Saturday, 16 November 2024
2:15pm CST
Empire Room

This event will be held as part of the Society’s Many Musics of America event series.

Stephen Sondheim’s television musical Evening Primrose follows a community of social nihilists that lives in a department store by night and hides in plain sight as mannequins by day. It’s a fantastical and colorful story about a simple and common impulse: to deny the world we grieve. The show aired only once, on November 16, 1966, for decades kept alive thanks to meandering bootleg copies and ardent fans who borrowed the show’s songs for the cabaret circuit and revues. With a run time of 50 minutes and consisting of merely four songs, it remains an unsettled musical, like its characters caught within the gambit of looking one way and yet behaving another.

By the time Evening Primrose snuck into the world, American musical theater was being decentered by television just as the American family was increasingly centering itself around it. Between 1960 and 1965, television viewing time in the average American home increased by twenty-three minutes per day, all while radio, film, and theater audiences declined. The television musical was one attempt to redirect the public’s attention to the theater. Evening Primrose was the latest of a relatively new genre of television musical and was programmed as part of ABC Stage 67—ABC’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to extend the anthology series of the 1950s, which included musicals written by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, and Jerry Adler, among others, siphoned onto the small screen.

Evening Primrose nonetheless remains a Sondheimian novelty, his only musical written for a medium other than live theater. After collaborating on Broadway versions of Elizabethan romance (West Side Story, 1957) and ancient farce (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 1962), Sondheim’s shift of focus to the televised macabre of Evening Primrose entered unannounced, was received as unremarkable, and remains mostly unexplained.

As unexpected as it may be, this one hour of television not only fits importantly within Sondheim’s evolving theatrical sensibilities but also captures the terrors of another time. A box in the living room was becoming more and more the norm by 1966, as were frozen TV dinners and the decentered American family life. Even more, though, times were uncertain; it had been a mere four years since the Cuban missile crisis had brought the United States to the brink of nuclear war, and less than three years after Abraham Zapruder’s black and white footage of Kennedy’s assassination had been piped onto these same screens in American homes. Sondheim’s audience was already on edge, and television was the vehicle through which this anxiety had been most persistently rendered since the 1950s.

It seems a strange choice on Sondheim’s part, then, to use television—which by the mid-1960s featured a wonderland of variety shows with quick and easy laughs, escapism in a word—to broadcast a musical whose serious sensibilities were decidedly of the previous decade. Like the grotesque mannequins in Evening Primrose, the show seems to be modeling a fashion out of place with the times its audience lived in and more in line with a new world the audiences fearfully anticipated and the passing world it grieved. Also on the table here is a case where the musical feels in denial, too. It is up to us to decode, unravel, and pull into focus the message this musical contains that it may not have known it was carrying.

This lecture-performance uses Evening Primrose to tell a story about the fear and petrification implicit in denial—being stopped cold, feeling helpless, knowing nothing can be done. The format of this event pays homage to the musical’s playful and unsettling inability to distinguish the living from the dead, the real from the unreal.

Performers

Jake Johnson is a writer, pianist, and vocal coach on faculty at the University of Oklahoma. His writing and teaching explore the interweaving of music, literature, art, and media in American life. He is the author or editor of three books on belief and American music, and his most recent book Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America will be published early 2025 through the University of Illinois Press. Many of his former students work prominently in theater, including starring roles on Broadway, in film and television, and on numerous regional and touring productions around the world.

Marita Stryker is an assistant professor of music at St. Olaf College. Prior to coming to St. Olaf, Marita was the founding voice teacher for the Contemporary Musicianship and Entrepreneur Development program at Shenandoah Conservatory. She has also held positions at Oklahoma City University and Senzoku Gakuen College of Music in Tokyo, Japan, where she still serves as Visiting Professor. She is the Vocal Director for Texas Arts Project, and has presented papers and workshops at the The Voice Foundation Symposium, NATS, the Pan-American Vocology Association Symposium, Texas Thespian State Festival, and for the Visceral Voice.

Scott Guthrie is an assistant professor of musical theatre performance at the Max Weitzenhoffer School of Musical Theatre at the University of Oklahoma. Scott is also a professional actor and director, having worked in theaters in New York City and all across the country. Recent credits are playing Chris Bean, the director, in The Play That Goes Wrong, Capt. Von Trapp in The Sound of Music (both for Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma), and directing Rent for Oklahoma City University.