Bernadette Peters in Into The Woods

At first, they were a few lunchtime tweets, which proved of little interest, it seemed. But when I collected a couple, and added a few more, for a Facebook post at 9:30 pm on New Year’s Eve, they seemed to resonate. And so, with little ado, my New Year’s resolutions by way of lyrics and dialogue from works of theatre, but no less heartfelt for being so.

1. Talk less, smile more.
2. Wake each morning to realize I have a good thing going.
3. Never walk alone.
4. Decide what’s right, decide what’s good.
5. Half the fun is to plan the plan. All good things come to those who can wait.
6. Many people have to depend on the kindness of strangers. Be that stranger.
7. When I speak, and I will, be kind.

Sources

I don’t want to patronize those who recognize where these are all from, or presume that everyone will know each one. So if you want to seek any of these out in their original contexts, here are some details.

1. Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton, direct quote
2. Stephen Sondheim, Merrily We Roll Along, “And then one morning I woke to realize, we had a good thing going.”
3. Oscar Hammerstein II, Carousel, “Walk on with hope in your heart and you’ll never walk alone.”
4. Stephen Sondheim, Into The Woods, “You decide what’s right, you decide what’s good.”
5. Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd, direct quote
6. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
7. Robert Anderson, Tea and Sympathy, “When you talk about this…and you will…be kind.”

Aside from being the month of copious pumpkin flavored foodstuffs, October also brings two perennial theatrical top ten lists that are worthy of note: American Theatre magazine’s list of the most produced plays in Theatre Communications Group theatres for the coming season and Dramatics magazine’s lists of the most produced plays, musicals and one-acts in high school theatre for the prior year. They both say a great deal about the state of theatre in their respective spheres of production, both by what’s listed explicitly, as well as by what doesn’t appear.

In the broadest sense, both lists are startlingly predictable, although for different reasons. If you happen to find a bookie willing to give you odds on predicting the lists, here’s the trick for each: for the American Theatre list, bet heavily on plays which appeared on Broadway, or had acclaimed Off-Broadway runs, in the past year or two. For the Dramatics list, bet heavily on the plays that appeared on the prior year’s list.

But in the interest of learning, let’s unpack each list not quite so reductively.

American Theatre

As I’ve written in the past, what happens in New York theatre is a superb predictor of what will happen in regional theatre in the coming seasons, especially when it comes to plays. Any play that makes it to Broadway, or gets a great New York Times review, is going to grab the attention of regional producers. Throw in Tony nominations, let alone a Tony win – or the Pulitzer – and those are the plays that will quickly crop up on regional theatre schedules.

Anyone who follows the pattern of production would have easily guessed that Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike would proliferate this year, being a thoughtful, literary based comedy with a cast of only six. That American Theatre lists 27 productions doesn’t even take into account the 11 theatres that did the show in 2013-14, and certainly there are non-TCG theatres which are doing the show as well. It’s no surprise that Durang has said he made more money this past year than in any other year of his career; it’s a shame that financial success has taken so long for such a prodigiously gifted writer and teacher.

In general, shows on the American Theatre list have about a three year stay, typically peaking in their second year on the list, but this can vary depending upon when titles are released by licensing houses and agents to regional theatres. 25 years ago (and more significantly years before that) theatres might have had to compete with commercial tours, but play tours are exceedingly rare birds these days, if not extinct.

Perhaps this rush to the familiar and popular and NYC-annointed is disheartening, but it’s worth observing that the American Theatre list notes how many productions each title gets, and that after the first couple of slots, we’re usually looking at plays that are getting 7 or 8 productions in a given season, across TCG’s current universe of 474 member companies (404 of which were included in this year’s figures). Since the magazine notes a universe of 1,876 productions, suddenly 27 stagings of a single show doesn’t seem so dominant after all. Granted, TCG drops Shakespeare from their calculations, but even he only counted for 77 productions of all of his plays across this field. So reading between the lines, the American Theatre list suggests there’s very little unanimity about what’s done at TCG member theatres in any given year, a less quantifiable achievement but an important one.

Dramatics

While titles come and go on the American Theatre list, stasis is the best word to describe the lists of most produced high school plays (it’s somewhat less true for musicals). Nine of the plays on the 2014 list were on the 2013 list; 2014 was topped by John Cariani’s Almost, Maine, followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the two titles were in reverse order the prior year. The other duplicated titles were Our Town, 12 Angry Men (Jurors), You Can’t Take It With You, Romeo and Juliet, The Crucible, Harvey and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Like the American Theatre list, the Dramatics survey doesn’t cover the entirety of high school theatre production; only those schools that are members of the Educational Theatre Association’s International Thespian Society have the opportunity to participate, representing more than 4,000 high schools out of a universe of 28,500 public, private and parochial secondary schools in the country. Unlike the Dramatics list, there are no hard numbers about how many productions each show receives, so one can only judge relative popularity.

