Or imagine my brother and I, the sculptor's sons, who will probably inherit a
house full of our father's bronzes, marbles, engravings, paintings, drawings
etc, most of which nobody wants (including us). At some point, we'll have to
decide which ones are worth putting into storage, and unlike the daughter
mentioned below, we will hopefully set aside any resentment we might feel
towards a father who cared for little except his own work.
It's too bad that some things will end up in the garbage - but wait --- due
to modern technology, we can photograph everything and save it forever in a
memory storage device the size of my thumb. (which is exactly what that
un-filial daughter in your story should have done)
Does a tree fall in the forest if nobody notices it ? I suppose humanity is
deeply divided on this issue -- but my vote is "yes" If a
play-song-painting-sculpture-poem *is* great -- it remains so whether anyone
else ever notices it or not. (so curators/publishers/record labels should
always be looking in unusual places. That's their dharma)
BTW -- regarding Webber, Bernstein, and musical theater -- this would make
for a fun discussion on a separate thread. I happen to prefer Webber's
Requiem to his musicals (I recently suffered through "Phantom of the Opera")
But I do enjoy selected moments from "Joseph" and "Cats"-- as I enjoy
selected moments of "West Side Story". That seems to be how I enjoy all of
American musical theater: only in small doses -- like pieces fancy chocolate,
that can make for a memorable moment, but cannot serve as an entire banquet.
******
>What do you have in mind with the word 'accomplished' there? What is
"accomplished" if a playwright writes a play that is never performed and
never
published?
Imagine a playwright who is undeterred by the fact that if he writes a play
with, say, 24 characters (FRONT PAGE, McArthur & Hecht, 1928 had that many)
it
will never be produced. Undistracted by the desire to make money, or to allow
any producer to make money, let's say he writes 15 such 24-character plays in
his lifetime. Let's say he dies, and his daughter has to go through his
things
so she can clear out his garret. She finds a stack of his scripts, each one
with several dozen rejection slips from producers, all of them saying the
cast
size makes production utterly impossible. She can't determine if any of the
producers ever read even a single one of the scripts. She notices the date
on
the latest one is fourteen years ago. The daughter, always rankled by her
Princeton-grad father who stayed for twenty-five years at a non-demanding
nine-to-five job at the Post Office so he'd never have to take work home and
could
spend all his free waking hours writing "impossible" plays, now throws the
fifteen scripts in the garbage.
Regardless of how we might judge the quality the scripts if we'd ever read
them, what would you say he "accomplished" thanks to his being undistracted
by
the possibility of making money?
P.S. About your judgmental remark on Andrew Lloyd Webber: "(and think of what
Webber could have written if he hadn't been so dedicated to making cheesy hit
musicals.)" Well, I suppose it's possible he might have done what Leonard
Bernstein did: write symphonies that no one listens to anymore. If only
Bernstein
hadn't wasted his time on the likes of WEST SIDE STORY, ON THE TOWN, and
WONDERFUL TOWN, he might have written more such symphonies.
Do you have any idea what Webber wrote in the "classical vein"? I would trade
a hundred of his "Requiem" for the music in his best musicals. Do you disdain
all musicals as "cheesy"?
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