Sing a Song of Forgetting

We opened Next to Normal last week and it has been a wild ride -- the biggest pre-sale in our 22-year history, huge houses opening weekend, and as of right now, seven rave reviews, calling our production "nothing less than extraordinary," "superior," "brilliant," "affecting and thought-provoking," "inspired," "surprising and exceptional," "emotionally packed, captivating," and my favorite, "with scorching intensity."

When we work on a show this difficult and complex -- and this challenging for the audience -- it's always so wonderful when our audiences fully embrace our production. And I gotta say, that happens almost every time -- we have such smart, fearless, adventurous audiences in St. Louis, and they never shy away from even our darkest, most intense work.

But even beyond this amazing reception, the biggest joy for me is getting to just sit back and watch this amazing piece of theatre every night, as it evolves in subtle ways, getting richer and deeper every night. It's such fun to hear the audience gasp when the various plot twists are revealed.

But more than that, it's fun to discover the endless treasure inside this script and score. Brian Yorkey's incredible musical rhyming dialogue is so naturalistic, yet so well-crafted, chock full of so many little jokes and hints and foreshadowing. I'm not exaggerating when I say almost every line of lyric contains thematic material and/or subtle foreshadowing.

One of my favorite numbers is "Song of Forgetting" in Act II. The more I listen to it, the more I find there. It's an interesting song structurally, because the verses are dialogue; but the choruses are commentary, a kind of  Fourth Wall-busting that acts as a cool meta-moment because they're singing about singing. In the original production, Dan sang the chorus to Natalie, presumably enlisting her into his warped agenda, but that staging changes Natalie into a more active player in the family psycho-drama, which doesn't mesh well with the rest of her character arc. Natalie stands outside the central storyline for most of the show, and that's important for the resolution of her story. The script doesn't say that Dan's singing this to anyone in particular. If he sings the chorus to the audience, it makes us accomplices, and it leaves Dan's dark agenda "unspoken" inside the reality of the story, which makes his motivations richer and more complex, only to be gradually revealed to Natalie in "Better Than Before."

The phrase "Sing a song of..." has Biblical roots, but it's intentionally ambiguous here. Throughout human history, why do we sing songs? To celebrate and to remember. Is Dan celebrating Diana's memory loss? Notice specifically what he's celebrating:

Sing a song of forgetting...
A song of the way things were not.
Sing of what's lost to you,
Of times that you never knew....
Sing of not remembering when,
Of mem’ries that go unremembered, and then
Sing a song of forgetting again.

He's celebrating the way things were not, times that they never knew. And then he sings of not remembering, and of unremembered memories. Also, notice that the first two lines don't rhyme -- they stick out, in order to underline the most important idea -- "the way things were not." This is a poetic way of articulating Dan's agenda, which is to reshape Diana's -- and the family's -- past to his liking. This is a dangerous road he's going down, but we only gets hints of that here. The rich music gives it a romantic feeling, but when you listen to what he's saying, we realize the song itself mirrors Dan's duplicity, operating on two levels at once.

The song starts with the discovery of the breadth of Diana's memory loss after her treatment. Notice how natural the dialogue sounds, but also notice that Yorkey never violates the structure and rhyming.

Dan

This house and all these rooms?

Last Christmas or last year?
Out back the dogwood blooms?

Diana

Do I really live here?

Dan

The paint, the walls...

All this glass and wood...

You don't recall?

Diana

How I wish I could.

Dan

Our house on Walton Way

The house with the red door?

Our trip to St. Tropez,

The whole week a downpour?

Natalie

My first few steps...

And my first lost tooth...

What, nothing yet?

Diana

To tell the truth...

Natalie

Jesus.

Dan

Sing a song of forgetting...

A song of the way things were not.

Sing of what's lost to you,

Of times that you never knew....

Sing of not remembering when,

Of mem’ries that go unremembered, and then

Sing a song of forgetting again.

That day our child was born,

Our baby girl's first cry?

That grey and drizzly morn,

I've never felt so high.

Diana

The day we met...

And we shared two beers...

Dan

Then?

Diana

I forget.

Dan

But that's nineteen years.

Diana

That doctor Mitchell said there might be some memory loss.

Dan

Doctor Madden.

Diana

Well, see, there you go.

Natalie

What a lovely cure...

It's a medical miracle.

With a mind so pure

That she doesn't know anything.

Dan

It's there I'm sure

‘Cause memories don't die.

Natalie

Why?

Dan

They don’t die.

Natalie

They die...

Diana

I'll try...

And then all three of them sing the chorus, but the words mean something different to each of them. Dan's idealized past is phony. Natalie's past is all pain. And Diana's past is gone. From these three conflicting perspectives, these words take on layers of meaning that slam up against each other and foreshadow the emotional collisions to come.

Dan, Natalie & Diana

Sing a song of forgetting...
A song of the way things were not.
Sing of what's lost to you,
Of times that you never knew.
Sing of not remembering when...
Of memories that go unremembered, and then
Sing a song of forgetting again.

It's remarkable writing. It functions both as a Brechtian commentary song, but also as as a conventional book scene, in that it moves the story forward, and it foreshadows Dan's desperate decision to try and rewrite their family history.

The song "Better Than Before" uses the same kind of musical dialogue, but minus the commentary.

I noticed when we were working on bare a couple years ago that we've reached a new level of lyrical sophistication in the musical theatre. Oscar Hammerstein invented the musical scene almost a century ago, with "Make Believe" in Show Boat, and later with "If I Loved You" in Carousel. Stephen Sondheim developed it further in Sweeney Todd, Passion, and other shows. But in bare and Next to Normal, it's been developed even further. Hammerstein's musical dialogue was always a bit stilted, sometimes having to rely on inverted sentences, odd word choices, etc. to make the trick work. Sondheim's musical dialogue was almost too skillful (look at the amazing "Weekend in the Country"), often calling attention to its own artistry. But Jon Hartmere's work in bare (just look at the remarkable "Wonderland" number) and Brian Yorkey's work in Next to Normal have taken us to a whole new level. And that's very exciting.

We truly are in a new Golden Age of musical theatre, and Next to Normal is a shining example of that. It's pretty fucking thrilling to be in the middle of all this...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott