Entry tags:
What a poem this would make
Rabbit, rabbit! Evening Primrose (1966) is so slight that to describe it risks giving the whole thing away and so delicate that to discuss it risks breaking the magic and so weird that it is impossible not to do either of these things. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ladymondegreen sent me the DVD and it arrived just in time for Halloween, a macabre and wistful fairy tale of the uncanny valley. If you have ever had E. L. Konigsburg-like thoughts of spending the night in a department store, watching this musical will almost certainly cure you of them. Do we still have department stores? A night in a mall would be a completely different horror.
Start with that pastoral, liminal title, so seemingly out of place in a citadel of consumer culture unless it's a type of perfume or a shade of blush. It comes straight from the original 1941 short story by John Collier, whose elegant, ironic, oft-anthologized weird fictions were almost as oft-adapted for television and radio, being generally bite-sizes of nightmare fuel so suggestively written and neatly constructed that even a shock ending is a pleasure to watch snap into place; "Evening Primrose" with its hyperbolic narrator and submerged frame story is a prime example. In both its book by James Goldman and its music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the musical Evening Primrose is more generous with its characters and more romantic in tone, but it doesn't slack on the irony. Fleeing the complications of life and his own unsuccess as a poet, Charles Snell (Anthony Perkins) lingers past closing in a New York department store with intent to spend his days in hiding and his nights in luxurious, inspiring solitude, only to discover that this escapist fantasy is not exactly original to him. One by one, apparent mannequins around him unfreeze into an entire nocturnal community headed by the imperious Mrs. Monday (Dorothy Stickney) who boasts of having lived in the store "since the crash of '97. I've survived two mergers, three complete redecorations, and the move from 14th Street," acquiring other displaced children of privilege as the years and the market crashes go by. She approves Charles' entry into their "exclusive group," but he soon finds his new society even more constricting than the one he left behind—absolute secrecy is their watchword and anyone who threatens their stealthy ways, be that store detectives, burglars, or dissenters among their own, is at the mercy of Mrs. Monday and the "Dark Men," enforcers who come from the famous mortuary of "Journey's End" and have more than a little to do with the periodic appearance of new mannequins around the store. Under threat of the Dark Men, Charles must observe a strict schedule in keeping with the night watchman's rounds, always ready to "dummy up" if discovered. He is expected to socialize with his store-dwelling fellows, attending musical soirées and playing contract bridge like he has nothing better to do. Most gallingly, he is forbidden contact with the only other young person in view, Mrs. Monday's personal maid Harkins (Charmian Carr). Her given name turns out to be Ella; she was lost as a child in Women's Hats and through the long years as a captive servant relegated to the bargain basement with the rest of the "seconds and rejects" has fiercely treasured her dog-eared memories of the world Charles couldn't wait to escape. They fall in love, naturally. They make secret assignations in the outdoor sports section, with an electric fan for a breeze and sounds of the natural world playing off records and tapes, but soon it isn't enough to play at camping and going to the beach. You hope that isn't the twist ending you can see coming, but it's a Collier story at heart: all the pieces of the trap were always in place. Forever in fantasy can be a fatal word.
I am fascinated by the way Anthony Perkins is beautiful in movies, because he isn't always. I would call this the expected result of catching a person at all different angles on camera except that I have seen him in one role where he was almost unbelievably beautiful throughout and that was Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), so I incline toward thinking it's a deliberate effect. In Phaedra (1962), in Pretty Poison (1968), even in mid-life appearances like Remember My Name (1978), he shifts according to different sides of himself; it works just as well in Evening Primrose. Sometimes Charles looks as sensitive and romantic as his self-image and sometimes he just looks like a rather tall and gawky young man whose mouth pulls to one side when he smiles. He's broad-shouldered but rail-thin, which gives him a scarecrow look in a trenchcoat and something of a heron's fragile height out of it; his dark brows are good for looking apprehensively out from underneath. As far as his skill with verse is concerned, at least he had the self-awareness to burn the one which started "Crack, crack, Con Edison, and crush the streets / As cruel Vanessa does my heart. / She shatters me and yet my heart still beats— / O happy pavement, to be torn apart," but he retains a fatally romantic idea of what it means to be a poet, which it is clear he views as something separate from the act of writing poetry. All too often he reacts as though he's in a story, without giving much thought to the kind of story it might be. Discovering that Ella can neither read nor write nor even calculate simple sums, he is enchanted with the idea of being her Pygmalion; on being warned of the nature and practices of the Dark Men, he winces in revulsion, runs a disbelieving hand through his hair, and then blurts out the title of this post. He is not even being disingenuous when he says of his attraction to Ella, "She's beautiful and I'm a poet. Poets have deep feelings for what's beautiful." Don't bother wanting to give him a swift kick in the common sense; the world tried it and that's why he's singing to himself on escalators in the middle of the night. But he's sympathetic, especially to anyone who has ever longed for an uninterrupted block of time to get art done in; the stresses and failures he's hiding from are real and so are his feelings for Ella, for whose sake he will eventually brave the threat of the Dark Men and the much more daunting workaday world. It is moving and meaningful where it might previously have been bathetic when he declares "I love you more than poetry."
