On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (27 page)

Perhaps that’s why the audience is so stunned when the lights come up on the Texas School Book Depository: Booth’s murder of Lincoln is the first one, but Oswald’s of Kennedy was the Big One, directly related to the personal feelings of at least some of the audience. From the very first notes of the opening, “Everybody’s Got the Right [to be happy],” this is the scene that the show has been navigating toward, the act that outranks the others—the meanest one, the stupidest one, and of course the mysterious one, with an entire subculture of writing about just who (else) was involved. And once again, the concept-musical format allows the authors to set onstage two characters who could never have met, Booth and Oswald—who must be thinking, Who
is
this guy?

BOOTH
:
I’m your friend, Lee.

OSWALD
:
I don’t have any friends.

BOOTH
:
Yes, you do. You just haven’t met them yet.

Not long after, all the other assassins came out from crevices in the set to add their pleas to Booth’s. Oswald resists. “People will hate me,” he says. Then Booth hits the shift key: “They’ll hate you with a passion, Lee.”

With a
passion
. Because, on one level, assassination on this grand a level is about becoming famous for more than fifteen minutes. Sondheim and Weidman show history’s government killers longing for the headline of
OSWALD KILLS KENNEDY
as the
My Fair Lady
of murders, one destined to reaffirm them personally.
Assassins
uses a shooting gallery as its framing metaphor, but the show really sees—as many other works do—American culture conducing to show biz, as if fame were talent, individuality a production, notoriety a long run. Again, Sondheim likes to say, “Content dictates form,” and, yes, violence guns the action. Still, doesn’t everything in America revolve around one’s billing and who gets the eleven o’clock song, in a Tocquevillian entertainment? So now we know who they were. What did they want? André Bishop tells us: “To reconcile intolerable feelings of impotence with an inflamed and malignant sense of entitlement.”

Passion

Anxious, rhapsodic romance, 1994.

Based on Ettore Scola’s film
Passione d’Amore
, itself drawn from Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s novella
Fosca
.

Music and Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: James Lapine.

Original Leads: Donna Murphy, Jere Shea, Marin Mazzie. Director: James Lapine.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as Romanticism was giving way to Modernism, there arose in Italy, around Milan and Turin, a movement known as the Scapigliatura. The term doesn’t translate easily.
Una capigliatura
(without the
S
) denotes a head of hair with the implication that it’s a fine one—a hairdo, say, fresh from the shop.
Una scapigliatura
is the opposite—a messy head of hair. The movement that wore that name denoted writers, artists, and musicians who were thus “disorderly” or “sloppy”: because they rejected the conventional in all things. Their attitude, one might say, anticipated Groucho Marx’s refrain in a song in the college film
Horse Feathers
: “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”

Indeed, there was a lot of humor in the worldview of the Scapigliatura—or, at least, a lot of sarcasm. The scapigliati loved juxtaposing extremes, and their characters tended to nurture feelings of ambivalence, regret, and anger—an anticipation of many of Sondheim’s people. Above all, the scapigliati abhorred Alessandro Manzoni’s
I Promessi Sposi
(The Fiancés), the celebrated early nineteenth-century novel that put its two sweethearts through state and religious persecution, war, and plague yet never lost its oh, so measured narrative voice. No more
measured
, the scapigliati cried. Instead: anarchy!

And yet, as with so many artistic movements, the scapigliati included many exceptions and unaligned offshoots. Arrigo Boito, the most prominent of the scapigliati, collaborated with Giuseppe Verdi, himself a firebrand but conservatively so, nonconformist and old-fashioned at the same time. Boito even dug into the dictionary for his libretto for Verdi’s
Falstaff
, giving it the most elaborate and fastidious vocabulary of the age, an act that could be seen as the very opposite of anarchy: literature.

