John Collier’s short story, “Evening Primrose,” was published in the 1951 collection Fancies and Goodnights. The collection won the International Fantasy Award for fiction in 1952. “Evening Primrose” was published again in The John Collier Reader in 1972. Collier’s story is told by Charles, a poet who wants to escape the increasing harshness of a material society. He hides in a closed department store and finds a secret group of like-minded individuals who have lived in the store for years. He falls in love with a young woman who also lives in the store, and soon discovers his fellow department store denizens have a terrible secret. In 1966, Stephen Sondheim adapted “Evening Primrose” into a fifty minute television musical for the series ABC Stage 67. The musical version of the story, also called Evening Primrose, was broadcast only once, on Nov. 16, 1966. For over 50 years, opportunities to see this television musical were limited to bootleg copies and museum viewing. Although the musical was broadcast in color, the original recording was lost. A black and white copy was found and released on DVD in October of 2010. This allowed for a reexamination of Collier’s themes as interpreted by Sondheim.
This presentation will explore the way Collier’s dark tone and wry comments on artists and society are emphasized and deepened in Sondheim’s musical adaptation. Sondheim uses the music and lyrics in Evening Primrose to further illustrate Collier’s ideas about conflict between the trappings of art and genuine artistic dedication. Collier and Sondheim further explore differing views of the beauty and ugliness of our world. Both Collier’s and Sondheim’s works show the influence of the times in which they lived. This presentation will show the timelessness of their ideas and the relevance to current times.
About the presenterGail D. Rosen
Gail D. Rosen is an Associate Teaching Professor at Drexel University in the Department of English and Philosophy. She teaches Our Vampire, Ourselves, Literature and the Broadway Musical, Mythology, Law and Literature and courses in the first year writing sequence. In 2013 she published Now Playing: Learning Mythology through Film. Her essay “Whedon’s Women and the Law: Parallels from Slayers to S.H.I.E.L.D.” was published in The Comics of Joss Whedon: Critical Essays in June 2015.