CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED? By Peter Filichia
Returning to the original cast album of REDWOOD had me recalling a column that was once a go-to feature in Ladies’ Home Journal.
Starting in 1954 and continuing for several decades, this magazine would ask an expert counselor and its readership, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”
And that became the question I had for REDWOOD’s Jesse and her wife Mel.
Jesse’s son died at a much-too-young age. She, out of pain, just took off and drove from east to west coast without telling Mel. Jesse is so distraught that she won’t even return Mel’s frantic phone calls – not for weeks, anyway. Finally, she does, and Mel isn’t quick to forgive. She does leave the door at least slightly ajar that they could have a future.
But we must ask: “Can this marriage be saved?”
In both “Back Then” and “Looking Through This Lens,” Mel – through De’Adre Aziza’s fine delivery ofKate Diaz’s music and lyrics – shows love pouring through, suggesting that they’re going to be all right.
“We’re Gonna Be All Right,” proclaim Eddie and Jennifer Yaeger in DO I HEAR A WALTZ? You’ll be inclined to believe it if you hear the Richard Rodgers-Stephen Sondheim song on the 1965 original cast album.
You won’t be so sure when you hear it on SONDHEIM: A MUSICAL TRIBUTE. Here are his original lyrics, which were much more sardonic. (That’s our boy!)
Rodgers wrote music to the long verse that you won’t hear on the cast album. Once Rodgers’ wife Dorothy heard it and hated it, the composer – also the show’s producer – nixed it.
Bet you won’t agree with her when you hear the unexpurgated version. Maybe Richard Rodgers took Dorothy’s advice to save his marriage.
Five years later, Sondheim would examine wedlock in far greater detail in COMPANY, his true breakout musical. Can Larry and Joanne’s marriage be saved? That she tries to seduce Bobby would suggest a problem. Although she fails with him, we have the feeling that this lady, perhaps after lunch, will bed someone else.
Harry and Sarah? Brownies and liquor aside, can we read into his singing the word “Sorry” before the word “Grateful” that there’s an emphasis on the former and that they won’t last?
David and Jenny? Perhaps one night when they’re smoking pot – its own kind of truth serum – they’ll see that their marriage is going to pot.
Paul and Amy? She didn’t want to be “Getting Married Today,” so there may not be too many tomorrows in which she’s happy.
We know for sure that Peter and Susan’s marriage cannot be saved, for, in Act One, both tell Bobby that they’ll soon divorce. The real surprise comes in Act Two, when we learn that they have legally split, but are still living together. Just the idea that they’re not bound to each other makes them grateful and not the least bit sorry that they did what they did.
Michael and Agnes, not many years after singing the title song of I DO! I DO!, both feel that “Nobody’s Perfect” and “The Honeymoon Is Over.” But the two settle down – and don’t appear to be settling for less – as they keep their love alive in the ensuing decades.
Listen to JUNO – the musical version of Sean O’Casey’s Irish drama Juno and the Paycock – and you’ll find Juno (previous Oscar winner Shirley Booth) and Jack (future Oscar winner Melvyn Douglas) do battle in the delightfully hilarious “Old Sayin’s.”
Jack starts with, “Why can’t you be like our neighbor, Mrs. Coyne? Always a’smilin’, always jokin’, Mrs. Coyne.”
To which Juno responds, “Sure, Mrs. Coyne can smile all day. Paddy Coyne brings home his pay!”
“You’re changin’ the subject!” roars Jack. He’ll make that complaint two more times, after Juno twice comes back with excellent rebuttals that he doesn’t want to hear.
And just when you’re wondering why the song is called “Old Sayin’s” and not “You’re Changin’ the Subject!” – for that’s the one repeated phrase in the first full minute of the song – you find that what Marc Blitzstein wrote was an unusually long verse.
Now he’ll get to the meat of the matter:
Jack notes, “There’s an old sayin’: ‘Man is the master. Woman is there for service!’”
Juno rebuts, “There’s another sayin’: ‘Servants should be paid, or they get nervous!’”
Jack is incensed. “That’s not a sayin’! Not a sayin’! You know as well as me!”
Juno resolutely responds, “Who cares a jot? Indeed, if it’s not, I swear it ought to be! Sure, it ought to be!”
Here’s a marriage that will be saved simply because, in 1920s Dublin, where else could a woman go?
JUNO shows us one awful marriage; FOLLIES shows us two. Ben and Phyllis Stone, despite their wealth and prestige, aren’t any happier than ordinary middle-classers Sally and Buddy Plummer. Trouble is, Sally comes to the reunion of Weismann Girls still carrying a torch for Ben and hopes that one of its sparks can rekindle in Ben what they had before he dumped her for Phyllis.
During the long Walpurgisnacht, Sally at first tries to convince Ben that she’s so, so happy because of how she’s appreciated “In Buddy’s Eyes.” By “Too Many Mornings,” the next song they have together, she comes clean: “If you don’t kiss me, Ben, I think I’m going to die.”
Soon we’ll see how Phyllis feels in “Could I Leave You?”, a waltz-macabre that’s a veritable dance of a marriage death. Later, in “Live, Laugh, Love,” Ben will admit “Me, I like to love – me!” So, when you come right down to it, Ben doesn’t want either Sally or Phyllis.
And yet, Sondheim and bookwriter James Goldman wanted audiences to believe that, after these two couples faced the truth on this fateful night, that their marriages would be saved. Really? Are you convinced?
Some theatergoers might have been when the musical opened in 1971, when the divorce rates were a fraction of what they are now. But would Ben and Sally be happy if they had respectively left Phyllis and Buddy? Statisticians wouldn’t bet on it; they claim that, no matter what Sammy Cahn asserted when he wrote “Love is lovelier the second time around,” the fact is 60-70% of subsequent marriages end in divorce.
So, to all of you musical theater characters named above, perhaps the devil you know is indeed better than the devil you don’t – even if Katharine Hepburn had a point when saying, “Marriage isn’t a word; it’s a sentence.”
No wonder that she was always a mademoiselle…
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY: 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available on Amazon.