Charmian Carr has one other acting credit to her name; it is the role of Liesl in The Sound of Music (1965) and I have not seen that movie in years due to a fairly severe bounce in childhood, although I keep feeling I should give it another chance now that the internet is full of Christopher Plummer tearing Nazi flags in half. As the department store foundling, cinder-esque Ella who has not seen the sky for thirteen years, she looks even more the fairy tale innocent than Charles; her antique clothes, her cleanly curving face, and her very long, silky-straight fair hair give her a Victorian china air which is nicely undermined by the vehemence with which she asserts her true name, jabs pins into a baby doll of Mrs. Monday, and performs her maid's duties with flawless, hating decorum, as though every mantel she dusts and every cup of tea she pours is her sworn enemy. Her speaking voice is small and clear, her singing voice sweet but sure as steel. Once embarked on her rebellious meetings with Charles, she delights in spelling exercises and multiplication tables, donning modern fashions like talismans against the waxwork regime of Mrs. Monday who still dresses fin-de-siècle and prefers to spend her mornings in the "cold room" where Charles' breath fogs and even Ella has to chafe her hands against the meat-locker chill, like some silver-rinsed, dowager duchess Dr. Muñoz. More than anything, Ella likes to be held: real, living contact, human warmth affirming her own humanity. The snobbish, aging store people don't touch her, they barely even speak to her; she's an inferior species to them, too much "like the people on the outside." In the basement, she lays her hand against Charles' cheek as gravely as if she's touching fire, draws a sharp breath when he places his hand over her own. "It's not like anything," she says in amazement. The musical would still function if she were the pearl-pale childlike waif of Collier's story, but it is immeasurably stronger for her edges and her hunger, her ignorance of the outside world that does not make her less complex than scared and embittered and lingeringly naive Charles. They are yearning, incomplete people and they bond as powerfully as any doomed lovers, dreaming of "a world where we can be alive."
I said it was a Halloween story and I wasn't kidding. I heard this musical long before I saw it, but the CD booklet included a synopsis and as I explained then tospatch, you can't expect a narrative in which it is established early on that people can be turned into mannequins not to turn someone into a mannequin by the finale. Or more than one person, if it makes a better display. "When someone upstairs dies, or if a burglar breaks in and sees the people here and might tell . . . in the Dark Men come, with leather satchels full of things, and when they're finished . . . there's another dummy." In the short story, Charles inadvertently betrays Ella's dayward longings in his disappointment that she loves another; he resolves to rescue her from the Dark Men, but first takes the precaution of leaving his diary out on a counter in case he fails, with instructions to the finder to "look in the windows. Look for three new figures . . . Look for us," and keen-eyed readers will recall that the entire epistolary narrative has been framed as found "in a pad of Highlife Bond, bought by Miss Sadie Brodribb at Bracey's for 25¢." That's a nice spooky stinger, but I think the musical with its romanticism actually goes one better. Perkins' Charles gives their secret away in a moment of joy rather than jealousy: in his eagerness to play for Ella every sound effect of the world they have determined to rejoin, he accidentally switches on the store's PA system, broadcasting to every department—and the ears of the startled night watchman—the last verse of their duet that is a declaration of intent to escape. The Dark Men are called. Charles pleads for their lives, swears himself to silence only to be told by the sweetly smiling Mrs. Monday, in a dreadful affirmation of his own knee-jerk reaction all those weeks ago, "You would never keep our secret. You're a poet. You'd have to put it in a poem. It's much too good a story not to tell." The lovers make one last run for it; they hide among boxes in the back of a store truck, planning to "ride out with the first delivery," and indeed we see, as the trucks roll out and the awnings roll up the next morning, a pair of lovers hand in hand in front of a display window, a dark scarecrow-shouldered man in a trenchcoat, a slight girl beside him with long undressed fair hair. They are strangers to us. They are admiring a display with a wedding theme. The faces of the bride and groom are eerily, waxenly familiar—their minister might once have worked as a night watchman. And because Evening Primrose is a musical and a television one at that, playing over this revelation is a final reprise of the duet that Perkins and Carr began as they huddled together in the truck, as if Charles and Ella were still alive, had really escaped, were somehow that doppelgänger couple blissfully envisioning their own marriage rather than the stuffed and mounted icons of the happy-ever-after their voices are still singing of. We shall have the world to keep. Such a lovely world, we'll weep. We shall have the world forever for our own. Game, set, and irony, John Collier.
