On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (3 page)

Carroll is on hand for these spiels, too. Everyone smokes but the dog.

It’s an odd way to launch a career in music theatre, but we should note that Sondheim later collaborated on play and movie scripts. It’s not too early to point out that Sondheim sees his songs as “playwrighting.” That is, he is a dramatist more than a songwriter, with an acute sense of when narrative needs to spring into song: his music lies somewhere between dialogue and opera, mixing the former’s kinetic motion with the latter’s expressive power.

Back in New York after
Topper
, Sondheim set about establishing living quarters on his own and finding work. His first opportunity hit when he was twenty-four:
Saturday Night
, a smallish show about courtship rituals in Brooklyn in the late 1920s, with a book by Julius J. Epstein. One may wonder why Sondheim never considered writing an opera. But then, for all his love of classical music, he wasn’t interested in a theatrical form that depended more on lavish vocalism than on crisply dramatic communication, cast for the most part with not singing actors but singing singers. Then, too, in those days before titling was normalized, opera audiences had no idea what the characters were saying from one line to the next. What kind of theatre is that?

Unbeknown to Sondheim,
Saturday Night
’s producer, Lemuel Ayers, suffered from leukemia; he died suddenly while the show was still casting and raising its capitalization, and the production evaporated. There was another project, called
The Last Resorts
, spun off Cleveland Amory’s book of essays about the gala vacation haunts of the one per cent, from Newport to Saratoga. Amory was known for two things, pioneering animal-rights activism and writing about Society, and his books were bestsellers. So
The Last Resorts
was designed to take advantage of a pre-sold title, now attached to a wholly original story devised by Walter and Jean Kerr. Sondheim wrote three songs, which the Kerrs didn’t like, and the show’s producer, Harold S. (more commonly Hal) Prince, didn’t like the Kerrs’ script. So nothing came of that show, either, though Palm Beach, another of those haunts of the leisure class, would figure in Sondheim’s latest work,
Road Show
.

Then Steve got a show destined to make the short list of great musicals,
West Side Story
(1957). This time, he was asked to write only lyrics—worse, only some of the lyrics, collaborating with Leonard Bernstein, to Bernstein’s music. This was dismaying, of course: melody centers the art, and juggling rhymes is just so much homework. However, Oscar Hammerstein advised Steve not to pass up the chance to work with top people, for besides Bernstein there was Jerome Robbins, already celebrated not only as a choreographer but also as a director. Hammerstein was well aware of what Robbins could do; hired to stage the numbers on
The King and I
, Robbins became the show’s virtual director when John Van Druten, of the spoken stage, proved helpless trying to command a big musical. Further, Hammerstein’s professional savvy must have told him that Robbins’ reputation was just about to break out spectacularly, and
West Side Story
, made of gangs, jazz, and Shakespeare, might easily be the coronation title. Last, Hammerstein, a lyricist himself, knew that great shows need great words as well as great music. The lyricist matters.

And Hammerstein was right on every point, especially that Steve would find
West Side Story
a veritable college in the making of musicals. But then it happened again: he was invited to write the score to
Gypsy
(1959), yet its star, Ethel Merman, was unwilling to take a chance on an unestablished composer. Maybe the lyricist
doesn’t
matter, for Merman must have thought of herself as singing entirely on the music. Starting with her debut in 1930, she had appeared in eleven shows, all boasting major composers. Not just Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Irving Berlin but Vincent Youmans, Ray Henderson, and Arthur Schwartz. Even Merman’s second rank was first rank. Then, on the twelfth show,
Happy Hunting
, in 1956, Merman accepted the unknown composer Harold Karr, and while the show ran a year with the “first months sold out” feeling of a hit, it lost money and the score did not really take off.
Gypsy
, Merman’s thirteenth musical, had to revert to the Merman formula: music by Famous and lyrics by whoever’s handy.

The chosen composer, Jule Styne, turned out to be a fine partner for Sondheim, a ceaselessly inventive musician and very open to new ideas. “You don’t like that tune?” he would ask, from the keyboard. “Let me try another. How about this one?” And Styne would simply start playing as if the piano itself had channeled him.

