| re: What needs to be rewritten? | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 07:28 pm EDT 08/01/24 | |
| In reply to: re: What needs to be rewritten? - PlayWiz 06:27 pm EDT 08/01/24 | |
|
|
|
| I'm so glad you questioned me on this because I'm wrong. Even though it wasn't all that long ago that I re-read The Matchmaker, when I compared virtually it line by line with The Merchant of Yonkers, I continued to trust what Hal Prince wrote in his book Contradictions, and his considerably expanded update of the book, Sense of Occasion, and what he also was quoted saying by William Goldman in The Season, in all of which he said that she'd never been there, and so the song made no sense (although Michael Stewart changed that). Prince was wrong, although right in that there is no indication whatsoever or any reason to believe that she was ever a regular there or that anyone recognizes her or knows who she is when she shows up. In The Matchmaker, she tells Vandergelder, "I'll bring Ernestina to that restaurant on the Bowery. You know it: the Harmonia Gardens. It's good, but it's not flashy." This does seem to indicate that she's been there, even though the play makes clear that she likely hasn't been there in a long time as it's much clearer in The Matchmaker and The Merchant of Yonkers that her financial is not only not great, it's desperate. In The Merchant of Yonkers, she says the exact same things, and then adds, "We won't eat in the big hall. We'll have a table set up on a little verandah that I know there." So it's even clearer that she had to have been there at some times in the past. |
|
| reply | |
|
|
|
| Previous: | re: What needs to be rewritten? - PlayWiz 06:27 pm EDT 08/01/24 |
| Next: | re: What needs to be rewritten? - PlayWiz 07:48 pm EDT 08/01/24 |
| Thread: |
|
Time to render: 0.032701 seconds.