However, the scapigliati were known not for making art with national treasures like Verdi but for edgy behavior and dying young. One such was Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, an ex-soldier who tried journalism and fiction. Under the spell of Edgar Allan Poe, Tarchetti favored Gothic tales, and his short novel
Fosca
(1869), though not fantastical, is somewhat macabre. Let there be a garden and it must be overgrown, filled with decaying trees and mutilated statuary, dead yet pulsing with some unnamed, insidious energy. Comparably, love is a force eager to consume the innocent, and Tarchetti built his tale around a soldier not unlike himself, caught between a beauty and a sickly horror of a semi-invalid who is forever letting off terrifying screams and going into convulsions.

Caught? Surely the soldier will choose the beauty. But, in Tarchetti’s view, love does the choosing, and his soldier hero is drawn to the horror despite himself. “You shall learn about me,” she tells him (in Lawrence Venuti’s translation). “I need to be known, understood. … I am sick, on top of being ugly, very ugly. … Do not deny me your pity—show it, do not deny me!”

Fosca
, named for the sickly woman, was unknown (and even untranslated) here when Ettore Scola’s Italian film adaptation,
Passione d’Amore
, was released, in 1981. The movie became the source of Sondheim’s third collaboration with James Lapine, the title shortened to
Passion
, and the word alone, basic yet rich in meanings, has so overshadowed the novel that the Venuti translation has been republished under Sondheim’s title rather than Tarchetti’s. Interestingly, the film virtually uses the novel as its script, so close is the adaptation, and the musical closely follows the film. It is a single idea in three formats.

The construction is tight, in a virtual three-person scenario, all but strangling in its own feelings. It’s a vast change after the panoply of eccentrics that peopled
Sunday In the Park With George
and the activity-filled plot lines of
Into the Woods
. Opening with the soldier, Captain Giorgio Bachetti, and his beauty, the married Clara, in bed together, the musical wastes not a moment in getting to its topics. These are: the nature of love, how looks and charm introduce it into our lives, and how a shared sensibility urges it on. Giorgio and Clara are drawn together out of sheer physical symmetry, though they think of themselves as sharing a very finesse of affection. In novel and film alike, they make love in an abandoned cottage overrun with lizards and rodents, so crazed for each other they might as well be in a silken bower in Loveland. Or they become so entranced in a meadow that they ignore mischievous children who remove a plank from a watering outlet and (the movie omits this) soak them in the ensuing flood.

Fosca’s bond with Giorgio is just the opposite, not physical but poetic, a mating of sensitivities. The other soldiers are coarse, especially in the musical. “They hear drums,” she sings, “you hear music.” And Sondheim carefully, subtly, distinguishes that music from the melody gushing from Giorgio’s union with Clara. The two “musics” can’t be too different, for passion is passion. Nevertheless, the show runs on the comparison between a love of two enchanting physical equals and a love unbalanced and crazy, a beseeching obsession.

As if in retreat from this difficult subject, the songs scarcely bear titles. After the resonance of “Being Alive,” “I’m Still Here,” and “God, That’s Good!,” it is bemusing to read
Passion
’s song list on the CD, devoted to “First Letter,” “Second Letter,” “Third Letter,” to “Garden Sequence,” “Trio,” “Soldiers’ Gossip,” to “Flashback” and “Farewell Letter.” Such modest nomenclature suggests a Neo-classical approach, but in fact the score is Romantic and lyrical in the extreme. Again, it soars for Giorgio and Clara in their solipsistic love feasts, then yields to Fosca’s self-denying plaints, love bingeing on a fast. Still, this is a very singing score, almost an unbroken flow, the spoken dialogue tipped into the music like mezzotints into an ancient collection of sonnets.

And here’s something odd: the plot of
Passion
is very reminiscent of Bellini’s opera
Norma
. The titular heroine, a Druid priestess in Gaul, is the Fosca figure—difficult and vindictive, though of course Bellini’s bel canto poeticizes her. Then, too, unlike Sondheim’s musical, which tells Giorgio’s story, the opera sees the difficult woman as the protagonist, and tells the tale from her viewpoint.

