On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (10 page)

And this came to light in a panel in the series
Dancers Over Forty
, in which Chita Rivera eulogized Gennaro. They worked on several shows together, with backgrounds ranging from Parisian to gypsy, and while Gennaro was, unlike Robbins, genuinely well liked by his dancers, Rivera emphasized how adept he was in ethnic styles. “Every nationality,” she said. “Every color. He was the rainbow.” And, finally: “My rhythm of life is Peter.”

All this reminds us how much collaboration goes into the making of musicals—how much that doesn’t get credited, whether from a co-choreographer, a dance arranger, an orchestrator, an assistant director. Once, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, musicals were assembled out of separate parts, script and score written off a treatment with little or no consultation between book writers and songwriters. Directors and choreographers also worked apart from each other, then everything would be shoved together. But
West Side Story
in particular marked a break from such practices, as when Robbins cast a single ensemble to act, sing, and dance together, or when all the creators contributed all the time in everyone else’s department. This fluid collaboration had been evolving since
Oklahoma!
, fourteen years before. But
West Side Story
instituted it most completely. It really was the first all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing integrated musical.

After 734 performances, the production went out on tour—prematurely, for once the closing notice went up, the house started selling out. After ten months on the road, it returned to Broadway for 249 further repetitions. In London, rapturously received, it lasted longer than the combined New York runs. As I’ve said, the film expanded the show’s reputation considerably, and we discern in this very formative Sondheim work the beginning of a pattern: a Sondheim musical achieves a qualified success made of intense admiration from some, mixed with ambivalence from others, only to grow in popularity till it reaches classic status.

^*
West Side Story
’s Mercutio is, as gang leader, the chief Montague, but in Shakespeare he is of neither feuding family. Though Romeo’s buddy and ultimately a victim of Capulet belligerence, Mercutio is actually aligned with the ruling house of Verona. Benvolio, Romeo’s other closest friend (who has no counterpart in
West Side Story
, having been absorbed by Riff) makes this clear in addressing the Prince in Act Three. When describing Shakespeare’s anticipatory equivalent of the musical’s rumble, he refers to “thy kinsman, brave Mercutio.”

^*
Robbins made a specialty of hating outstanding numbers in various shows. On
Gypsy
, he wanted the spectacular overture cut. Was it because the (of course unstaged) overture was the only part of the production that he couldn’t take credit for?

Gypsy

Backstager drawn from Gypsy Rose Lee’s autobiography, 1959.

Music: Jule Styne. Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: Arthur Laurents.

Original Leads: Ethel Merman, Jack Klugman, Sandra Church. Director: Jerome Robbins.

Billed as “a musical fable” (presumably because it tells a true story with fanciful alterations),
Gypsy
marked Sondheim’s only experience working with an old-fashioned Broadway star who wore her roles like tailoring, made to measure. Ethel Merman was, most famously, the revivalist singer Reno Sweeney, the spy-foiling Canal Zone good-time gal Panama Hattie, and Annie Oakley, but she was born to play Rose,
^*
the mother of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and actress June Havoc (from Hovick, the family name). Merman did have to expand her normal playing space from a face-front, stand-and-deliver caricature to accommodate a more organic participation in the action, but Rose was the part of a lifetime, worth the trouble. Besides, the story gave her something really arresting to play: she pushes her two daughters into vaudeville, promoting first the cute one and, when she flees, then the other one. But vaudeville is dead, and somehow the act ends up in burlesque, so Rose now pushes the other one into stripping. Rose’s vis-à-vis, Herbie, is so disgusted he walks out on her, and at length she realizes that she threw her life away chasing a lie:

ROSE
: I guess I did do it for me. … Just wanted to be noticed.

Jule Styne composed Merman’s hullaballoo of a voice into the music, and Laurents and Sondheim wrote book and lyrics around her aggressive self-confidence. And these three and Merman made the show, for while Jerome Robbins was directing, there actually was little for him to do in his unique way.
Gypsy
is not a choreographer’s show. There is some modest vaudeville hoofing and one exhibition dance (in “All I Need Is the Girl”) for a supporting player. But
Gypsy
is really a very tight little tale about three people—Rose, Herbie, and Louise (Gypsy Rose Lee herself). There is no Second Couple, no local-color chorus, no title song.