Evening Primrose was produced as part of the ambitious, short-lived anthology series ABC Stage 67 (1966–67), which aired 26 original hour-long productions in a variety of genres—comedies, dramas, mysteries, monologues, documentaries, musicals, dance pieces, revues—before canceling amid multi-million-dollar losses and mixed to poor reviews. It did not lack for talent. I have already praised Perkins and Carr. Sondheim was Sondheim. James Goldman gave us most famously The Lion in Winter (1968), also the book for Follies (1971). Director Paul Bogart would win five Emmys over the course of his career in television and the occasional feature film. The production . . . It was not a live performance, although it has some of the unpredictable, improvisatory feel of one: due to a tight schedule and purse strings, the cast and crew got exactly one day of shooting on location at Stern Brothers on 42nd Street with neither the time nor budget for retakes, which explains why obvious continuity errors like a disappearing scarf or an inopportune blink stayed in. Most of the singing was recorded live. Sondheim to this day blames himself for directing Perkins not to make eye contact with the camera during his introductory song, because it makes Charles look shiftier than he is, but there was no room to reshoot the number. And just to add to the poverty-row nature of the enterprise, like so many pieces of mid-century television Evening Primrose survives only as a black-and-white kinescope of the original color broadcast, the mannequin version of its living self. Twenty minutes of silent, handheld location footage—included as an extra on the DVD—provide the only hint of what the now-lost color master tape could have looked like, as Perkins in character warily prowls the different departments of Macy's, where the shoot was originally supposed to take place. (The store got cold feet at the last minute, necessitating the move to Stern's and rendering the extant establishing shots useless, but they make a wonderful miniature time capsule of shopping life in 1966 Manhattan, plus the adorable moment where a stranger on a park bench visibly recognizes Perkins and tries to make contact while the actor is trying to read a newspaper like a nervous poet waiting for his moment to sneak into a store at closing time and get himself lost for life.) Honestly, I find it charming and I don't mean that condescendingly at all. The story is so small, strange, and intimate that the lo-fi approach almost suits it better than a glossier production might have. But I love B-movies where the sets are clearly two pieces of cardboard and a flashlight: I can take almost any suspension of effects so long as the writing and the performances hold. That does not appear to have been the attitude of the ABC-viewing public in November 1966. I suspect the evanescent WTF of the plot didn't help. Evening Primrose got one transmission and then, except for its music and a cult following, more or less vanished from the face of the earth.
The cult following eventually generated the DVD I just watched, courtesy of the Archive of American Television and a newly discovered 16 mm kinescope. The music was and remains great. It's like concentrated Sondheim: lyrical, off-kilter, intensely clever. The leads get a pair of duets and one solo each, with reprises as needed and about fifteen minutes of incidental music plus end credits. "If You Can Find Me, I'm Here" is a nervy, celebratory catalogue of the hassles Charles has escaped with his disappearing act, from "bloodsucking landlords" and "despoilers of beauty" (I think he means critics) to "Neanderthal neighbors" and "fair-weather friends"; it opens with a skittery, darting heartbeat and closes with a soaring self-assertion that anticipates both Follies' "I'm Still Here" and Company's "Being Alive," although Charles, unlike Carlotta or Bobby, slightly ruins the effect by diving offscreen before his last high note. "I Remember" is the sum total of Ella's childhood memories, expressed in similes from the department store: "snow soft as feathers, sharp as thumbtacks . . . ice like vinyl on the streets, cold as silver, white as sheets . . . trees bare as coatracks, spread like broken umbrellas." The melody sounds as simple as a finger exercise, but as it works itself out in varying combinations it turns out to be as gracefully layered as Ella herself. "When" is a dreamy, quickening duet staged cinematically rather than theatrically—it is heard in voiceover, with frequent close-ups on the singers' non-singing faces—across assorted scenes of nightly life in the department store, as Charles and Ella's mutual interest mounts to their first clandestine tryst. I adore his glumly crossed-out attempts to rhyme her name: "Ella, gay as a tarantella. Pure as larks singing a cappella. Let my poem be your umbrella. Ella, poets who suffer pain should fall in love with girls named Jane!" The showstopper and the song I have heard most often outside of cast albums is "Take Me to the World," where Ella's heartfelt ache for "the world that's real" meets Charles' cynical fears. "A poet doesn't count for much out there," he mutters between her lines, half to himself. "You couldn't get a job. I couldn't hold one . . . We'd have fights. You'd cry. I couldn't bear it if you cried." But she knows this shadowy half-life is no life at all and he knows it's the truth and by the end of the song they are pledging themselves to the unknown, smiling, ugly world as much as to one another: "We shall see the world come true." I am less qualified to discuss the instrumental pieces, but the waltz for two clarinets and nothing else is one of the creepier things I have heard recently, and bear in mind the holiday we just had.
