The background to "Send in the Clowns"

The Broadway Maven, David Benkof, interprets Broadway

Here’s the monthly FREE issue of The Broadway Maven’s Weekly Blast. Subscriptions are just $5 a month or $36 a year.

Shalom!

This week, The Broadway Maven looks at the song “Send in the Clowns”:

• On Monday, April 11 at Noon and 7 pm ET, there will be a FREE Zoom class exploring Sondheim’s most popular tune, taught by special guest Sondheim expert Gail Leondar-Wright.

• This Weekly Blast:

A) contains an essay by Gail exploring the meaning of “Send in the Clowns”;

B) includes a RAVE review of Hugh Jackman’s current Music Man production on Broadway;

C) provides a YouTube GEM with a Broadway Maven interview of actress Ann Harada; and

D) RAVEs about a technology that has begun improving the experience of being a Broadway audience.

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Gail Leondar-Wright: Those of you who have taken David’s classes know that Sondheim is well versed in the world of musical theatre but that even when he writes in the style of someone else, or of another time period, he adds a little something/something to it.  It’s commonly understood that he tends to make even the frothiest of genres a little darker, a little more complex. 

In the case of A Little Night Music, Sondheim is writing in the tradition of romantic, late 19th century European operetta. The traditional trapping of which are… “High society, the vaguely exotic, foreign locale, the opulent settings…  and larger than life characters.”  But, Joseph Swain suggests, one might call A Little Night Music an “anti-operetta,” because it challenges the notion that love conquers all, and even the “value of romantic fidelity.”

And of course, Sondheim always adds his own comment on the style.

Director Hal Prince says that the creative team wanted to do a “Chekhovian musical.”  And I do see Chekhov in it – the richly drawn characters, the human comedy, the foibles, the sweetness tempered by misery.  Cornel West adds “the injection of the tragic-comic…”  “the preservation of the playfulness and the compassion and the ambivalence and ambiguity, and the ability to endure.”

We’ll see how this plays out in Sondheim’s most popular song, “Send in the Clowns.”

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Hugh Jackman sure knows how to play flim-flam men.

In the current Broadway production of The Music Man, the Greatest Showman star personifies the classic title role of a swindler pretending to offer music lessons to the citizens of River City, Iowa – and finds that the town makes him an honest man, in more ways than one.

Speaking of which, as Marian the Librarian, Sutton Foster is a delight. Under Jerry Zaks’s crisp direction, Marian has real chemistry with Jackman’s Harold Hill, especially in the second act when she comes to appreciate the gifts of kindness and pride he has brought the town.

“Con,” of course stands for confidence. And that’s exactly Hill’s – and Jackman’s – gift to the town: the confidence that helps a lisping boy sing with delight and a bickering school board turn into a barbershop quartet.

The score, as always, is lush and multitextured, and the show’s lyrics hold up well 65 years later.

G-d, I want to teach this show. Maybe later this year…

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Actress Ann Harada recently visited The Broadway Maven’s ALL-ACCESS group to discuss her career.

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Second Stage’s current production of the locker-room play Take Me Out at the Hayes Theatre has instituted a smart cell phone policy that is new to Broadway shows: Yondr phones. The system, which has been used for several years at concerts and in schools, gives patrons a pouch to lock their cell phones in, and they can only be opened on the way out of the theater.

Second Stage is using Yondr to prevent photography of the naked men on stage. But there are many other benefits:

• Audience members don’t check their phones for the time or anything else during the show, thus eliminating some real distractions;

• Copies of the Playbill that otherwise may never be opened get studied by ticketholders with newfound time not spent on their phones; and

• Patrons actually talk to each other before the show starts and at intermission.

I’d love to see the technology become standard practice in the theater, on Broadway and beyond.

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Sign up for Sondheim April with Gail Leondar-Wright here.

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Register for the May/June Introduction to Broadway class here. Sign up by Tuesday and save $20 off the regular rate of $69. You pay only $49.

Intro to Broadway looks at clips from more than 70 shows and covers lots of musical theater concepts in an attempt to help people decide what shows they next want to see (or see again).

It’s a different kind of teaching than the regular Broadway Maven, one that last year’s seminar participants enjoyed quite a bit. The mini-course is fast-paced, broad-ranging, and fun. Every Tuesday in May and June at Noon and 7 pm ET, starts May 3.

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Listen to the song "Send in the Clowns," easily available on YouTube or iTunes. What is your personal interpretation of who the clowns are, and why might they come "next year" and be "finally here"?

Please send your answers to TalkingSondheim@gmail.com.

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Note: links to register for ALL classes are ALWAYS available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Monday, April 11 “Send in the Clowns” with Gail Leondar-Wright (Noon and 7 pm ET)

• Monday, April 18 Follies with Gail Leondar-Wright (Noon and 7 pm ET)

• Monday, April 25 “Company: a Second Look” with Gail Leondar-Wright (Noon and 7 pm ET)

• Tuesday, May 3 Introduction to Broadway, part 1 of 9 (Noon and 7 pm)

• Tuesday, May 10 Introduction to Broadway, part 2 of 9 (Noon and 7 pm)

• Tuesday, May 17 Introduction to Broadway, part 3 of 9 (Noon and 7 pm)

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The Broadway Maven, David Benkof, helps students further their appreciation of musical theater through his classes, his YouTube Channel, and his Weekly Blast. Contact him at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.