And no Robbins “production.” He had envisioned a panorama of bygone show business, a very vaudeville in itself. Laurents, in his memoir
Original Story By
, thought Robbins “listless” in rehearsal: because he was “directing a
Gypsy
that wasn’t the
Gypsy
that he had conceived.”
West Side Story
was a staging triumph. But
Gypsy
was a writing triumph.

Sondheim’s definition of his work as “playwrighting” is much more fulfilled here than in
West Side Story
. The script tells us how the world sees Rose, from her disapproving father to the boys in the act, who might like her but don’t trust her.
Gypsy
’s songs, however, tell us how Rose sees the world. “Some People,” her establishing number, is, as I’ve said, a cousin of
Saturday Night
’s “Class”: a statement of purpose that scorns those who don’t get it. But Jule Styne gave “Some People” an emphatic vocal line, and Sondheim’s lyrics fold themselves around the unique sense of self that Merman always brought to her raveups. So Oscar Hammerstein was right to guide his protégé into creating for a star: it centers the art on not just character and theme but on how that character will present that theme. “Playing bingo and paying rent,” Rose sings: that’s the ninety-nine per cent. Rose is going to join her own one per cent: not in money and power but in the self-esteem that show-biz success inspires.

It’s the American dream—starring in the
Follies
, as Marilyn Miller did at the end of
Sally
(1920) and Barbra Streisand did halfway through Act One of
Funny Girl
(1964). Or becoming the greatest showman in the land, as Jim Dale did in
Barnum
(1980). Does Rose harbor comparable ambitions? All we see her attain, really, is low-rent vaudeville. One reason “Some People” never loses its fascination is its paradoxical flavor of flop confidence. It sounds like the start of a great career (like another Jule Styne number,
Funny Girl
’s “I’m the Greatest Star,” to Bob Merrill’s lyrics), yet it leads to nowhere.

Pursuing their stimulation of the Merman persona, Styne and Sondheim followed “Some People” with softer spots—the ballad “Small World,” the comic number “Mr. Goldstone,” the fox trot “You’ll Never Get Away From Me.” Thus, Rose can be loving (or is it opportunistic?), amusing (or is it overkill?), or at ease in romance (or is it fatally lacking in perspective?). To close Act One, when the cute daughter has abandoned her and the other one is all that’s left, the authors provisioned the titanic Merman again, in “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” The script describes the number as “violently joyous,” and, once more, Sondheim fills the air with the images that Rose thinks of as exciting, though to us they’re clichés—“curtain up” and “Santa Claus.” It’s the Little Golden Book version of success, or, for a later time, Barney the Dinosaur’s version. We’ll make popcorn and stay up till seven o’clock! The odd confluence of Rose’s name and the use of “roses” in the lyric confused Jerome Robbins when he first heard it. “Everything’s coming up Rose’s
what
?” he famously asked.

These five character songs limn Rose so brilliantly that
Gypsy
got away with giving her relatively little more to sing in Act Two—a trio with Herbie and Louise (“Together Wherever We Go”), nine vocal bars of a reprise of part of “Small World,” and a final solo, “Rose’s Turn.” For a short while during the tryout, Merman had another comedy spot, “Smile, Girls,” a tango to open the second act, when Rose is rehearsing the new act, the Toreadorables. It’s a droll spot, with a running gag, for Rose twice peps the team up, addressing each girl individually except the one who gets “Smile, Whateveryournameis.” However, the show had already made it plain that Rose thinks she can make art with literally anyone, and the number was dropped as redundant. Besides, as an audiotape of Merman’s final New York Rose attests, no later Rose got more laughs out of the script than Merman; the last thing she needed was more comedy. At that, “Together,” which directly succeeded “Smile, Girls,” boasted a great joke on a rhyme to match “By threes”: as two go off left in a show-biz exit, one goes off right—and Merman sang, “No, this way, Louise!” Sondheim habitually wrote stage business into his songs after Jerome Robbins scalded him with the usual Robbins acid when
West Side Story
’s “Maria” gave him nothing to play with visually. It’s a love song. A guy met a girl. He’s radiant with tenderness and hope, so he stands there and sings.

He stands there and sings
for three minutes
?

So Robbins says, “
You
stage it.”

“Rose’s Turn” was the opposite: staged before it was written. It was Rose’s moment of
anagnorisis
, the ancient Greek “recognition,” when the protagonist is shattered by a catastrophic discovery, and Rose, reviewing her life, realizes that all her conniving and cheating and hoping and planning created one victim above all: herself. The scene was dreamed up during rehearsals, when, mapping it out in improvisation, Robbins “played” Rose while Sondheim, at the keyboard, hammered out reminiscences of the show’s score. “Rose’s Turn”—her own personal act, after the years of devising acts for others—was to be the ultimate eleven o’clock song. Not just the greatest yet, but one to land with an intensity this exhibition genre had never known before.

“It’s sorta more an aria than a song,” Merman told Sondheim—“doubtfully,” he recalls—when he and Styne played the finished number for her.

Exactly—and it took Merman’s conservative outlook to pinpoint Sondheim’s modernist renovations in how a score works. Yes, Sondheim writes songs. But he writes, as well, “arias”: musical scenes that are more encompassing, more dramatically kinetic, than songs. Of course, the musical scene has been around for a long time, but mainly in operettas. The musical comedies that Merman specialized in used the building blocks of simple song structures. For the public to see Madam Rose having a nervous breakdown of
anagnorisis
in an “aria” was an illuminating shock—not least when Rose stumbled over the word “Momma,” repeating it over and over in panic.

One might have expected Merman to balk at such personal loss of command—as a character, of course, not as a performer. But on Merman’s Broadway, the star
was
the character.

Furthermore,
Gypsy
had been rehearsing very well. It ran too long and had too many old vaudevillians in it, left over from Robbins’ original plan that had been abandoned long before. (Almost all the extra players were gone before the Philadelphia tryout, and the last few were dropped before New York.) Still,
Gypsy
had the one thing Merman knew a Merman show had to have, a Great Merman Score. After all, this was why she had been unwilling to take a chance on the as yet unknown music of Sondheim in the first place. Styne, Merman thought, was a little nutty, but what composer wasn’t? And Sondheim was a bit too sure of himself for a kid. But they had come through for her—Laurents, too. Rose, she declared in
Merman: An Autobiography
, was “the most memorable character ever portrayed in any musical, with all due respect to Nellie Forbush [in
South Pacific
], Liza Doolittle [in
My Fair Lady
], and any of the rest.” So Merman sang that Mad Scene of a “Rose’s Turn,” complete with the embarrassing “Momma”s, and no one else has ever brought them off as well.

Opening on May 21, 1959, at the Broadway Theatre,
Gypsy
was a smash, lasting 702 performances and an eight-month tour. When it turned classic, some called it the greatest musical of all—not least, surely, because the central role calls for a dense and demanding power. It is more than memorable, as Merman said: it is The Challenge. No diva is complete without a Rose in her repertory.

Oddly,
Gypsy
lost every Tony Award to
The Sound of Music
or
Fiorello!
(both of which tied for Best Musical). Merman, her Herbie (Jack Klugman), and her Louise (Sandra Church) lost in their nominations, Merman to Mary Martin. Jerome Robbins lost to
Fiorello!
’s George Abbott. Even
The Sound of Music
’s conductor, Frederick Dvonch, won over
Gypsy
’s Milton Rosenstock. But then,
The Sound of Music
is a feelgood show, while
Gypsy
, for all its humor, is dark—even, ultimately, dismissive. It says that your mother doesn’t love you. She loves what she thinks you can do for her.