John Collier was not a regular contributor to The Twilight Zone (1959–64). He feels like he should have been: he was all over Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–65) and Tales of the Unexpected (1979–88). In fact only one of his stories was ever adapted for a Serling narration; that would be "The Chaser" (1940), which never stopped well-read viewers from noticing that the first-season episode "The After Hours" echoes "Evening Primrose"'s themes of a night society inhabiting a department store and the inevitable, uncanny blurring of human and mannequin. I've seen it myself, though not for years. It's extremely well-regarded, even if at the time it made me think of Today's Special (1981–87). But it doesn't have Anthony Perkins, and it doesn't have Charmian Carr, and it doesn't have Stephen Sondheim. It doesn't have the sweetness and the shiver. It doesn't have the weird. This world brought to you by my true backers at Patreon.
ladymondegreen sent me the DVD and it arrived just in time for Halloween, a macabre and wistful fairy tale of the uncanny valley. If you have ever had E. L. Konigsburg-like thoughts of spending the night in a department store, watching this musical will almost certainly cure you of them. Do we still have department stores? A night in a mall would be a completely different horror.Start with that pastoral, liminal title, so seemingly out of place in a citadel of consumer culture unless it's a type of perfume or a shade of blush. It comes straight from the original 1941 short story by John Collier, whose elegant, ironic, oft-anthologized weird fictions were almost as oft-adapted for television and radio, being generally bite-sizes of nightmare fuel so suggestively written and neatly constructed that even a shock ending is a pleasure to watch snap into place; "Evening Primrose" with its hyperbolic narrator and submerged frame story is a prime example. In both its book by James Goldman and its music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the musical Evening Primrose is more generous with its characters and more romantic in tone, but it doesn't slack on the irony. Fleeing the complications of life and his own unsuccess as a poet, Charles Snell (Anthony Perkins) lingers past closing in a New York department store with intent to spend his days in hiding and his nights in luxurious, inspiring solitude, only to discover that this escapist fantasy is not exactly original to him. One by one, apparent mannequins around him unfreeze into an entire nocturnal community headed by the imperious Mrs. Monday (Dorothy Stickney) who boasts of having lived in the store "since the crash of '97. I've survived two mergers, three complete redecorations, and the move from 14th Street," acquiring other displaced children of privilege as the years and the market crashes go by. She approves Charles' entry into their "exclusive group," but he soon finds his new society even more constricting than the one he left behind—absolute secrecy is their watchword and anyone who threatens their stealthy ways, be that store detectives, burglars, or dissenters among their own, is at the mercy of Mrs. Monday and the "Dark Men," enforcers who come from the famous mortuary of "Journey's End" and have more than a little to do with the periodic appearance of new mannequins around the store. Under threat of the Dark Men, Charles must observe a strict schedule in keeping with the night watchman's rounds, always ready to "dummy up" if discovered. He is expected to socialize with his store-dwelling fellows, attending musical soirées and playing contract bridge like he has nothing better to do. Most gallingly, he is forbidden contact with the only other young person in view, Mrs. Monday's personal maid Harkins (Charmian Carr). Her given name turns out to be Ella; she was lost as a child in Women's Hats and through the long years as a captive servant relegated to the bargain basement with the rest of the "seconds and rejects" has fiercely treasured her dog-eared memories of the world Charles couldn't wait to escape. They fall in love, naturally. They make secret assignations in the outdoor sports section, with an electric fan for a breeze and sounds of the natural world playing off records and tapes, but soon it isn't enough to play at camping and going to the beach. You hope that isn't the twist ending you can see coming, but it's a Collier story at heart: all the pieces of the trap were always in place. Forever in fantasy can be a fatal word.