Almost, Maine’s swift ascension to the top rungs of the list is extraordinary, but it’s due in no small part to its construction as a series of thematically linked scenes, originally played by just four actors but easily expandable for casts where actor salaries aren’t an issue. Looking at recent American Theatre lists, they tend to be topped by plays with small casts (Venus in Fur, Red, Good People and The 39 Steps), while the Dramatics list is the reverse, with larger cast plays dominating, in order to be inclusive of more students (though paling next to musicals where casts in school shows might expand to 50 or more).

The most important trend on the Dramatics list (which has been produced since 1938) is the lack of trends. Though a full assessment of the history of top high school plays would take considerable effort, it’s worth noting that Our Town was on the list not only in 2014 and 2013, but also in 2009, 1999 and 1989; the same is true for You Can’t Take It With You. Other frequently appearing titles are Arsenic and Old Lace, various adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, Harvey, and The Miracle Worker.

No doubt the lack of newer plays with large casts is a significant reason why older classic tend to rule this list; certainly the classic nature of these works and their relative lack of controversial elements play into it as well. But as I watched Sheri Wilner’s play Kingdom City at the La Jolla Playhouse a few weeks ago, in which a drama director is compelled to choose a play from the Dramatics list, I wondered: is the list self-perpetuating? Are there numerous schools that seek what’s mainstream and accepted at other schools, and so do the same plays propagate themselves because administrators see the Dramatics list as having an implied educational seal of approval?

That may well be, and if it’s true, it’s an unfortunate side effect of a quantitative survey. But it’s also worth noting that many of these plays, vintage though they may be, have common themes, chief among them exhortations to march to your own drummer, to matter how out of step you may be to the conventional wisdom. They may be artistic expressions from other eras about the importance of individuality, but in the hands of teachers thinking about more than just placating parents, they are also opportunities to celebrate those among us who may seem different or unique, and for fighting for what you believe in against prevailing sentiment or structures.

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Looking at musicals on the American Theatre list is a challenge, because their list is an aggregate of plays and musicals, and while many regional companies now do a musical or two, it’s much harder for any groundswell to emerge. In the last five years, only three musicals have made it onto the TCG lists, each for one year only: Into The Woods, Spring Awakening and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. That doesn’t mean there’s a dearth of musical production, it simply shows that the work is being done by companies outside of the TCG universe.

Musicals are of course a staple of high school theatre, but the top ten lists from Dramatics are somewhat more fluid. While staples like Guys and Dolls, Grease, Once Upon a Mattress, You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown and Little Shop of Horrors maintain their presence, newer musicals arrive every year or two, with works like Seussical, Legally Blonde, Spelling Bee, and Thoroughly Modern Millie appearing frequently in recent years. At the peak spot, after a six-year run, Beauty and the Beast was bested this year by Shrek; as with professional companies, when popular new works are released into the market, they quickly rise to the top. How long they’ll stay is anyone’s guess, but I have little doubt that we’ll one day see Aladdin and Wicked settle in for long tenures.

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When I looked at both the American Theatre and Dramatics lists over a span of time, the distinct predictability of each was troubling. Coming out when they do, before most theatrical production for the next theatre season is set, I’d like to see them looked at not as any manner of affirmation, but as a challenge – whether to professional companies or school schedules. I admire and enjoy the plays that are listed here, and nothing herein should be construed as critical of any of these shows; audiences around the country deserve the opportunity to see them. While I do have the benefit of living in New York and seeing most of these popular shows there, I must confess that I am most intrigued by the theatre companies and school groups that might just say to themselves, ‘Let’s not do the shows, or too many of the shows, that appear on these lists. Let’s find something else.’ Those plays may never appear as part of any aggregation, but I suspect the groups’ work will be all the more interesting for it, benefiting both artists and audiences.

The arrival of a new movie trailer online is received with a level of excitement and scrutiny that once waited for the film itself; even photos get analyzed in depth, as the recent hubbub over the first image of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman has proved. So it’s no surprise that the theatre fan community went into a frenzy over the first full trailer for Disney’s film of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into The Woods; after all, superhero movies now arrive like clockwork, while movie musicals, though more common than in the 70s and 80s, are still infrequent events. That dearth caused a previous bit of alarm and umbrage over Into The Woods, when Mr. Sondheim suggested there might be some plot changes.