Nevertheless, Steve would have turned the show down but for, again, Hammerstein’s advice. Writing for a star like Merman, he thought, would give Steve another valuable experience. Oddly, Hammerstein himself had seldom written for a star. Yes, in the 1920s, Hammerstein’s
Wildflower
(with co-composers Vincent Youmans and Herbert Stothart) was built around the star of
Irene
, Edith Day; and
Sunny
(with Jerome Kern) was made on Marilyn Miller, the biggest musical star of the age. Still, more often, performers
became
stars in Hammerstein’s shows—Mary Ellis and Dennis King in
Rose-Marie
, Helen Morgan in
Show Boat
, Helen Kane in
Good Boy
, Alfred Drake and Celeste Holm in
Oklahoma!
, John Raitt in
Carousel
.

Perhaps it was Hammerstein’s belief that Steve needed more exposure to Big Broadway, where the despots of talent turn productions into their own personal banana republic and ego eats ego for snacks. Steve was brighter than anyone, but he was sensitive and needed toughening up.

However, Sondheim was getting acquainted with The Business on his own. One of its most important (and hush-hush) jobs is Play Doctor: a colleague’s show is struggling out of town and you are invited to have a look and then outline the required fixes. It’s a gig that takes in anything from giving the creative staff a few notes to replacing the director with name billing on the poster in big letters inside a box. Jerome Robbins was notable in the field—and Hammerstein could be counted on for a trip to a matinée and a suggestion or two. Now, at the age of twenty-six, Sondheim attained the position when Bernstein’s
Candide
was in trouble in Boston.

At Bernstein’s insistence, Steve went up to have a look at what was soon to be the most distinguished flop in Broadway history, with, he thought, a brilliant book (by Lillian Hellman), a brilliant score (taking in a bevy of lyricists, including even Hellman and Bernstein and, for some unknown reason, Dorothy Parker), and a brilliant production (by Tyrone Guthrie). Unfortunately, each of these elements was brilliant in a different way, the book mean and funny, the score now spoofy and now plangent, and the production on the grand scale with infusions of camp. It was Western Civilization in the form of a pageant co-authored by Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, and Bugs Bunny, and Bernstein induced Sondheim to share his thoughts with Bernstein’s collaborators. As Sondheim put it in the second of his lyric collections,
Look, I Made a Hat
, the
Candide
crew “looked balefully at me, with understandable disdain—who was this kid, this latest protégé of Lenny’s?” Indeed, they probably took Steve for Bernstein’s latest romance; he had a habit of introducing his flames into his world professionally. The episode shows us how sharp Sondheim’s theatrical instincts were even without any practical Broadway experience, for
Candide
opened nine months before
West Side Story
, when the latter was still in composition. Ironically, Sondheim himself was to join the ranks of
Candide
’s myriad lyricists for the 1973 Brooklyn (and 1974 Broadway) revision, directed by Hal Prince in a more consistent tone of meta-theatrical clowning.

In the 1960s, making himself at home in the New York theatre world, Sondheim was at last able to present Broadway with scores entirely his own, writing music and lyrics for
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Forum
(1962) and
Anyone Can Whistle
(1964). They were different from
West Side Story
and
Gypsy
, for the former was experimental and the latter very dark, while
Forum
was sunny and hilarious and
Whistle
offbeat and mischievous. Both were musical comedies in the purest sense, Sondheim’s first since the unproduced
Saturday Night
. Thus they stand out in his oeuvre, for his later shows returned him to the dark and experimental. At that, Sondheim’s television musical,
Evening Primrose
(1967) was dark, though its plot whimsically concerned people living undetected in a department store, some of them for decades.

Sondheim’s next full score would inaugurate his series with Hal Prince, starting with
Company
(1970). But there were detours along the way, writing lyrics only, to Richard Rodgers’ music, for
Do I Hear a Waltz?
(1965), then to Leonard Bernstein’s music on an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s
The Exception and the Rule
, starting in 1968 (and ultimately never produced). Sondheim dislikes Brecht’s hectoring political statements and automatic characterizations of manipulative authority figures and their pathetic victims; when Sondheim came to write about authority figures and their victims, in
Sweeney Todd
, there was nothing automatic about their character development (though their actions called forth a few of those hectoring political statements).