I am fascinated by the way Anthony Perkins is beautiful in movies, because he isn't always. I would call this the expected result of catching a person at all different angles on camera except that I have seen him in one role where he was almost unbelievably beautiful throughout and that was Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), so I incline toward thinking it's a deliberate effect. In Phaedra (1962), in Pretty Poison (1968), even in mid-life appearances like Remember My Name (1978), he shifts according to different sides of himself; it works just as well in Evening Primrose. Sometimes Charles looks as sensitive and romantic as his self-image and sometimes he just looks like a rather tall and gawky young man whose mouth pulls to one side when he smiles. He's broad-shouldered but rail-thin, which gives him a scarecrow look in a trenchcoat and something of a heron's fragile height out of it; his dark brows are good for looking apprehensively out from underneath. As far as his skill with verse is concerned, at least he had the self-awareness to burn the one which started "Crack, crack, Con Edison, and crush the streets / As cruel Vanessa does my heart. / She shatters me and yet my heart still beats— / O happy pavement, to be torn apart," but he retains a fatally romantic idea of what it means to be a poet, which it is clear he views as something separate from the act of writing poetry. All too often he reacts as though he's in a story, without giving much thought to the kind of story it might be. Discovering that Ella can neither read nor write nor even calculate simple sums, he is enchanted with the idea of being her Pygmalion; on being warned of the nature and practices of the Dark Men, he winces in revulsion, runs a disbelieving hand through his hair, and then blurts out the title of this post. He is not even being disingenuous when he says of his attraction to Ella, "She's beautiful and I'm a poet. Poets have deep feelings for what's beautiful." Don't bother wanting to give him a swift kick in the common sense; the world tried it and that's why he's singing to himself on escalators in the middle of the night. But he's sympathetic, especially to anyone who has ever longed for an uninterrupted block of time to get art done in; the stresses and failures he's hiding from are real and so are his feelings for Ella, for whose sake he will eventually brave the threat of the Dark Men and the much more daunting workaday world. It is moving and meaningful where it might previously have been bathetic when he declares "I love you more than poetry."
Charmian Carr has one other acting credit to her name; it is the role of Liesl in The Sound of Music (1965) and I have not seen that movie in years due to a fairly severe bounce in childhood, although I keep feeling I should give it another chance now that the internet is full of Christopher Plummer tearing Nazi flags in half. As the department store foundling, cinder-esque Ella who has not seen the sky for thirteen years, she looks even more the fairy tale innocent than Charles; her antique clothes, her cleanly curving face, and her very long, silky-straight fair hair give her a Victorian china air which is nicely undermined by the vehemence with which she asserts her true name, jabs pins into a baby doll of Mrs. Monday, and performs her maid's duties with flawless, hating decorum, as though every mantel she dusts and every cup of tea she pours is her sworn enemy. Her speaking voice is small and clear, her singing voice sweet but sure as steel. Once embarked on her rebellious meetings with Charles, she delights in spelling exercises and multiplication tables, donning modern fashions like talismans against the waxwork regime of Mrs. Monday who still dresses fin-de-siècle and prefers to spend her mornings in the "cold room" where Charles' breath fogs and even Ella has to chafe her hands against the meat-locker chill, like some silver-rinsed, dowager duchess Dr. Muñoz. More than anything, Ella likes to be held: real, living contact, human warmth affirming her own humanity. The snobbish, aging store people don't touch her, they barely even speak to her; she's an inferior species to them, too much "like the people on the outside." In the basement, she lays her hand against Charles' cheek as gravely as if she's touching fire, draws a sharp breath when he places his hand over her own. "It's not like anything," she says in amazement. The musical would still function if she were the pearl-pale childlike waif of Collier's story, but it is immeasurably stronger for her edges and her hunger, her ignorance of the outside world that does not make her less complex than scared and embittered and lingeringly naive Charles. They are yearning, incomplete people and they bond as powerfully as any doomed lovers, dreaming of "a world where we can be alive."