Almost as quickly as the Into The Woods trailer appeared, my social media feeds were filled with an anguished refrain: where are the songs? Yes, the core audience felt betrayed, even though I suspect every person who was moved to write already knows the score by heart.

What those of us who love theatre in general, musicals in particular, and Sondheim most of all have to remember is that, sadly, we are not representative of the majority of moviegoers, and movie marketers have to throw a wide net. Those of us who flock to watch the trailer of Into The Woods are already committed to seeing it, no matter how much we may want to grouse about it. The film studios are trying to reach a much wider crowd, for whom the sight of stars singing may be off-putting, strange as such a thought may be to those of us who are ready to belt out a show tune at the slighted prompting. It’s also possible that we’ll get a more representative trailer as the film draws closer.

Minimizing the musical theatre connection has certainly been true for movie musicals for some time. It’s almost as though marketers are trying to slip the fact that people sing past potential audiences. Unlike Into The Woods, which does seem more like a moody tour of the film’s production design than anything, music is prominently featured in countless trailers, even for non-musical films, and sometimes with music that isn’t ever heard in the film. But when it comes to seeing people sing, let’s keep that quiet, shall we? We can hear singing in trailers, and see people moving their lips, but not in sync. Take a look at the trailer for Hairspray as an example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ53mRO80c0

Dancing, apparently, isn’t so problematic. The Dancing with the Stars effect has probably only increased its appeal. Another example is Mamma Mia! which looked as if it was a romantic comedy with a bunch of Abba songs on the soundtrack, rather than a story told using Abba songs. One can understand why they wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see and hear Pierce Brosnan warbling, but the sight of master thespian Meryl Streep going to town on some Swedish pop might have added some appeal in its very incongruity.

Maybe Paramount knew the theatre purists were already on edge when they cut the trailer for Sweeney Todd, given the relative musical inexperience of the main cast (which many feel lived down to their expectations), which keeps vocals to a minimum. Despite that, more than most musical trailers, Sweeney actually gave us a real look at a bit of a song, “Epiphany,” spoke-sung by Johnny Depp (although we were halfway through the trailer before it was deployed). However that could easily be recognized as a fantasy sequence and seemingly not the style of the whole film. Overall the trailer hewed closer to the Hammer Films homage that director Tim Burton had appropriated for the Grand Guignol tale, and maybe a few Fangoria devotees were lured into a musical they’d have avoided otherwise.

It’s not that we don’t get a few glimpses of people singing in some trailers, but in the quick-cut style that brings them flash and energy, there is a certain “blink or you’ll miss it” quality, even when the making of music is central to the plot, as in the Dreamgirls trailer, where one would think performance footage of a superstar like Beyoncé would actually be a plus.

The incongruity of Eddie Murphy singing may be why we saw a bit of exactly that in Dreamgirls, and the same rationale may have applied to Depp in Sweeney, as well as Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellwger as the merry murderesses in the trailer of Chicago. For Zellweger, the singing was new; for Zeta-Jones it was part of her professional background, but before she became a star. Perhaps singing from people we least expect to sing has marketing value.

Mind you, this fear extends to movies that aren’t musicals but tell musical stories and in which the main characters are known to us precisely because they’re singers. The flash of the trailer for the just-released Get On Up, about James Brown, gives us glimpses of his energetic performances and we hear his music along with narration and dialogue, but lips actually moving along with the songs go largely unseen. Of course, given the subterfuge with which actual musicals are being marketed, I can’t help but wonder whether some audiences see this and think, “Uh, I dunno. I think they’re trying to slip one of those durned musicals by us.”

As much as we purists might be desperate to see musical scenes as quickly as possible, we can be fairly sure that the film itself will be a musical, even if it has been adapted and altered from its stage version. The example of Irma la Douce, one of the very few musicals to be adapted for the screen without the songs, is unlikely to recur.

So what about original musicals for the screen? To be fair, original live action film tuners are scarce, except for animation, where, since Disney’s The Little Mermaid, a mini-song score seems de rigeur. But is that a selling point? On the basis of the trailer for Frozen, which ultimately drilled Idinia Menzel’s “Let It Go” into the brains of millions of kids and their parents worldwide, even Disney wasn’t sure that the massively successful score was going to bring in the crowd. The film seemed to be the story of one girl, one boy and one talking snowman. However, to be fair, even though they hid it, the word got out about the exceptional songs.

