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How Did We Get Here from There?
May. 3rd, 2008 10:40 pm(Three friends on a rooftop, watching Sputnik pass overhead and talking in wide-eyed wonder about what it means.)
"We're standing on the threshold of the future."
"We've got to be the luckiest people who ever lived. After this moment, this moment that the three of us are sharing here together, nothing's ever going to be the way it was, ever again. Do you guys realize that now, we're going to be able to do anything? Anything we ever dreamed of? What a time to be starting out. What a time to be alive."
I've been listening through the new cast recording of Merrily We Roll Along tonight. As with a lot of Sondheim, most of the message of the show is delivered in the music, though I had the privilege of seeing this in college, so I had some extra context for some of it. Also have the extra 20 years of milage the characters start this show with, and the attendant questions about how bright promise fades, friendships fall apart, not everybody lives happily ever after.
I highly recommend it if you ever get a chance to see it. It's unusual-- it starts at the end and runs backward through twenty years in the life of three friends, making this finale piece that much more wrenching and bittersweet. It doesn't offer any answers about how things went wrong-- it stays very true to life in that way. We make the best decisions we can at the time, or we let our insecurities or momentary desires make them for us, and then we deal with the consequences. And sometimes we get what we thought we wanted, only to find out it's not at all what we thought. The hopeful note at the end, even knowing how things are going to go wrong for these kids, challenges an audience to see if they're where they meant to be, and realize that in some ways we start out new, every day. Maybe the friends in the show can't be saved, but that doesn't mean you have to stay trapped.
In light of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
juno_magic's quote from Heinlein tonight about writing, though, I offer this bit from "Our Time,":
There's so much stuff to sing.
And you and me, we'll be singing it like the birds,
Me with music and you with words,
Tell 'em things they don't know.
Up to us, pal, to show 'em.
This show does that, or rather, it tells us things we do know are true, but maybe haven't thought about in quite that way. We write, when we do it best, when we tell people things that are true like that.
But none of this is getting any of my actual stories written. Still, I wanted to share it. But now, back to it.
"We're standing on the threshold of the future."
"We've got to be the luckiest people who ever lived. After this moment, this moment that the three of us are sharing here together, nothing's ever going to be the way it was, ever again. Do you guys realize that now, we're going to be able to do anything? Anything we ever dreamed of? What a time to be starting out. What a time to be alive."
I've been listening through the new cast recording of Merrily We Roll Along tonight. As with a lot of Sondheim, most of the message of the show is delivered in the music, though I had the privilege of seeing this in college, so I had some extra context for some of it. Also have the extra 20 years of milage the characters start this show with, and the attendant questions about how bright promise fades, friendships fall apart, not everybody lives happily ever after.
I highly recommend it if you ever get a chance to see it. It's unusual-- it starts at the end and runs backward through twenty years in the life of three friends, making this finale piece that much more wrenching and bittersweet. It doesn't offer any answers about how things went wrong-- it stays very true to life in that way. We make the best decisions we can at the time, or we let our insecurities or momentary desires make them for us, and then we deal with the consequences. And sometimes we get what we thought we wanted, only to find out it's not at all what we thought. The hopeful note at the end, even knowing how things are going to go wrong for these kids, challenges an audience to see if they're where they meant to be, and realize that in some ways we start out new, every day. Maybe the friends in the show can't be saved, but that doesn't mean you have to stay trapped.
In light of
juno_magic's quote from Heinlein tonight about writing, though, I offer this bit from "Our Time,": There's so much stuff to sing.
And you and me, we'll be singing it like the birds,
Me with music and you with words,
Tell 'em things they don't know.
Up to us, pal, to show 'em.
This show does that, or rather, it tells us things we do know are true, but maybe haven't thought about in quite that way. We write, when we do it best, when we tell people things that are true like that.
But none of this is getting any of my actual stories written. Still, I wanted to share it. But now, back to it.