I said it was a Halloween story and I wasn't kidding. I heard this musical long before I saw it, but the CD booklet included a synopsis and as I explained then to
spatch, you can't expect a narrative in which it is established early on that people can be turned into mannequins not to turn someone into a mannequin by the finale. Or more than one person, if it makes a better display. "When someone upstairs dies, or if a burglar breaks in and sees the people here and might tell . . . in the Dark Men come, with leather satchels full of things, and when they're finished . . . there's another dummy." In the short story, Charles inadvertently betrays Ella's dayward longings in his disappointment that she loves another; he resolves to rescue her from the Dark Men, but first takes the precaution of leaving his diary out on a counter in case he fails, with instructions to the finder to "look in the windows. Look for three new figures . . . Look for us," and keen-eyed readers will recall that the entire epistolary narrative has been framed as found "in a pad of Highlife Bond, bought by Miss Sadie Brodribb at Bracey's for 25¢." That's a nice spooky stinger, but I think the musical with its romanticism actually goes one better. Perkins' Charles gives their secret away in a moment of joy rather than jealousy: in his eagerness to play for Ella every sound effect of the world they have determined to rejoin, he accidentally switches on the store's PA system, broadcasting to every department—and the ears of the startled night watchman—the last verse of their duet that is a declaration of intent to escape. The Dark Men are called. Charles pleads for their lives, swears himself to silence only to be told by the sweetly smiling Mrs. Monday, in a dreadful affirmation of his own knee-jerk reaction all those weeks ago, "You would never keep our secret. You're a poet. You'd have to put it in a poem. It's much too good a story not to tell." The lovers make one last run for it; they hide among boxes in the back of a store truck, planning to "ride out with the first delivery," and indeed we see, as the trucks roll out and the awnings roll up the next morning, a pair of lovers hand in hand in front of a display window, a dark scarecrow-shouldered man in a trenchcoat, a slight girl beside him with long undressed fair hair. They are strangers to us. They are admiring a display with a wedding theme. The faces of the bride and groom are eerily, waxenly familiar—their minister might once have worked as a night watchman. And because Evening Primrose is a musical and a television one at that, playing over this revelation is a final reprise of the duet that Perkins and Carr began as they huddled together in the truck, as if Charles and Ella were still alive, had really escaped, were somehow that doppelgänger couple blissfully envisioning their own marriage rather than the stuffed and mounted icons of the happy-ever-after their voices are still singing of. We shall have the world to keep. Such a lovely world, we'll weep. We shall have the world forever for our own. Game, set, and irony, John Collier.Evening Primrose was produced as part of the ambitious, short-lived anthology series ABC Stage 67 (1966–67), which aired 26 original hour-long productions in a variety of genres—comedies, dramas, mysteries, monologues, documentaries, musicals, dance pieces, revues—before canceling amid multi-million-dollar losses and mixed to poor reviews. It did not lack for talent. I have already praised Perkins and Carr. Sondheim was Sondheim. James Goldman gave us most famously The Lion in Winter (1968), also the book for Follies (1971). Director Paul Bogart would win five Emmys over the course of his career in television and the occasional feature film. The production . . . It was not a live performance, although it has some of the unpredictable, improvisatory feel of one: due to a tight schedule and purse strings, the cast and crew got exactly one day of shooting on location at Stern Brothers on 42nd Street with neither the time nor budget for retakes, which explains why obvious continuity errors like a disappearing scarf or an inopportune blink stayed in. Most of the singing was recorded live. Sondheim to this day blames himself for directing Perkins not to make eye contact with the camera during his introductory song, because it makes Charles look shiftier than he is, but there was no room to reshoot the number. And just to add to the poverty-row nature of the enterprise, like so many pieces of mid-century television Evening Primrose survives only as a black-and-white kinescope of the original color broadcast, the mannequin version of its living self. Twenty minutes of silent, handheld location footage—included as an extra on the DVD—provide the only hint of what the now-lost color master tape could have looked like, as Perkins in character warily prowls the different departments of Macy's, where the shoot was originally supposed to take place. (The store got cold feet at the last minute, necessitating the move to Stern's and rendering the extant establishing shots useless, but they make a wonderful miniature time capsule of shopping life in 1966 Manhattan, plus the adorable moment where a stranger on a park bench visibly recognizes Perkins and tries to make contact while the actor is trying to read a newspaper like a nervous poet waiting for his moment to sneak into a store at closing time and get himself lost for life.) Honestly, I find it charming and I don't mean that condescendingly at all. The story is so small, strange, and intimate that the lo-fi approach almost suits it better than a glossier production might have. But I love B-movies where the sets are clearly two pieces of cardboard and a flashlight: I can take almost any suspension of effects so long as the writing and the performances hold. That does not appear to have been the attitude of the ABC-viewing public in November 1966. I suspect the evanescent WTF of the plot didn't help. Evening Primrose got one transmission and then, except for its music and a cult following, more or less vanished from the face of the earth.
