The Score broken down by Scott Miller (Abridged by faith)
The opening lyrics to Two Gentlemen of Verona are deliberately more childish than sophisticated. After all, how could these childish, spoiled young people have a sophisticated view of themselves? To give characters self-knowledge they haven’t earned would be bad writing. MacDermot’s other hit, Hair, made the same point, frequently giving its hippies (particularly the totally self-involved Berger) intentionally shallow, childish things to say or sing. Because so many of them were so young and were rejecting the guidance and accumulated wisdom of the older generation, they also tended to be selfish and self-involved. Two Gents is about the selfish side of the hippie movement. Sure it was about peace and love, but it was also about getting laid and getting stoned.
"Love, Is That You?" and "Summer, Summer."
References in this song to the changing of the seasons = young people’s constantly changing moods and loves.
The last of these first four solos introduces the running theme of "spring," rebirth, new beginnings, and yes, love.
This is also a song about a shallowness (or even a complete lack) of self-awareness that will drive the plot and a naïve understanding of love. This first song ends with the line, "Love reminds me of me." Of course it does. These are kids.
"I Love My Father" These kids throw around the word love a lot, but none of them really knows what love actually is. Proteus knows only what he’s read about, an idealized, courtly love. Julia wants perfect love, so she rejects anything that doesn’t hit that mark. Valentine has no interest in love whatsoever. And Silvia thinks she’s in love, but as she’ll admit to us later, she wouldn’t know a "spiritual relationship" (in other words, real love) if she tripped over it and broke her nose. They haven't experienced real love, so their take on it is shallow. At this point, all these kids know is the very different love of family, so those are the only terms in which they can think about love. Notice the end of the song: "I love my mirror, I want to tell me, I want to love me." This is a joyful song, but it's also a song about being selfish, and it tells us that this is a story about being selfish.
References in this song to the changing of the seasons = young people’s constantly changing moods and loves.
The last of these first four solos introduces the running theme of "spring," rebirth, new beginnings, and yes, love.
This is also a song about a shallowness (or even a complete lack) of self-awareness that will drive the plot and a naïve understanding of love. This first song ends with the line, "Love reminds me of me." Of course it does. These are kids.
"I Love My Father" These kids throw around the word love a lot, but none of them really knows what love actually is. Proteus knows only what he’s read about, an idealized, courtly love. Julia wants perfect love, so she rejects anything that doesn’t hit that mark. Valentine has no interest in love whatsoever. And Silvia thinks she’s in love, but as she’ll admit to us later, she wouldn’t know a "spiritual relationship" (in other words, real love) if she tripped over it and broke her nose. They haven't experienced real love, so their take on it is shallow. At this point, all these kids know is the very different love of family, so those are the only terms in which they can think about love. Notice the end of the song: "I love my mirror, I want to tell me, I want to love me." This is a joyful song, but it's also a song about being selfish, and it tells us that this is a story about being selfish.
Next is a series of "I Want" songs, that set up who the main characters are and what their central motivations are. "That’s a Very Interesting Question," a very unconventional song because it’s really nothing more than a stall while Proteus tries to think of an answer. While writers in the Rodgers and Hammerstein mold always insisted that characters in musicals could only break into song when the emotion became too "big" for spoken words, that rule was often broken by the time the experiments of the Sixties and Seventies got underway. Here, Proteus breaks into song to tread water. And just as we realize that he’s stalling, he comes up with a answer – something completely inane (he wants to be a rose on Julia’s breast?) – and we segue into the next song. In "I’d Like to Be a Rose," we contrast the two friends, one interested in nothing but love, the other focused on more "important" things, like money, fame, and power. Both these young men have some growing up to do, and that’s the spine of the story.
"Symphony" a song which is as much clumsy emotional blackmail as it is a promise of love. Cue Julia's "I Want" song, "I Am Not Interested in Love," laying out her emotional damage for us, along with the primary conflict of the show – Proteus and Julia are the central romantic couple but how will they ever end up together when Proteus understands love only in the shallowest way and Julia is terrified of love altogether.
"Pearls" the primary function of which is to get through the plot point that Proteus and Julia have sex before he leaves. This incident is not in the Shakespeare play, but it gives Julia a much stronger motivation for traveling to Milan. The song is really only there to give the characters time to copulate before Proteus leaves. But it also achieves some thematic work and, under the surface, it’s also a song about the awkwardness of first love and first sex. It tells us indirectly that both Proteus and Julia are virgins and therefore this sexual encounter is going to have huge implications.
