New Vid: "It Depends On What You Pay" (Dollhouse)

[giandujakiss]

Song: It Depends On What You Pay from The Fantasticks
Artist: Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones

Fandom: Dollhouse

Summary: You've come a long way, baby.

Spoilers: Through "Haunted"

Sizes: 30.8 MB (540 x 360 .avi), 13.3 MB (420 x 280 .wmv)
Length: 2:48

Download from Sendspace: The .avi file is here and the .wmv file is here.

Notes and

Comments

[elz]

That was great, ITA with your take on the show, and I need to go shower now. *shudders*

[giandujakiss]

Heh - thanks, that's just the reaction I was looking for :-).

[bradcpu]

Subject matter aside, there is some *extremely* clever musicality all through this, particularly in the final minute. I love what you did with the music and motion.

[giandujakiss]

Oh, thanks! I'm happy you thought so!

[bradcpu]

The way theater music builds to a crescendo lends itself really well to vids, particularly statement vids. I wish songs like this were used more often (and used as well as this).

[giandujakiss]

You know, that's funny, because theater music usually doesn't quite work for me in vids - the images and the sound rarely seem to mesh for me, for some reason, the way they do for vids using other kinds of music. So I never expected to use theater music myself. But I'm delighted it worked for you!

[giandujakiss]

I don't know how you actually got through an entire timeline of it, wow.

It wasn't easy at first, actually - but I acclimated. And yes, she did indeed wear that, and I totally understand if you don't want to watch it again. But I'm glad you enjoyed it, for what it is :-).

[giandujakiss]

Actually, The Fantasticks is an excellent musical - one of my favorites. There's a reason it ran for 42 years (and then was revived just a few years after closing). And Stephen Sondheim totally ripped it off for Into the Woods.

In the song, the word "rape" is used as a synonym for "abduction." The singers are plotting to stage an abduction of a girl so as to provide an opportunity for her boyfriend to heroically intercede and save the day. So nothing in the show requires anyone to actually be raped, but the humor of the song was rooted in the use of the word "rape" over and over.

But, that said - I'm glad you thought the vid was well done!

[rachelmanija]

My old theatre professor told me that he was once invited to a production of that show at a Catholic boys' school. The monks had apparently decided that "rape" was too risque, especially since it meant "kidnapping," and so substituted.... "snatch."

A twelve-year-old Catholic boy gleefully sang,

It's a snatch for pleasure
It's a snatch for fun
It's an open little schoolgirl snatch

My professor said one of the very worst moments of his entire life was taking an elderly monk into the men's room and telling him what "snatch" meant.

[mara_snh]

It bothers me that contemporary productions of The Fantasticks take PC liberties with it. Don't get me wrong -- I'm as committed an anti-rape feminist as ever. Even back in the 60s, the "rape" scenario in The Fantasticks was icky. It was supposed to be; it was, in fact the "bitter" part of the term "bittersweet" that most theatre critics assigned to it. The song, like the whole show, was intended to illustrate how far people will go to achieve something ultimately destructive because they've been misled by romantic fantasy to dismiss the everyday nature of real love. The cynical baiting of "It Depends on What You Pay" that came through so well in Jerry Orbach's voice in the recording was critical to understanding the show, and certainly for experiencing the edginess of it in its day. Cannot people appreciate something like this in the context of its time, as we must do with books like Huckleberry Finn? This reminds me of Bowdlerizing Shakespeare: it would be laughable if it weren't so troubling

[giandujakiss]

Ah, I'm not sure I agree with your interpretation of the show - I think it was going for bittersweet, but I don't think the sexism and the making light of "rape" were part of that; I think the show was going for a more general life lesson sort of thing, not a gender-specific object lesson in oppression, and the sexism was merely a byproduct of its time, so I do think it was appropriate to change the lyrics.

But, either way, I'm really happy you enjoyed the vid, even without knowing the show. Thank you so much!

[mara_snh]

My main point -- an d sorry for muddling it, or, in fact, for not even making it! -- is that it's a shame to change a work of art to suit the taste of the times. How are we to learn from the past if we don't allow it to be passed on to us unadulterated? The Fantasticks in its original state provides a teaching moment, in the parlance of modern education. Do we censor Othello in this way? Or even something as relatively benign as Hollywood movies of the early 20th century, many of which portrayed women and minorities in ways that reflected the way things were in those days, which helps us to understand cultural movements that came out of those days to have an impact on us right now.

[jonquil]

It has complicated the way we present Taming of the Shrew. It has complicated the way we watch admittedly great movies like Birth of a Nation, which is a seminal movie with completely unforgivable racial politics.

We cannot watch art with the same eyes our ancestors did, nor can we expect ourselves to.