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| my problem with Sondheim's problem with "I Feel Pretty" | |
| Last Edit: Chazwaza 08:13 pm EST 12/24/21 | |
| Posted by: Chazwaza 07:58 pm EST 12/24/21 | |
| In reply to: re: question re: WSS - have the authors ever addressed why there's SO much more Jets than Sharks in the score/play ?did Sheldon Harnick "lyric-shame" Sondheim? - bmc 07:25 pm EST 12/24/21 | |
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| Thank you for the generous words! Glad you found it a worthwhile read. And yeah, I don't doubt that Harnick said something like that. I'd say he was wrong too. It seems to me that "I Feel Pretty" exists in one of these options of dramatic reality: A) All characters speak in 95-100% English because it's a play written to communicate to an English speaking audience. So even when Spanish speaking characters (who, in the reality of their current lives, likely all speak some English, and most of whom are actively learning it) speak, it is translated *by the play to the audience* to English so that it can be understood, because presumably everything a character says or sings in a play is there for a reason and must be understood by the audience. In this reality, Maria is, in theory, speaking in Spanish for "I Feel Pretty", because she's speaking to Puerto Ricans only, but it's magically translated for the audience into English so we can understand it, as well as into rhyming lyrics that fit onto music because it is a song. B) Unless we hear them use Spanish (which we do occasionally), the Puerto Rican characters ARE speaking English. This is true of many immigrants who are trying to assimilate into a place with a different language (in America or otherwise). I think it was largely understood that to take advantage of the supposed opportunity available in America, you would have to speak the language that is the primary language of the country and the exclusive language spoken by the people in charge. (I'm not saying this is fair or right, I'm just discussing what the reality was). Insisting on speaking English to each other (as Anita often does) in order to practice, or just doing it without calling attention to it, is not far fetched at all. A smart young woman like Maria, at her age especially, would surely be actively learning and using English. How pompous of Sondheim and insulting to Maria for him to think his use of words like "alarming / charming" and "stunning, entrancing, committee, dizzy/fizzy" etc are beyond what Maria would have been able to know at that point in her time in America. If anything, his lyrical "showing off" actually sounds like a young person learning these medium-level vocab words and using them to show off herself. Apparently this wasn't intention of Sondheim, but to me it is much more believable that Maria IS using words she just recently learned. A more sophisticated English thinker/speaker would probably not express themselves the way the lyrics of this song are written. So if we're to believe she's expressing herself in Spanish because she's speaking to only Puerto Rican immigrants and they're all using only Spanish when not in the company of English-speakers, then why wouldn't she be using words at this medium-vocab level? And if we're to believe she is expressing herself in English, a language she is currently learning and using to assimilate, with a sharp and sponge-like mind of a teenager, and is choosing words she may have recently learned that express her giddy joy ... then why wouldn't see be using the words in the lyrics? Unless his issue is that she's doing such "clever" or "sophisticated" ***rhymes***... to which I have to laugh. We do not think Maria is actually rhyming, whether the lyric is: "it's alarming how charming i feel" OR "I feel dizzy, I feel sunny, I feel fizzy and funny and fine, And so pretty, Miss America can just resign." ... because this is a musical. And fun internal rhymes like this: "I feel pretty, Oh, so pretty That the city should give me its key. A committee Should be organized to honor me." ... are not Maria showing off. In the reality of a musical (at least most musicals, including this one), Maria does not know her words rhyme. Because of this, it is Sondheim showing off, but showing off to underline and/or achieve a higher level of expression of Maria's feeling here... and it works. The song has more zip and buzz and communication of what Maria is experiencing in her head and heart in this moment *because* of a little internal rhyme there. What he thinks is weaker writing or a betrayal of the character or the reality of her given circumstances is actually unfair and working to have the opposite effect for the *musical*. In a musical everyone sings and when they do they rhyme. Something perhaps Sondheim conveniently forgot in order to have a baby to throw to the wolves of humility. And in fact sometimes people express themselves in a song in more heightened ways than they would if it were spoken dialogue. This is part of the format of a musical... Every character who sings rhymes. In a musical, other than diegetic songs, the audience understands that NONE OF THE SONGS are the characters *actually* singing in the actual reality of the story. The story is being told and the character's thoughts and feelings and often dialogue are being expressed with song, and dance. We do not watch the Prologue and think these gang members are meant to be actually dancing through the streets of NYC... we understand it is an artistic expression to represent them roaming the streets... just as we do not think when someone sings AND their lyrics (through which they express their thoughts or dialogue during a song) RHYME, as almost all lyrics do, that the character is actually rhyming their thoughts, or would be rhyming their words if it were spoken dialogue rather than lyrics. So for him to have an issue with her having the apparently astounding wit it might take to do internal rhymes or rhymes of words she may not even be that familiar with, is pretty ridiculous, not to mention insulting to the audience. So on several levels I find Sondheim's issues to be silly and unfounded, and either an insult to Maria or to the audience or both. Either way I think he looks worse for his criticisms than better. And I'm glad that he never won the battle to change these lyrics. :) (ps it's hard to tell here, but I am quite an intense Sondheim worshiper, though I do find fault with his logic at times) |