"Symphony" a song which is as much clumsy emotional blackmail as it is a promise of love. Cue Julia's "I Want" song, "I Am Not Interested in Love," laying out her emotional damage for us, along with the primary conflict of the show – Proteus and Julia are the central romantic couple but how will they ever end up together when Proteus understands love only in the shallowest way and Julia is terrified of love altogether.
"Pearls" the primary function of which is to get through the plot point that Proteus and Julia have sex before he leaves. This incident is not in the Shakespeare play, but it gives Julia a much stronger motivation for traveling to Milan. The song is really only there to give the characters time to copulate before Proteus leaves. But it also achieves some thematic work and, under the surface, it’s also a song about the awkwardness of first love and first sex. It tells us indirectly that both Proteus and Julia are virgins and therefore this sexual encounter is going to have huge implications.
"Two Gentlemen of Verona." This is the moment when the audience realizes that Valentine and Proteus aren’t the gentlemen of the title; Julia and Lucetta are. And with the show opening around the same time that glam rock was taking hold, this blurring of gender lines must have felt unusually contemporary. But the strongest cultural comment in the song "Two Gentlemen of Verona" comes from Lucetta’s lyric, "Throw off all the fears you have – we’ll dress like men." Lucetta is the hippie here, encouraging Julia to let go of her entrenched assumptions about a male-dominated society, exactly the kind of cultural reassessment women all over America were in the midst of at this moment in history.
"To Whom It May Concern" to "Night Letter," we get details on Eglamour, on Thurio, on the Duke’s habit of sending Silvia’s boyfriends off to Vietnam. We also get a seduction, and true to Shakespeare, the seduction is unmistakably sexual, starting off with Silvia’s lists of body parts in. Imagery invoking sex, is peppered throughout "Night Letter," "hot," to drooling, to being "wetter," to licking, to slapping, and even the old standby, "S.W.A.K.," for "sealed with a kiss." As they did in "What an Interesting Question," here toward the end of "Night Letter," Guare and MacDermot once again give us musical stalling, as Valentine tries to gather his thoughts and ignore his penis. At the beginning of the show, Proteus is stalling over a question Valentine has asked him; here Valentine is stalling over a question from Silvia. This makes the point, continued in the following scene, that Valentine has become just as hopeless a lover as Proteus.
Act II starts with a very brief entr’acte, "Thou Hast Metamorphosed Me," but this time very up-tempo, with a rowdy, Latin rock beat. Here the music itself tells us that these love stories are going to spin out of control. Love is no longer represented by ballads in this story, but now by driving rock numbers. This plot is kicking into high gear and it won’t slow down till the end.
"What a Nice Idea," The premise of the song is familiar to anyone who’s been in dysfunctional love. Julia sings, "Because he loves her, he despises me. Because I love him, I pity him." These are complicated emotions. Standing there in male drag, she realizes that if she could be Silvia, she could just as easily be Proteus. She realizes that in a world where she can pass for a man, her options are suddenly more numerous. It’s a funny/sad moment, watching Julia suffer through indignities and escape into revenge fantasies; but it’s also a powerful commentary on gender and drag from a 1971 perspective. And MacDermot does something both subtle and powerful with the music in this song – with each verse, the rock beat gets stronger and more aggressive, mirroring Julia’s growing confidence. From here to the end of the story, Julia takes progressively more and more control of her situation, exposing her disguise, scolding Proteus, taking possession of him, and laying down her rules for how their relationship will now function. Julia changes more than any other character in the show – and so arguably she is the story's central protagonist – transforming for completely passive to fully active.
"Who is Silvia?" (a song actually found in the original play) is pure, overblown Shakespeare, love verses from a kid too in love with love to actually consider the feelings of the woman he’s serenading. And then Guare takes us screaming into the seventies with the next song, the driving "Love Me," in which Silvia scolds Proteus and his choir for idealizing her, for pretending to worship her without even bothering to know her (at this point, Proteus hasn’t even spoken to her!). The lush, choral music of "Who is Silvia?" gives way to the relentless, driving, angry beat of "Love Me." Silvia rejects the faux romanticism of high-flown poetry, and in the process, rejects Proteus as well.