The Brecht project seemed enticing nonetheless, even if Bernstein had already begun working with another lyricist, Jerry Leiber, a stalwart of rock and roll who with Mike Stoller wrote “Jailhouse Rock” and “[You ain’t nothin’ but a] Hound Dog,” among other definitive titles. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the history of rock without Leiber and Stoller—but what was Leiber doing in Bernstein’s company, not to mention that of John Guare (writing the book) and Jerome Robbins (directing)? The lure of working with Robbins again, and possibly coming up with something as distinguished as
West Side Story
, was what led Sondheim to sign on, and he ultimately wrote lyrics for eight numbers. But he found Bernstein as condescending and competitive as he had been on
West Side Story
, relentlessly challenging Sondheim’s lines. (Steve: “A boy like that.” Lenny: No, how about … “A boy like him”?) Worse, Bernstein was still unaware of how mawkish his instincts were in the matter of the “softer” lyric. His lack of perspective in how words sound led him to insist on calling the musical
A Pray By Blecht
, perhaps the most juvenile and affected title ever proposed for Broadway. It makes one think fondly of the ancient days of
Whoop-De-Doo
and
Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!!
. Sondheim found battling through Bernstein’s egomania “tedious and time-consuming and no fun at all,” and he dropped out of the project. Sooner or later, one outgrows one’s Bernstein—and when Steve wrote a few lyrics for the aforementioned
Candide
revision, he insisted that he work alone with Bernstein’s music, not with Bernstein himself.

Company
, produced when Sondheim was forty, at last brought him recognition as an author of important musicals. He always gives full credit to his librettists, with whom he exchanges ideas and who write dialogue that he can transform into musical passages. And it must be said that the Sondheim shows’ emphasis on literate and imaginative book writing have concentrated attention on the contributions of the librettist as never before. (This is yet another part of Oscar Hammerstein’s legacy.) Still, no one thinks of—to cite the librettists—
Company
as a George Furth musical,
Follies
(1971) as a James Goldman musical,
A Little Night Music
(1973) as a Hugh Wheeler musical,
Pacific Overtures
(1976) as a John Weidman musical, or
Sweeney Todd
(1979) as another Hugh Wheeler musical. These are Sondheim musicals.

They are as well the five shows that Sondheim wrote for production and direction by Hal Prince in the 1970s, a body of work that, when new, divided the theatregoing community as never before, though now all five are undisputed classics. As each of the quintet was experimental—and each experimental in a completely different way—some opinion makers felt imposed upon, forced to admire.

This led to what appeared to be a pile-on of anger at the sixth Sondheim-Prince title,
Merrily We Roll Along
(1981). True, the English revue
Side By Side By Sondheim
, seen here between
Pacific Overtures
and
Sweeney Todd
, marked a change in the way Sondheim was perceived by some of his detractors. With three singers, a narrator, and Sondheim’s songs presented as stand-alone art, his supposedly difficult music and idea-stuffed lyrics suddenly seemed not difficult but agreeable and not idea-stuffed but stimulating. One reason that some listeners weren’t able to assimilate Sondheim’s mature style—that is, from
Company
on—is the way the numbers are embedded in each show’s action. Once, theatre music was “Tea For Two”: you relax and enjoy the song as pure sensuality. By the Rodgers and Hammerstein era—from the 1940s on—theatre music was
Carousel
 ’s “Soliloquy”: you can’t relax, because the song provides compelling character information. And Sondheim took the process a step further, adding irony to the mix. In
Company
’s “Side By Side By Side,” the character tells us one thing (I’m so happy in my social loop) while the context of the number creates a contradiction (Is he, really?). However, released from their dramatic responsibilities, “Side By Side By Side” and the rest of the program turned out to be easy to enjoy, even relaxing.