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| re: my problem with Sondheim's problem with "I Feel Pretty" | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 08:26 pm EST 12/24/21 | |
| In reply to: my problem with Sondheim's problem with "I Feel Pretty" - Chazwaza 07:58 pm EST 12/24/21 | |
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| I think Sondheim would counter that the vocabulary and linguistic achievements of a character - including internal rhymes - while not meant to be understood literally are meant to reflect the character's linguistic intelligence and sophistication. Over the years, Sondheim took his own criticism to heart and made a point of writing his lyrics in ways that better suit the character. On stage, I've tended to agree with your reading of Scenario 1, which is that Maria is singing and showcasing her intelligence in Spanish, and we are hearing it in English. In this most recent film, I think we are told explicitly that she is singing in English, and I think we've also been told up until this point that her English, which workable, is not nearly up to the task of the song... and while I think there's a great insight that she could be whipping off vocabulary words like "charming" and "dizzy" and "sunny", I don't buy the argument that she's at the point where she's learning "entrancing" nor mastered the sentence structure to say "a committee should be organized to honor me", which is both complicated grammatically and also a tricky verb tense, conditionals being a bit higher level... especially since she is likely learning from a book in a time when language learning was more about rote repetition... but maybe we can make an argument that these are all phrases she's had to learn from a lesson? I think where you hit the nail on the head is that Sondheim is maybe a bit embarrassed that he thought, at 27, that the song was showcasing his cleverness as a lyricist, when in fact the rhymes are all a bit obvious and beat-you-over-the-head, and he's attempting to find a sophisticated way to explain away his own self-critic. |
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| re: my problem with Sondheim's problem with "I Feel Pretty" | |
| Last Edit: Chazwaza 08:57 pm EST 12/24/21 | |
| Posted by: Chazwaza 08:54 pm EST 12/24/21 | |
| In reply to: re: my problem with Sondheim's problem with "I Feel Pretty" - Singapore/Fling 08:26 pm EST 12/24/21 | |
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| I completely buy your point. And I wish the song had been done in Spanish in the movie for this reason. I think being set in their White-run (even if closed for the night) workplace, it is even more likely they'd be speaking (and there for singing) in Spanish to each other. I also intellectually understand the reasoning for not subtitling the Spanish but I think it worked against them. To be the wiser solution to not giving primacy to one language over the other would be to subtitle BOTH English and Spanish (English into Spanish and Spanish into English). To assume also that everyone seeing the movie speaks English fluently is actually the kind of exclusive/ignorant assumption or inadvertent gate-keeping they were hoping to avoid or stand against. All the words in the movie are worth communicating to the audience, to have the non-Spanish-speaking audience miss out on so many of the words that the Spanish-speaking characters are saying does a disservice to those characters, the audience, and the play. The statement is made, sure, but there's a sacrifice that comes with it that isn't worth making. Subtitling both languages would have made the statement and lost nothing for either an English-speaking audience or a Spanish-speaking audience. And "I Feel Pretty" is SO well known as it is, that it's an easy song to have English-speakers hear in Spanish, not to mention that it was already re-written for that for the 2009 revival, with the now-even-more-famous Puerto Rican writer Lin-Manuel Miranda doing it with Sondheim's oversight/approval. I wish the new movie had committed to this, or just left it all in English with the conceit we all have understood for decades if not centuries for plays that involve characters who might not always be speaking in the language of the play, the play translates it for us because it is a play... just as we all understand the conceit that when characters in musicals sing (and rhyme), they are not actually doing that, it is a translation for the audience via the format of the play/movie. Also, for fun, a shoutout to the best I've seen this issue dealt with in a Broadway play... Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, taking place in Russia... the Russian characters all spoke in English with non accent, and when they were in scenes speaking English (to characters who do not speak Russian) they spoke the same English as before but in a heavy Russian accent. It made perfect sense and was a graceful clever way to distinguish (since of course Russian is not spoken in a Russian accent to Russians, the accent exists in comparison to non-Russian speakers and when saying non-Russian words ... etc). West Side Story was not written for this to be utilized, and so they must do the play as written, or go all in on addressing it scene by scene and use the appropriate subtitles (which can happily include subtitles for every word regardless of language). |
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| re: my problem with Sondheim's problem with "I Feel Pretty" | |
| Last Edit: Chromolume 10:42 pm EST 12/24/21 | |
| Posted by: Chromolume 10:41 pm EST 12/24/21 | |
| In reply to: re: my problem with Sondheim's problem with "I Feel Pretty" - Chazwaza 08:54 pm EST 12/24/21 | |
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| One question I would have dearly loved to ask Sondheim - was he poking fun at himself (in context of his feelings about the "I Feel Pretty" lyric) when he wrote "Come Play Wiz Me" in Anyone Can Whistle only 7 years later? In that song, he has Fay disguised as a French woman (whose French is only passable) who at one point comes up with the lyric "I like your, 'ow you say, imperturbable perspicacity." Later, Hapgood responds to that with "I like your, how you say, unmistakable authenticity." I HAVE to think that in the back of his head, Sondheim was slyly looking back at "I Feel Pretty." | |
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