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1
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Thank you
2
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Thank you. Thank you
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Hi everyone. Can you hear us? Does that sound OK? Great
4
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Actually what I want to talk about first is-
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People sort of think that a Sondheim show
is a Sondheim show, but actually...
6
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...you're in essence a collaborator,
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and the person who I think we should really
start talking about is James Goldman
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I'll tell you about that, as a matter of fact
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James Goldman has a brother named Bill Goldman,
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who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
among other things
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James wrote plays. And he said,
'I've always wanted to write a play. A reunion'
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'l have an idea for a musical'
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'l picked up the newspaper the other day and read about
this reunion each year of the Ziegfeld Follies girls'
14
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In fact we went to one of these Ziegfeld Follies things
- You went to one?
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Yes, absolutely
- With notebooks?
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Yes, indeed. Indeed. Yeah
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And some of the ladies were really-
one of them had been in the Follies of 1918
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We decided that it would take place at a party -
a reunion of the girls...
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...who haven't seen each other for 25 years,
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get back together and all their old hates, loves,
etcetera, etcetera, are resuscitated
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In which all four central characters
all fall bad! into the past
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and express what's going on through Follies songs
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And it would involve two of the girls who had been
best friends when they were in the Follies,
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and it would be about how their relationship fell apart
25
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So we decided exactly to do that
26
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I don't know how much you talk with your book writer
before you write
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I talk extensively. I mean really extensively
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You go into the detail. What does this mean?
What are you trying to convey to the audience?
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What are you trying to convey
to the other characters in the play?
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It's all about getting to the character
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And you suddenly find that certain words either - if
they don't rhyme with each other, relate to each other
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It's very much about serendipity.
It's very much - 'Oh, I didn't think' -
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and sometimes a lyric just starts to build
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Too many mornings
Wasted in pretending I reach for you...
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Often, the first couple of songs are terrific
and right on the nose
36
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The problem starts with Number 3
and Number-call and Number 5
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Now you have problems of variety.
You have problems of point of view,
38
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and then things slow down, this character gets boring
whatever. You know, it's hard
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Follies had been written for a company
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And we wrote eleven drafts,
because after the first draft, we read through it,
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and when it was setting the situation up,
the people arriving at the party,
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it was really interesting and atmospheric
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And then as soon as the plot started to kick in,
it started to, you know, get mechanical
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Eventually about the filth draft, we got the point
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Don't have a plot
- Right
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But you have to remember, the idea -
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we thought no producer is ever going to produce
a musical that has no plot
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Just people talking, and getting drunk,
and hating each other, and going home
49
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One of my favourite words which is misused a lot is
pastiche. But you do use that, especially in Follies
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I wanted to see if I could write pastime
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I know that sounds ridiculous
since I made an entire career out of writing pastiche
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But I wasn't sure at the time.
I wasn't sure at the time
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So I did that and I thought, yeah, I can write pastime
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All those Follies songs, in fact all the pastime songs
are, by nature of pastime,
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imitations of very specific composers and lyric writers
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And are these in some ways love-letters to that style?
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Absolutely... Those are songs that I grew up on,
so to speak, of course
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I think it's a prerequisite for
anybody who writes anything to know what the past is
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If you're going to write a novel,
you should have read Dickens
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Particularly since it gives you something to steal
- Yes!
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And as - was it Stravinsky who said,
Talent borrows, genius steals'?
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You know, you write - because you want to tell
this story about these characters,
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and as you know, any story you tell
has so many implications
64
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But that's the great thing about the theatre
as opposed to movies and TV - it's malleable
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You can see a show with an entirely new cast,
and a new director, and a new set of designs,
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and get a whole different take on it
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Every generation there's a new Hamlet,
there's a new way of looking at Hamlet
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It's not just Shakespeare who keeps the play alive:
it's the directors and actors who keep that play alive
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There's always another way of looking at it,
and that's always a pleasure
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It's an immense privilege for me, and I hope for you,
to be around my hero Stephen Sondheim
7222
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