'Trapped, BUT HAPPY...'

Does anyone else feel like Fosse let his pessimism run away with him -- to the detriment of the show's meaning -- by cutting the qualification "but happy" from the show's last line?

The ending's stark, (literally) stripped-down ending was quite enough of a rebuke to standard Broadway treacle without pushing it even further at the expense of basic sense and logic: in what possible sense is "trapped," period, NOT "bad, for a musical comedy" (in the traditional sense of "musical comedy" that Pippin is exploiting)? Or did Fosse honestly think it was a good idea to end the show on a note of arch sarcasm (as if "ta-da!" weren't distancing enough)?

In any case, for Fosse to editorialize and cast Pippin's "settling" for marriage and domesticity as an unmitigated cop-out, or "trap," is in its own way every bit as lopsided and simple-minded as the traditional clichéd "happily ever after" musical-comedy ending that Pippin takes such pains to avoid. Though Vereen has already left the stage by this point, the shortened ending seems to "side with" his character so firmly as to collapse any real distance between Fosse and his Leading Player; and in an evening that has heretofore shifted our sympathies among the leads with some dexterity, for the LP to become a direct mouthpiece for the director's most flatly cynical impulses seems a crude tactic, to say the least. Trapped... but happy, by contrast, gives equal weight to the probable ups and downs that await Pippin (like the rest of us) after the curtain falls, and acknowledges that real life is not only less rosy, but (far more interestingly) that it's far more complex than the standard musical-comedy ending.

Alternatively, one could at least give the shortened line a more sensitive reading:

"Trapped.", then wait for the laughter to die down.
Then continue, "Which isn't bad...", as if genuinely discovering this fact.
Let this sink in for a beat, and then -- once the audience has had a moment to absorb the idea that "trapped," as it is used here, might honestly not be an all-bad-thing -- then append the wry button:
"...for the end of a musical comedy. Ta-da!"

We can decide for ourselves whether the hokey "ta-da!" stuff undercuts the earnestness of "which isn't bad" or not. It's at least better than meaningless glibness.

Still, that's a lot of turns to make within a single (shortened) line. And Katt doesn't even attempt any such shading, instead letting "Trapped" land, and then rushing clumsily through the curtain line as if the dumbish laugh on "trapped" were all that mattered. Overall, I really think Schwartz had every right to be upset when Fosse cut the words "but happy," which got to the heart of Pippin's ambivalence simply and directly. I'm glad they were restored to the script after the original production.

I saw this on cable TV a few years after it was recorded, and as I recall, they had (to my surprise) lopped off Pippin's last line entirely, instead ending the show on Catherine's question "Then how do you feel?", letting it hang unanswered, and then running the credits quietly over the frozen image of the three dimly-lit figures. Interestingly open-ended, but in some ways unsatisfying (at least to me, since I remembered the "ta-da!" ending from having read the script sometime earlier). I assume this probably represented some kind of compromise -- or stalemate -- between Schwartz and Fosse concerning the battle over Pippin's last line.