The cult following eventually generated the DVD I just watched, courtesy of the Archive of American Television and a newly discovered 16 mm kinescope. The music was and remains great. It's like concentrated Sondheim: lyrical, off-kilter, intensely clever. The leads get a pair of duets and one solo each, with reprises as needed and about fifteen minutes of incidental music plus end credits. "If You Can Find Me, I'm Here" is a nervy, celebratory catalogue of the hassles Charles has escaped with his disappearing act, from "bloodsucking landlords" and "despoilers of beauty" (I think he means critics) to "Neanderthal neighbors" and "fair-weather friends"; it opens with a skittery, darting heartbeat and closes with a soaring self-assertion that anticipates both Follies' "I'm Still Here" and Company's "Being Alive," although Charles, unlike Carlotta or Bobby, slightly ruins the effect by diving offscreen before his last high note. "I Remember" is the sum total of Ella's childhood memories, expressed in similes from the department store: "snow soft as feathers, sharp as thumbtacks . . . ice like vinyl on the streets, cold as silver, white as sheets . . . trees bare as coatracks, spread like broken umbrellas." The melody sounds as simple as a finger exercise, but as it works itself out in varying combinations it turns out to be as gracefully layered as Ella herself. "When" is a dreamy, quickening duet staged cinematically rather than theatrically—it is heard in voiceover, with frequent close-ups on the singers' non-singing faces—across assorted scenes of nightly life in the department store, as Charles and Ella's mutual interest mounts to their first clandestine tryst. I adore his glumly crossed-out attempts to rhyme her name: "Ella, gay as a tarantella. Pure as larks singing a cappella. Let my poem be your umbrella. Ella, poets who suffer pain should fall in love with girls named Jane!" The showstopper and the song I have heard most often outside of cast albums is "Take Me to the World," where Ella's heartfelt ache for "the world that's real" meets Charles' cynical fears. "A poet doesn't count for much out there," he mutters between her lines, half to himself. "You couldn't get a job. I couldn't hold one . . . We'd have fights. You'd cry. I couldn't bear it if you cried." But she knows this shadowy half-life is no life at all and he knows it's the truth and by the end of the song they are pledging themselves to the unknown, smiling, ugly world as much as to one another: "We shall see the world come true." I am less qualified to discuss the instrumental pieces, but the waltz for two clarinets and nothing else is one of the creepier things I have heard recently, and bear in mind the holiday we just had.
John Collier was not a regular contributor to The Twilight Zone (1959–64). He feels like he should have been: he was all over Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–65) and Tales of the Unexpected (1979–88). In fact only one of his stories was ever adapted for a Serling narration; that would be "The Chaser" (1940), which never stopped well-read viewers from noticing that the first-season episode "The After Hours" echoes "Evening Primrose"'s themes of a night society inhabiting a department store and the inevitable, uncanny blurring of human and mannequin. I've seen it myself, though not for years. It's extremely well-regarded, even if at the time it made me think of Today's Special (1981–87). But it doesn't have Anthony Perkins, and it doesn't have Charmian Carr, and it doesn't have Stephen Sondheim. It doesn't have the sweetness and the shiver. It doesn't have the weird. This world brought to you by my true backers at Patreon.
no subject
(Thank you!)
no subject
You're welcome! Enjoy!
no subject
no subject
She's great here: I was actively surprised that she didn't have a continuing career in musicals on stage or screen. As with Perkins, I would have expected her to do more Sondheim. She has one of the kinds of voice he writes for.
(I remember almost nothing about her as Liesl except for half a verse of "Sixteen Going on Seventeen," but I remember very little of that musical overall. I expect to rewatch it and find I recognize every beat in the way of movies that I saw when very young, but at the moment it's mostly "Edelweiss," the running bit with the Captain's whistle, and a vague sense of resentment that Christopher Plummer was not Theodore Bikel. I don't appear to have anything against Julie Andrews for not being Mary Martin.)
no subject
no subject
Enjoy!
no subject
no subject
Thank you! I didn't know.
