Threaded Order Chronological Order
| 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 | |
|
|
|
| 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. |
|
| reply to this message |
| 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 | |
|
|
|
| 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). |
|
| reply to this message |
| 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 | |
|
|
|
| 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." | |
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
Time to render: 0.013048 seconds.