LARRY KORNFELD INTERVIEW with Steve Bottoms, 9.95 - Judson ...

So they really retained the quality ... Promenade was expanded! And I think it wasquite wonderful. But it did lose some of the focus of the original. It did, I'll admit that.LK: At Judson it was a play with a lot of music. When it went uptown it became amusical. And Irene wrote lyric after lyric for it too, and we were all involved in it,Irene didn't have to fight, we were all very excited about it. And when we looked at it,certainly when Irene looked at it afterwards, we realised that the focus ... it gotrefocussed, it was obviously a musical. If it had remained downtown and beenexploded, it wouldn't have been such a musical. By moving it uptown, and having theprice of the tickets go up, it might have been reviewed for the music! You see AI'smusic is very seductive. Extremely harmonic. And .... the record of Promenade is notas good as it could be. Madeleine refused to be on it. She left the show, went to LosAngeles, and when they recorded it, the record company wanted to bring her back butshe didn't want to, she was happy to get out, for personal reasons.SJB: Did you apply a Brechtian approach to Promenade as you did with HomeMovies?LK: No, I did not apply a Brechtian approach [in Home Movies]. It was anundercurrent in me, of some of the formalisms of Brecht. And that's it. It did not looklike Brecht in any way.LK: At Judson when I did it - I have to separate the two productions here - it had todo with the set. The set was a flat back, and every time you changed the set,somebody would walk the set like a book, and turn the page, and there'd be anotherset, turn the page, and another set. And it was painted in a sort of cartoonish way. Itwas sort of like ... I don't know if this is after the fact, I may have thought about itthen ... I have a vague memory of wanting to ... a walk through a cartoon world,walking through pages ... I wanted the feeling of Promenade to be that people are inone place, and the world keeps changing around them. And that was much clearer atJudson than it was in the uptown production. It was much more of a musical comedy,it didn't make quite as much sense. So from that point of view, the production uptownwas a pure caprice, and most people who went to see it saw it as such - as a caprice,but with very strong political points made in the lines, in the words. The production atJudson was much more about how the world turns around us. There are those twoyoung men in prison, and then suddenly you're in the ballroom, and then they end upin the park, and all is well with the world, and then something else happens to them.That was clearer there, and when we went uptown it became in a sense more abstract,more decorative. The production uptown was much more decorative, and thereforeIrene's book was more hidden, although it was very strong, it was very much there, itbecame covered. The production at Judson, the book was much stronger, not becauseit was changed, but because it was just more apparent.