Norma
’s Giorgio is Pollione, like Tarchetti’s hero an officer, of the occupying Romans, involved with Norma (and the father of her children). But Giorgio is cultured and sensitive, whereas Bellini characterizes Pollione as brutish, a conqueror like Rome itself. The Clara figure is Adalgisa, a Druid temple virgin, and, just as in
Fosca-Passion
, the soldier is drawn to the pretty one, not to the intense one.
^*
In the end, though, Pollione, like Giorgio, is overwhelmed by something extraordinary in the character of Norma-Fosca, and he dies at the stake rather than be separated from her.

Of course, in 1831, the year of
Norma
’s premiere, Italian tenor heroes were not made of Giorgio material. His type came along later, mainly in French opera, in the heroes of Massenet’s
Manon
and
Werther
, for example: sweet and docile lovers, not fighters. As Sondheim sees him, Giorgio is above all a naïf, someone upon whom a character-changing experience can easily be imprinted. In
Look, I Made a Hat
, Sondheim greatly praised another of those trendy “little” London productions, a
Passion
at the Donmar Warehouse, calling David Thaxton the very embodiment of Giorgio: “He conveyed an innocent vulnerability not just through acting but by virtue of who he was . … He didn’t seem to be a fully grown man; he was clearly someone on the brink of change.”

This brings us to a major topic in the influence of the Sondheim shows—their need for performers who are more than the acting singers or singing actors of old, thespians nimble enough to slide into the niches of ambivalence and anxiety that hide in the psychology of the Sondheim lead. When the musical’s Golden Age began, at about 1920, the stars weren’t actors. They were personalities—Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Fred and Adele Astaire, Marilyn Miller. They had talent, to be sure, as singers, dancers, comics. They were unique and irreplaceable. But they weren’t actors in the sense of the people who appear in Shakespeare, Ibsen, O’Neill.

Came the revolution, in the 1940s—Rodgers and Hammerstein and their meaningful narratives with genuine character conflict. Not tiffs or contrived misunderstandings, but the war between incongruent worldviews, as with the two leads in
Oklahoma!
,
South Pacific
, and especially
The King and I
. Suddenly, those who played such roles had to justify characterologically nuanced texts. Why is
Oklahoma!
’s Laurey so uncommitted—but intensely so—to Curly? Is she a flirt? A feminist? Is it because she’s a landowner and he herds cows? Does
The King and I
’s Mrs. Anna want to coach the King in democratic humanism or simply control him? Or consider shows written by others in the Rodgers and Hammerstein style—
Brigadoon
, for instance. Why does a hip New Yorker like Tommy want to live in an isolated Scots village made of fantasy and folklore? Is he what people seem like just before they join a cult?

So far, so good. But there was a second revolution, in the 1950s and after, with the habilitation of the Novelty Star—Rosalind Russell, Rex Harrison, Robert Preston, Richard Burton, Anthony Perkins: infusions of acting talent from outside the world of the musical. A live audiotape of the original
Camelot
reveals the secret of why this misconceived show, with its glorious score and dodgy libretto, played so well. Burton’s Shakespearean grandeur mated with Julie Andrews’ Noël Cowardesque light comedy offers another example of Scott McMillin’s aforementioned theory of “disjunction,” in which apparently inimical styles mesh through a kind of bonded disunion, a vitality of opposition.

Clearly, the musical was becoming enriched by a various expertise in its acting pool—and Sondheim’s provocative characters created the third revolution.
Follies
’ four leads function far more expansively than the traditional First and Second Couples whose heyday not only runs back to the so-called “first” musical,
The Black Crook
(1866), but continues well past the Rodgers and Hammerstein era. The First Couple has the romance, while the Second Couple gets to dance and wax sarcastic:
Kiss Me, Kate
’s Fred and Lilli, then Bill and Lois, from “So in Love” on one hand to “Always True To You In My Fashion” on the other. And, yes, there are variations, as with
The King and I
’s Mrs. Anna and the King, then Tuptim and Lun Tha: all four are serious, and an air of tragedy hangs heavy over them.