“Without someone in a tree nothing happened here”
Listen to this. This (click on the song title) is Sondheim’s favorite piece of work: Someone in a Tree. This version is from the original soundtrack of Pacific Overtures — I like it better than the version used in the recent revival although the revival has B. D. Wong and I have a small crush on him. The revival version, ack, the samurai sounds like he’s doing a bad imitation of the cowardly lion. But never mind that. This is the version I wanted you to hear.
I’ve been thinking about memoir lately and this song kept coming back to me. I was listening to it again while I was playing solitaire and waiting for Noah to be done with Hebrew class. Playing solitaire and listening to showtunes is my version of meditation; it always gets me thinking.
I’ll set the song up for you. Listen to how it starts so simply — there’s a narrator in this show and just before the song begins he says that there’s no record of the meeting that took place between the first European visitors to Japan and the Japanese sent to meet them but then here comes this man to say he was there. The part where he’s repeating himself, “I was younger than; I was good at climbing trees” — he’s trying to climb the tree that was there. Hear the music building? The way it repeats itself as it builds? There — his 10-year old self has just come in and scurried up the tree. “Tell him what I see!” he demands. Hear how radiant the music is when he arrives?
There were two witnesses to the event — the boy who is now an old man (they are both telling the story, they tell it together, they help each other refine it/rewrite it) and then later a samurai enters and says he was there, too, under the floor listening. So there are three people telling us — two witnesses and a witness remembering.
When we remember our stories and then relate them to others, they exist because we were there. We are the story — our vantage point becomes the part of the story that matters most. “I’m a fragment of the day,” sings the boy/old man. “”If I weren’t, who’s to say / Things would happen here the way / That they happened here?”. … It’s the ripple not the sea / Not the building but the beam…”
I love this song so much; no wonder it’s Sondheim’s favorite. I love this celebration of our creative memories, the way it acknowledges our limitations (the boy sees someone, “Someone very old” and the man he has become explains apologetically, “He was only ten” — perhaps the man he saw was not so old at all — who can tell now?) but also doesn’t saddle us with those shortcomings.
“There was someone in a tree / Or the day was incomplete / Without someone in a tree / Nothing happened here…”
* Note on the recording: This whole soundtrack is just stunning and it’s swiftly becoming my favorite Sondheim recording, which is really saying something. If you get a copy of the Broadway DVD that was on PBS a couple of years ago you can see Sondheim rehearsing this song with the actors and the look on his face while he’s watching them sing — well, it’s inspiring. You can also hear another version from a Sondheim retrospective here.
I totally love (and share) your showtune/Sondheim appreciation. I think I must have that DVD.
We saw the revival of Sweeney Todd recently, and it was completely amazing. Sigh.
WOW - just wow!
I think the biggest reason I always come here is that you are always talking about something I have never heard of … and you always know so much about it!
Two very good things in a blog.
I love this post.
I adore Sondheim and am startled to realize that I have never heard this whole soundtrack. I’ve heard various songs from PO on various Sondheim compilations (one of my particular favorites was the two-disk concert everyone did, although I thought it was a little dumb to have all of Sondheim’s favorite leading ladies NOT sing their signature tunes — I did college theater so I “get” the performer’s mentality that led to that but hello, ladies, they’re your signature tunes for a REASON) but I’ve never noticed this song.
It must be where I’m at right now, brooding over my children aging, re-reading old journals, but what struck me most in the piece was the tension between the young storyteller and the old storyteller, the idea that we never have just one version of what happened in our life, the unreliability of youthful memory….I’m most moved by the ability of the old man to conjure back his younger self, just by the act of remembering.
I’m curious: the song says several times: “Without Someone in a Tree / Nothing Happened Here.” It’s a very powerful claim to make for storytellers. But of course, Perry landed with or without a child in a tree, and the effect was world-shaking. I’ve never seen the musical, so: does Sondheim ever deal with that? The claims of storytellers and the external realities (if they even exist) of history? It’s such an old debate, and I’m curious to know what Sondheim says.
At the end of the day, my favorite Sondheim musicals are Into the Woods and Passion, for very different reasons (obviously).