The trailer for Les Miserables did show us Anne Hathaway as the doomed Fantine singing “I Dreamed A Dream,” in fact it’s all we hear as we watch that trailer – all of the other visuals that are laid over it could easily come from a non-musical. No warbling Wolverine here. Perhaps, to the handful of people in the world who have managed to escape any knowledge of the stage musical, this one song could be an isolated case. But this trailer more than any demonstrates the marketing tactic that prevails: don’t make it look too much like a musical in the hope of capturing some people who may not like musicals, and as for the core audience, we’ll throw ‘em a bone.

I wish I could recall which Twitter wit I read who compared movie trailers without songs to foreign film trailers without dialogue, since I would like to credit them for that very astute observation. But it’s worth noting that foreign films are financed and produced abroad, then picked up for distribution over here; the Hollywood studios shoulder vastly greater risk when they release musicals. While I’m fairly grouchy about the studios these days, with the endless remakes, sequels and films from dystopian young adult novels (thanks Mark Harris for that), I really am willing to give them a lot of leeway on musicals, to a degree on how they adapt them, but certainly on how they sell them. For perspective: if a musical sells 600,000 tickets in a year, it’s a smash; if a movie musical sells 600,000 tickets in its first week, it’s a disappointment. And after all, if a trailer whets our appetite for a movie musical, we can always fire up the iPod, or our Sondheim channel, and listen and sing along to our heart’s content until the movie comes out. After all, haven’t we been doing that already?

Incidentally, we’re getting two musicals this Christmas. In addition to Into The Woods, everybody’s favorite orphan is back, and on the basis of the trailer, while it’s hard to know what’s been done with the story and most of the score, at least we know it will still be a hard knock life tomorrow, though we may not be entirely sure of who’s singing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrxc8rS2W2E

Based on the commentary I was seeing in online articles and social media comments yesterday, someone had just painted a mustache on the Mona Lisa. No one seemed to care that Da Vinci had decided to it himself.

I’m referring to the outpouring of dismay over the news that some changes had been made to the storyline and score of Disney’s upcoming film of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods. Mind you, no one has seen the film as of yet; the response resulted from a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece in which Sondheim spoke of the changes, and more to the point, from online articles based on that story which extracted out the specifics of the pending changes without the full context of the original report, which regrettably is behind The New Yorker’s paywall. Therefore it’s the secondhand reportage which seems to have reached the widest audience and sparked a healthy flurry of unhappiness.

I for one would like to state that I’m shocked – shocked, I say – to find that the creative and commercial forces behind the film adaptation of a stage work have mandated changes in the original material (for those immune to written sarcasm, I mean to say that I’m not remotely shocked). The litany of stage material (or for that matter books, true life stories and even prior films) that has been slightly altered or radically reworked for movie consumption is endless. But even minor changes become the fodder for endless online investigation, interpretation and instantaneous outrage, the currency of so much digital derision by the faithful. And it’s not even an online phenomenon – I remember the furor that arose when Tim Burton had the temerity to cast Michael Keaton as Batman in the 80s, even for what was a major reworking of material that had been reduced to camp 20 years earlier on television.

That Disney might want to homogenize some of the spikier elements of Into The Woods should have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the company’s brand, which has a long history of altering fairytale stories, from Snow White and Sleeping Beauty to Once Upon A Time and Maleficent. Yes, I am one of the many who revere Sondheim’s work, and the man, but just as the removal of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” from that film adaptation didn’t ruin the story on screen, I’m at least willing to wait to see Into The Woods before I critique its choices, whatever the rationale. And let’s face it, after almost 30 years, it’s not as if film companies were fighting for the right to bring the material to the screen.

What frustrates me much more in this scenario is the way in which the details of changes have been excised from their context in The New Yorker. Sondheim’s revelation came out of a conversation with high school teachers which touched upon some of the problems they face in trying to produce challenging work at their schools, by Sondheim and others. While reporter Larissa MacFarquhar is glib about opposition to Sweeney Todd (“the teachers were smut and gore idealists”), she does report on the portion of the conversation specific to Into The Woods. In particular, she relates how the teachers told stories of opposition to elements of infidelity and sexuality in the Sondheim-Lapine piece, and how Sondheim compared the attitudes of school administrators to those of Disney executives. (I asked the organization that arranged the conversation, the Academy for Teachers, whether a recording of the full session had been created, but founder Sam Swope said they had none, that the New Yorker account was accurate and that the censorship discussion was only a small part of a wider-ranging talk.)

When a teacher explains that she must always present bowdlerized versions of musicals (please look up that odd word if you don’t know it), the article reports:

“Can you let them read the original and then discuss why, say, Rapunzel is not allowed to die in the adulterated version?” Sondheim asked.