It's an important play for me for a variety of reasons, including that I once saw
no subject
Hah, I almost took a train trip to see the production you saw (and I think I found out about it from your LJ) but the idea of setting it in Appalachia and adding music threw me off too much. I'm glad it worked well.
no subject
Tangent: these days evening primrose is mostly known for (pseudo)medical uses, so it has become very much part of consumer culture.
no subject
I had no idea. I just thought it smelled nice.
no subject
no subject
no subject
You're welcome!
Collier feels mystifyingly unknown to me these days, especially compared with his ubiquity in the mid-century anthologies I grew up on. I think all of his novels are out of print. NYRB Classics reprinted his 1951 collection Fancies and Goodnights, but I didn't know that until I was trying to find an online text of "Evening Primrose." Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places, but I don't hear his name in as many discussions of weird fiction as I feel he warrants—even his stories without any fantastical element, as is technically the case with "Evening Primrose," feel strange. And he's fast, the technique that Yoon Ha Lee calls assassinating the reader. Most of his short stories are very short, just perfectly timed. I don't know why he fell out of fashion. He only died in 1980. I wonder if it's possible to find out if he ever saw Evening Primrose the musical, and if so what he thought of it.
no subject
I like what you say about the current black-and-white version being like a mannequin reproduction of the original--what a great real-life irony.
And I like, from your description, how the Anthony Perkins character is as naive and unworldly in his way as Ella is in hers.
no subject
I kept seeing reviews refer to Evening Primrose as minor Sondheim and it's true that it's a chamber musical rather than a full-sized production, but everything that's there is good. I don't think it's musically lesser. I don't think it falls down on acting or atmosphere. It's strange and that's part of its worth. If I had seen it once on TV in the '60's, I'd have remembered and cult-treasured it for years, too. (Before the release of the DVD in 2010, black-and-white copies of the musical could be viewed at the two branches of the Paley Center in New York and Los Angeles, but unless there were bootlegs I believe that was it.) I am so glad it still exists and can be seen.
I like what you say about the current black-and-white version being like a mannequin reproduction of the original--what a great real-life irony.
I know! I'm not saying I wouldn't watch the original color version if it surfaced someday, but it's even more weirdly appropriate for Evening Primrose than it was for Robin Redbreast (1970).
And I like, from your description, how the Anthony Perkins character is as naive and unworldly in his way as Ella is in hers.
I don't think I would feel as protective of their romance if he were otherwise. You don't know if they could have survived out in the world together, but you want them to have the chance.
Another comment irrelevant to the actual review:
now that the internet is full of
Christopher Plummer tearing Nazi
flags in half
- starting at the visible, pre-cut notch, which he needs must first slide along hand over hand to get to. #sorrynotsorry
If you do watch Sound of Music again, you may now catch two other howling bounders: Most Austrians regarded themselves as Germans - do they not speak German? - and openly wanted and welcomed the Anschluss Österreichs. CPT von Trapp was eccentric in more ways than child-rearing.
Two, if your characters need to flee Texas, depicting them literally walking across the border into Canada is just as ignorant as showing Austrians hiking into Switzerland. In reality the von Trapps took a normal train ride into Italy - the last such before the border was closed.
But hey, Hooray for Hollywood!
Re: Another comment irrelevant to the actual review:
I am well aware of its many infidelities to history, most of which were related to me by a friend with the exact opposite case of an undying childhood love for the film. But I do like Christopher Plummer, and I do like Charmian Carr, so it may happen.
Re: Another comment irrelevant to the actual review:
no subject
In synopsis, this strongly reminds me of King of Hearts (1966) which I’m sorry to say I’ve only seen bits of, but which has a very similar premise, particularly a literally unearthly, beautiful, hothouse-fragile romance that tragically cannot survive its make-believe setting.
(In cinema - and in television also - 1966 was an astounding year, a Harmonic Convergence of quality not seen since 1939.)
no subject
I have never seen King of Hearts, but I've heard good things about it. I will add your recommendation to the list.
no subject
Plus a fringe benefit, at least for me: When she was a Bright Young Thing, Geneviève Bujold gave Brigitte Bardot serious competition, and was a far better actress as well. Both qualities are shown here. (She also aged far better.)
no subject
Geneviève Bujold is a benefit for anyone with sense. I've seen her Antigone.