The habanera of "I’d Like to Be a Rose" to the calypso of "Calla Lilly Lady," the bolero of "Kidnapped," and most blatantly and comically in "Thurio’s Samba." About that song, Irene Dash quotes John Guare, in her book Shakespeare and the American Musical:
…first of all, Thurio is a fool, and secondly, this musical was playing primarily to an audience for its traveling theatre. The language would be understandable to that audience. They would recognize it as gibberish spoken to a fool by someone intent on winning points and convincing a rich suitor to continue to pursue [the Duke’s] daughter.
Though the chorus is full of nonsense syllables, it’s not without meaning. Like Hair did, here Two Gents is playing with words as percussion more so than as conveyors of meaning. Though it’s not obvious reading the script, what the audience actually hears is a playful and weirdly innocent incantation of the words fuck, cock, and pussy. Without actually saying the obscenities, the song still gets across its comically creepy sexuality.
But the score also plays with the conventions of old-school musical comedy, in the reprise of "Love’s Revenge," in "Hot Lover," and in "Milkmaid." In all three songs, the show’s creators play with the sillier practices of early musical comedy; in all three cases, the songs seem completely unmotivated, yet an audience accepts them because we so readily accept characters breaking into song in musical comedy. Two Gents was one of the first musicals to realize the value in returning to the devices, the energy, and the lack of a fourth wall that were hallmarks of George M. Cohan’s prototype musical comedies at the beginning of the twentieth century.
…first of all, Thurio is a fool, and secondly, this musical was playing primarily to an audience for its traveling theatre. The language would be understandable to that audience. They would recognize it as gibberish spoken to a fool by someone intent on winning points and convincing a rich suitor to continue to pursue [the Duke’s] daughter.
Though the chorus is full of nonsense syllables, it’s not without meaning. Like Hair did, here Two Gents is playing with words as percussion more so than as conveyors of meaning. Though it’s not obvious reading the script, what the audience actually hears is a playful and weirdly innocent incantation of the words fuck, cock, and pussy. Without actually saying the obscenities, the song still gets across its comically creepy sexuality.
But the score also plays with the conventions of old-school musical comedy, in the reprise of "Love’s Revenge," in "Hot Lover," and in "Milkmaid." In all three songs, the show’s creators play with the sillier practices of early musical comedy; in all three cases, the songs seem completely unmotivated, yet an audience accepts them because we so readily accept characters breaking into song in musical comedy. Two Gents was one of the first musicals to realize the value in returning to the devices, the energy, and the lack of a fourth wall that were hallmarks of George M. Cohan’s prototype musical comedies at the beginning of the twentieth century.
"Love Has Driven Me Sane" acts as a companion piece to the opening. This last song, a kind of coda after all the plots have been resolved, matches Shakespeare, who often ended his plays with a summation by one of the secondary characters. Here, this postscript delivers the show’s message: shallow love and love driven by lust will drive you crazy, but real love, adult love, will drive you sane. It’s a song firmly rooted in the hippie era, about letting go of the bullshit that always surrounds human interaction. The main characters have learned that "the shock of happiness" comes when they stop thinking about what they want and start thinking about what the person they love wants.
And though the "I Love My Father" section seemed shallow at the beginning here there is some more adult understanding of the interconnectedness of everyone. The discovery of real love, rather than the excitement of lust or the easy gratification of selfish love, teaches them what a wrong road they've all been on. When Launce sings, "Wonderland is not where Alice is..." he's standing in for all the lovers, who now understand that true, adult love doesn’t exist in a chaotic fantasy world of hearts and flowers and love notes, but that love and joy can be found in the real world.
All the crazy events have changed these young people and that in turn has changed the lyric they sing. Now that they have all learned something about becoming an adult, about caring for others, now this simplistic lyric transforms itself and becomes about much more, about civility, empathy, love of our fellow humans, and a rejection of the nasty, hateful public discourse of 1971 America – but also of America today.
And though the "I Love My Father" section seemed shallow at the beginning here there is some more adult understanding of the interconnectedness of everyone. The discovery of real love, rather than the excitement of lust or the easy gratification of selfish love, teaches them what a wrong road they've all been on. When Launce sings, "Wonderland is not where Alice is..." he's standing in for all the lovers, who now understand that true, adult love doesn’t exist in a chaotic fantasy world of hearts and flowers and love notes, but that love and joy can be found in the real world.
All the crazy events have changed these young people and that in turn has changed the lyric they sing. Now that they have all learned something about becoming an adult, about caring for others, now this simplistic lyric transforms itself and becomes about much more, about civility, empathy, love of our fellow humans, and a rejection of the nasty, hateful public discourse of 1971 America – but also of America today.