SONG & DANCE: Not the Same Song and Dance By Peter Filichia
In a way, it could be considered a Bernadette Peters album.
Most of the star’s longtime fans can tell you that over the decades, Peters has released six solo recordings.
But she really did a seventh as well. It’s her lengthiest one, at 64 minutes: SONG & DANCE – THE SONGS.
Does that title sound redundant? The actual title of the show that began previews on Broadway 40 years ago this week was simply SONG & DANCE.
Because every song was solely in Act One – and every dance was only performed in Act Two – the single disc was hence named SONG & DANCE – THE SONGS.
The project began in the late ‘70s when Andrew Lloyd Webber and Oscar-winning lyricist Don Black, members of the same club, met for lunch. They didn’t plan to write a musical; each just wanted to get to know the other.
Chitchatting led to Black telling of a young woman who was sitting next to him on a plane; she just wouldn’t stop talking about her recent break-up with a lover and that she was now going to make a brand-new start of it in old New York.
Soon, he and Lloyd Webber were planning a one-woman show in which, to use the composer’s not-so-elegant explanation, “a girl who’s closer to 30 than to 20 is getting twitchy about being left on the shelf.”
Lloyd Webber saw it as a song cycle, and Don Black, who knew West End star Marti Webb, envisioned it as a vehicle for her. The collaborators called it TELL ME ON A SUNDAY, because their heroine – simply called “The Girl” – told her current love that if he ever planned to break up with her, she would want him to “Tell Me on a Sunday”; that way, she’d at least have a few hours to lick her wounds before heading off to a demanding job the next day.
In early 1980, the song cycle morphed into a TV special. Its airing resulted in one song getting a single and reaching Number Three on the charts: “Take That Look off Your Face,” in which The Girl chided a friend for doubting she’d make good romantic decisions this time around.
Indeed, she’d make quite a few bad ones…
We often hear that today’s producers don’t come up with new ideas, but Cameron Mackintosh, who’d recently scored big with Lloyd Webber’s CATS, came up with one that gave a new life to TELL ME ON A SUNDAY.
Mackintosh knew that the piece, slightly more than an hour in length, wasn’t enough for a full theatrical evening. But one of Emma’s lyrics to a difficult lover stood out to him: “Spare me, please, the song and dance.”
So, what about an evening of song and dance? Mackintosh suggested that the first act could be TELL ME ON A SUNDAY, and the second would be all dance to music from Lloyd Webber’s own Variations.
This was the lyric-less piece that in 1977 the composer fashioned for his brother, up-and-coming cellist Julian Lloyd Webber. All the 23 variations were based on Paganini’s famous 24th Caprice for solo violin, the same piece that inspired Rachmaninoff to write his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. In a clever tribute, the 18th of Lloyd Webber’s variations is also based on the popular melody of the 18th of Rachmaninoff’s.
The two acts had little in common, but that didn’t stop SONG & DANCE for running nearly two years in London. But would it play on Broadway?
Says Richard Maltby, Jr., “It had just closed when I first heard of it. I was visiting Andrew, who was looking for a lyricist for ASPECTS OF LOVE. He and Cameron were thinking of bringing the show to Broadway, but everyone in the U.S. was telling them a show with two separate unconnected parts wasn’t meaty enough for New York.
“Could the two parts could be linked with a single story? Andrew said for that to happen, they would need someone who was both a writer and a director, who could conceive the whole show. ‘Someone like… well, you, Richard.’”
When you get such an offer, you don’t have to be Ado Annie to say “Yes!” Says Maltby, “Andrew and Cameron basically challenged me to come up with a story that combined the two halves.”
Maltby took The Girl, named her Emma, and retained that she was a young British woman who was one of another hundred people who just got off the plane at JFK. Although Emma will give the attention that must be paid to her goal of designing hats, she is equally diligent in her quest to find Mr. Right. And she believes she’s found him in Joe. But, as she later sings, “When we started to plan the future and all, Joe started to pull away.”
Maltby then came up with an Act Two that centered on Joe. How smart to have a man communicate what he felt solely in dance. After all, don’t men have a hard time verbalizing their feelings?
“Joe’s experiences in New York make him grow up, just as Emma’s do.” And a happy ending, of course, when they meet at the end. This time, Joe won’t give her the same song and dance.
Lloyd Webber also gives Maltby credit for suggesting Bernadette Peters. And indeed, as the cast album shows, during that entire first act, it’s all Peters, all the time (okay, aside from Cynthia Onrubia’s providing “Voice on the Telephone” in one song).
As for lyrics, Maltby says he did rewrite Emma’s letters home to her mother, “but,” he adds, “I had very little to do with the set piece songs, which are all Don Black’s. And during our work, we added ‘English Girls,’ whose lyrics Don wrote in one night.”
Maltby also had the benefit of a new song which was hot off the sheet-music press: “Unexpected Song,” set to the melody of the fifth of Lloyd Webber’s Variations. After Sarah Brightman’s initial rendition, Britian’s two most famous musical theater Michaels – Crawford and Ball – recorded it; even Marie Osmond got around to it as well.
Peters expertly delivers it, especially in the lyric, “Now, no matter where I am, no matter what I do, I see your face appearing.” She conveys romantic obsession without making it sound unhealthy.
Following Lloyd Webber’s suggestion, Maltby directed as well. After a successful workshop, he says that “I decided to take the show to Williamstown to break in the show in front of an audience. This turned out to be the smartest thing I ever did, for a reason I didn’t foresee. When we started techs, we did Act One relatively easily but Act Two was a big ballet with lots of cues. It took a whole week in which our star was sitting alone, unused… a star who was going to have to carry a whole first act by herself. But she was secure and could endure a week with nothing to do.”
Apparently so. Peters received a Best Actress in a Musical Tony Award and the Outstanding Actress in a Musical Drama Desk Award.
Not bad for someone who had a mere walk-on in all of Act Two and never had to dance in SONG & DANCE…
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.