“We do that, but they just get angry. They feel censored–they don’t feel trusted.”

“And they’re right,” Sondheim said. “But you have to explain to them that censorship is part of our puritanical ethics, and it’s something that they’re going to have to deal with. There has to be a point at which you don’t compromise anymore, but that may mean you won’t get anyone to sell your painting or perform your musical. You have to deal with reality.”

Now I’m not entirely comfortable with Sondheim’s conflation of censorship with marketplace realities, since censorship is performed unilaterally by people in power against those without influence, whereas creative alteration in a commercial setting results from negotiation – and money is at the root of the decisions on all sides. Into The Woods wasn’t taken unwillingly from Sondheim – he sold it. I trust that he has safeguarded the essence of the show. But I agree that the impulse to homogenize for the marketplace does indeed come from a puritan ethic, as does school censorship, both cases where adults take a patronizing view of what young people can handle – though in the case of a Disney film, they’re trying to reach audiences much younger than the participants in high school theatre programs in a big tent effort.

It is the stage alteration in schools that perpetually worries me. In cases when creators or rights holders have authorized “junior”or “school” versions of stage works, they are active participants in the excision of “challenging” material,” and while perhaps that’s also a market-driven decision, I like to think that it also occurs in the best interests of allowing to students to take on work which would otherwise be wholly off-limits in a school setting. Regardless, I worry about the academic gatekeepers who mandate these changes, which may vary from school to school or state to state, and in far too many cases are done at the school level without any approval from the licensing house or creator. That’s where censorship is truly taking place and insidious. It’s where the idea that anyone can alter a stage text at will is born, much to the consternation of authors, and their representatives at the Dramatists Guild, in the U.S.

As Sondheim notes in the New Yorker piece, “If you look at most plays, it’s like the sonata form in music–if you screw around with that, you’re taking your life in your hands.”

It is clear in the article that Sondheim is an active participant in the film of Into The Woods, whether his resulting choices are grudgingly mercenary or willingly collaborative is hard to assess. Regarding the removal of the Baker’s Wife’s liaison and the song “Any Moment,” the article reports one educator’s distress and Sondheim’s acquiescence.

“Stick up for that song!” a teacher called out.

“I did, I did,” Sondheim said. “But Disney said, we don’t want Rapunzel to die, so we replotted it. I won’t tell you what happens now, but we wrote a new song to cover it.”

As with any adaptation of a prior work, changes are inevitable. Fortunately, the new version doesn’t change the source, and in the case of Into The Woods, Disney’s film won’t yield a whole new stage text. I do worry that schools will interpret the screen revisions as permission to alter their own productions, which is in fact illegal; I’ve been struck by how often opposition to Sweeney Todd has arisen from the film’s gouts of bloods, which suggest that gore is essential to the show, when even John Doyle’s Broadway revival dispensed with obvious blood-letting, so the films do suggest a template to the public. What is very likely to occur from the Into The Woods film is that people beyond the core fan base for musicals will be introduced to the genius of Sondheim and, perhaps, that even more schools will do the show – according to the approved text.

It may be fun join in online outrage, but it’s an impotent act in a case like this. The film will be what Disney wants it to be. Why not put those efforts to better use, and direct them to supporting live theatre and making sure that the teachers whose genuine concerns sparked this kerfuffle have the opportunity to tackle brilliant and challenging work with their students, their schools and their communities. That’s where your voice can make a difference, in advancing the cause of arts education and in the battle against true censorship whenever it arises.

Addendum, June 23, 2014: One week after The New Yorker article came out and five days after the online furor began, Stephen Sondheim released the following statement about changes to Into The Woods, which largely negates the cuts he said would be happening. It reads:

An article in The New Yorker misreporting my “Master Class” conversation about censorship in our schools with seventeen teachers from the Academy for Teachers a couple of weeks ago has created some false impressions about my collaboration with the Disney Studio on the film version of Into the Woods. The fact is that James (Lapine, who wrote both the show and the movie) and I worked out every change from stage to screen with the producers and with Rob Marshall, the director. Despite what the New Yorker article may convey, the collaboration was genuinely collaborative and always productive.

When the conversation with the teachers occurred, I had not yet seen a full rough cut of the movie. Coincidentally, I saw it immediately after leaving the meeting and, having now seen it a couple of times, I can happily report that it is not only a faithful adaptation of the show, it is a first-rate movie.

And for those who care, as the teachers did, the Prince’s dalliance is still in the movie, and so is “Any Moment.”