
Jessie want's to be what Lucy was.

Lucy's a lassie
You pat on the head.
Jessie is classy
But virtually dead.

Lucy wants to be classy.
Jessie wants to be Lassie.
If Lucy and Jessie could only combine,
I could tell you someone
Who would finally feel just fine!

[goldenboy]

Posted: 4/8/13 at 11:46pm

again not Sondheim's brightest moment.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/8/13 at 11:48pm

I actually prefer the song they had in this spot earlier in the tryouts "Uptown, Downtown". "Jessie and Lucy" is nice (well, except for the slightly clumsy ending), but this one is a far more satisfying pastiche song.

That's how I feel about it. I always say they are more or less the same song, and I still think Uptown, Downtown is the better one.

[Playbilly]

Posted: 4/8/13 at 11:52pm

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.

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 4/8/13 at 11:55pm

Uptown/Downtown was only cut because Bennett wasn't happy with it, right? (It's suggested--probably in Everything Was Possible--that this was due to him just being tired of it more than anything.) Certainly their dance music sections are very very similar.

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

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 12:02am

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 ::

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 12:04am

Eric, Scripps and I once talked about that here. I thought it was that Bennett didn't want any songs that were written before he came on tot project, but I never reread the book I thought I read it in, so take it with a grain of salt.


Endless Follies Minutia

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 12:08am

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.

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 12:08am

Phyllis, what's the "Follies in Miniature" mentioned in that thread?

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 12:10am

That's PalJoey's baby!






I'll let him present it. Updated On: 4/9/13 at 12:10 AM

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 12:19am

Wow... that thud you hear is my jaw hitting the floor.

This show is so incredibly special to me: it was the first really Big Time Broadway show I ever saw (It was in LA at the time). The moment that drumroll began, I was completely hooked — and when they did the big transformation to Loveland, I *knew* this was what I wanted to do for a living.

I really pity the kids who will never see something as grandly opulent as FOLLIES. It's a shame this one was never captured for the NYLPA collection. It was the most lavish production ever, I'm sure — God knows, adjusting for inflation, the most expensive. I dont want to think about what it would cost to recreate those costumes.

And I am sooooooo glad nothing ever came of the proposed film version that was going to reset it in an old movie studio and intercut numbers from MGM musicals of the 30s and 40s. Can you imagine what a horror that would have been? LOL

Updated On: 4/9/13 at 12:19 AM

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 12:28am

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

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 12:35am

I've re-uploaded it to Sendspace. The link is below

I suppose I could post it to YouTube, now that I can post videos longer than 10 minutes, and copies of it have circulated to Sondheim and Prince and (presumably) the Widder Goldman, and no one has come after PalJoey with legal hatchets.

Someone without the over-10-minute achievement actually put it up on YouTube...IN TWO SEPARATE FILES!!! AAAAARGGHH!!! Don't they understand that the original production was meant to be experienced in one sitting, with no intermission. SO IS THE FOLLIES IN MINIATURE!!!

After all those years of passing it along on unmarked VHS tapes, in brown-paper bags, handed to an eager collector under coffee-shop tables, hidden from view, I think the least someone who's interested can do is download it as an MP4 file.







Follies-in-Miniature: download link

Updated On: 4/9/13 at 12:35 AM

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 6:31am

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

[After Eight]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 6:52am

"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."

Congratulations, Sean. But you can't expect the same from the dunderheads who don't belong to the BWW community. (Or the ones who do.)

And I have no doubt that if someone decided to have a character in a musical sing Mallarmé's "Afternoon of a Faun" at the speed of "The Camptown Races," we would have people proclaiming here, "*I* understood absolutely what it
means! How could anyone not?" Another would scream, "*I,* for one happen to like a song that gives us something more to think about than "Tea for Two." Or something like "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. " (Uh, while you're still thinking, the stagecoach continues to roll on by, leaving you behind in a cloud of dust.)

But to get back to the song at hand, here's another matter to consider, not yet discussed here. The song comes near the very end of a long slog of a show. The audience has been bludgeoned into a stupor with the same whine again and
again about four miserable, selfish people they care nothing about. The redundant Loveland sequence is the coup de grace. Worn down and worn out, what audience member even has the energy to focus on Sondheim's show-offy, self-congratutory word play, much less make sense of such gibberish? By this point the audience has had it, and doesn't care a hoot in hell if Lucy wants to be Jessie, if Phyllis wants to be Sally, if Sally wants to be Marie-Antoinette, or if Roscoe wants to be Caruso. They just want to get the hell out of there.

To which, our resident sage would no doubt say, with the wisdom of the ages:

"Regardless." (Love it!)


Updated On: 4/9/13 at 06:52 AM

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 7:02am

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.

[After Eight]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 7:24am

"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."

I love it! The reign of the ego on BWW!

You weren't confused, so how could anyone else be? "How could?" Well, that's not the issue, now, is it? The FACT is that people were/are. The FACT that the OP asked for clarification shows it. So do the comments from people in this thread. So did the comments from theatregoers at the very first NY preview of the show that I attended, and at performances ever since.

But why should the high and mighty like you be concerned with something as unimportant as FACTS! The truth is what you want it to be. How post-modern!



Updated On: 4/9/13 at 07:24 AM

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 7:27am

Silence! You have angered the Sondheimian gods.

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

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 7:33am

AND I WILL ACCEPT THAT SACRIFICE!!!

Just send him by when I get home from the gym.

[After Eight]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 7:42am

"You have angered the Sondheimian gods. "

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

[notabb]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 8:17am

What a laugh! I think we all know what poster truly believes the truth is what they want it to be.

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 8:52am

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

Dont kid yourself.

It would be Bounce.

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 4/9/13 at 9:12am

As has already been pointed out, whether one contemplates that Phyllis is contrasting herself and Sally, young Phyllis and mature Phyllis, or a compendium of young Phyllis and Sally and mature Phyllis and Sally (and, as with a lot of good lyrics, this is up to the hearer.... although for me and others the second of the three is the most supported and certainly the most Sondheimian and the most supported in context of the show), the themes remain similarly and quite evidently:

aging, disappearing dreams, whatever became of us, what's been gained, whether it was worth it, and the ennui, sense of loss and bitterness that comes from all of it.... the same themes we've been confronted with since the show began.

* * *

finally, the performer and director also have a responsibility to make the song and the particularl stamp they are putting on it as clear as possible within the bounds of taste and respecting the audience's intelligence. Like all good writers, Sondheim has given them a spectrum of choices to make, and they have the obligation to loyally serve him and the material.

But let's not forget that when a performer knows what she's singing about and why she has to sing it, the audience will as well. An audience member may be challenged to express their impressions in words but that won't stop him/her from feeling, thinking and fully experiencing the performance in his or her own individual way.



Updated On: 4/9/13 at 09:12 AM