From: conrad@brahms.udel.edu (Jon Conrad)
Subject: Re: Original cast recording of "Follies"
Organization: University of Delaware
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 14:13:17 GMT

In article <1993Jan27.000509.25650@psych.toronto.edu> dsy@psych.toronto.edu (Desiree Sy) writes:

>In article <C1GsnI.LIz@news.udel.edu> conrad@brahms.udel.edu (Jon Conrad) writes:

>>Yes, in the vocal score, the number "Bolero d'Amour" is called "Vincent
>>and Vanessa."

>I'm probably missing something obvious here, but why would an
>instrumental number be in a vocal score?

Desiree, we're on sufficiently friendly terms that I hope you'll allow
me to be tacky and say "Yes, you're missing something incredibly
obvious," ok?

What we call the "vocal score" is a piano-vocal score; i.e., all the
music used in the show from beginning to end, with all the voice parts,
and orchestra reduced for piano.  It's what's used in rehearsal, and
almost always by the conductor (full orchestral scores for musicals
being unheard of).  So it's useless without all the music.  What did you
think a vocal score would have in it?  (Serious question, I'm finding it
hard to picture.)

>>Apparently Michael Bennett (original co-director and choreographer)
>>insisted on this number remaining in, where Prince would have cut it.
>>Sondheim wasn't crazy about it either, since although the theme was his,
>>the number as a whole was an arranger's creation (he's touchy about
>>being visibly "helped" in that way -- one reason the more recent vocal
>>scores of his shows are based on his manuscripts rather than the
>>finished orchestration).  

>I'd never heard this about the arrangement before.  I'd read (I
>think in Sondheim and Co.) that Sondheim never liked the number,
>had wanted to cut it, but Bennett had felt it was necessary to
>break up the "purple numbers".  (I remember the wording, because
>I thought "purple" was some sort of a mood adjective -- cf.
>purple prose -- but then later on, Bennett elaborated that he
>meant the purple costumes that the people were wearing.)

Oh, I think Bennett meant both.  The people were wearing purple clothes
(actually they weren't -- regular tuxes and party clothes) and he felt
that the mood was too depressing and purple.  All that that you read in
Sondheim & Co. is true, but so, I believe, are Sondheim's private
ambivalences about it.

>>So it was dumped in the big concert and in
>>London.  I *like* the number (it has an absolutely glorious MGM-style
>>Tunick orchestration) and would always want to see it in a production of
>>Follies.  Its omission was one of the things that pissed me off the most
>>about the RCA recording 

>I like the number, too.  In the community version I was in, the
>couples dancing were the older Vanessa and Vincent, the younger
>V & V, and two other (young) couples.  I strongly disagreed with
>the decision to put the other couples in (not that I bothered
>saying so... 

Good.  Because they'd have been able to point to the original production
(I think there's a photo of this number in Sondheim & Co) and say that
they'd done exactly the same thing.  You may well find it wrongheaded
even when staged by Bennett, but he did in fact put 4 couples in the
number: the 2 V&V's, and 2 others.

>>(another was the curtailment of the Who's That
>>Woman dance).

>Which sounds like one of the most brilliant uses of dance in a
>musical I've ever heard of.

It was, it was.  So naturally, the number has never been recorded
complete.

Jon Alan Conrad
Newsgroups: rec.arts.theatre