Lying in the Middle by Jake Johnson

Author:Jake Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252052859
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Example 5.1: The final bars of “Oklahoma” with “Boomer Sooner” interpolation, as played by the University of Oklahoma Pride of Oklahoma Marching Band. “Oklahoma,” music by Richard Rodgers. “Boomer Sooner,” lyrics by Arthur M. Alden, music taken from Yale University’s “Boola Boola” and attributed to Allan M. Hirsch. Courtesy of Brian Britt.

One year we mashed together the song “Tiny Bubbles” with Lerner and Loewe’s “The Night They Invented Champagne” from Gigi. With a nod toward Hawaiian performer Don Ho’s original version, “Tiny Bubbles” was performed as a solo accompanied by ukulele, soft-shoe dancing, and a bubble machine—all reinforcing the connection between “tiny bubbles in the wine” and the sparkling froth of champagne. Aside from the more obvious textual connection the two songs share, the mashup was crafted to make a clever statement regarding aging stereotypes. The film-turned-musical Gigi is mostly known for the humorous song “I Remember It Well,” which entails an older couple reminiscing about their early courtship, yet neither one can quite remember well enough to get the facts straightened out. Instead, we chose “The Night They Invented Champagne” as a companion to “Tiny Bubbles” in order to frustrate that assumption of decline and pump more bubbly energy into the beginning of the show.

A more poignant moment later in the evening was a mashup of “It Was a Very Good Year,” famous for Frank Sinatra’s 1965 melancholic performance, with “Let the Sunshine In” from the musical Hair.46 The combination of the two seemed opportune. “Let the Sunshine In” is already known as a mashup of sorts. Its attachment to the song “Aquarius” from Hair, by the 5th Dimension, made it to the top of Billboard’s listing of pop singles in 1969 and has led more than a few listeners to hear “Let the Sunshine In” as the ending to the preceding song rather than a separate number altogether. Likewise, the song’s six bars of interminable oscillation between major and minor conjures feelings of melancholy or bittersweet, its resisting of easy modal description a comfortable likeness to the Senior Follies penchant for defying convention, for easing into the Middle. I restructured the Sinatra-associated tune to allow time for several of the more prominent cast members to sing their respective ages and harmonized it to better fit the upbeat sixties groove. “It Was a Very Good Year” originally makes a case for happiness at the ages of seventeen, twenty-one, and thirty-five. Our cast sang a canon of more mature age admissions during the mashup, starting with “when I was seventeen, twenty-one, thirty-five” and so on, and ending with a resounding and applauded “eighty-six”—the age of our oldest cast member.

Finally, we slightly tweaked the last verse to better fit the ideology of the Senior Follies. Originally, Sinatra croons about the shortened days of old age—“the autumn of my years”—and looks backward as vindication of a life well lived, singing that, back then, “it was a very good year.” In our version, the cast pulled out miniature glow sticks, identical to those distributed to the audience upon admission, and pronounced “it is a very good year.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.