On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (33 page)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Arthur Laurents discusses his innumerable sexual conquests, his delight in being nasty to friends and strangers alike, and other high jinks of the professional enraged queen in
Original Story By
(Applause, 2001). The author of three Sondheim librettos and a lifelong intimate, Laurents is very much a part of the Sondheim story, though we should note that Sondheim finally did get fed up with him and terminated the relationship.

Kurt Weill makes a valuable study in conjunction with Sondheim, because both men were classical composers who worked in the popular theatre. True, Weill did write symphonies, a concerto, string quartets, and such; Sondheim concentrates on narrative forms. But Weill did come to feel, as Sondheim does, that music theatre needs to be
theatre
, while the opera house of his day was too often about the music only.

There are other parallels. Weill’s pacifist
Johnny Johnson
(1936) strikes me as not only daring but daring in the way Sondheim’s
Assassins
is, dealing with a major national issue in a tone that toggles between serious and comic. Foster Hirsch’s
Kurt Weill On Stage
(Knopf, 2002) is an invaluable guide through Weill’s “musicals,” from the opera ones to the operetta ones to the play ones to the snazzy jazzy ones. More parallels: Weill’s
The Firebrand Of Florence
and Sondheim’s
A Little Night Music
: the costume operettas. Weill’s
Street Scene
and Sondheim’s
Sweeney Todd
: the operas. In biography, I’ll recommend my own
Love Song: The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya
(St. Martin’s, 2012). Lenya was Weill’s “voice”—at least, she became so after his death, leading the Weill Revival in recordings and stage appearances. But is there a Sondheim voice? Elaine Stritch in “The Ladies Who Lunch?” Len Cariou in Sweeney Todd’s mad scene? Bernadette Peters? Some songwriters do have these authenticating deputies. Cole Porter has Ethel Merman and Bobby Short. Kander and Ebb have Liza Minnelli. Johnny Mercer has Johnny Mercer. But Sondheim?

Three books on Hal Prince take us through his career rather than his life. Carol Ilson’s
Harold Prince
(Michigan, 1989) moves from
The Pajama Game
to
The Phantom Of the Opera
, quoting extensively from interviews, press reports, and the like. The book is big and thorough, and uncovers many interesting tidbits. Does anyone in the house remember that Prince was impersonated in a show many years ago, and was “furious” (his word) about it? Does anyone recall who impersonated him? It was Robert Morse, as one Ted Snow in
Say, Darling
(1958), the “not really a musical” with Styne-Comden-Green songs that came out of Richard Bissell’s experience co-writing the
Pajama Game
book. One wonders if this is at all connected to Prince’s firing Morse after the 2002
Show Boat
’s Toronto tryout, in favor of a very miscast John McMartin.

Foster Hirsch again proves an intrepid guide, in
Harold Prince and the American Musical Theatre
(second edition, Applause, 2005), which goes up to the reunion of Sondheim and Prince on
Bounce
. As the subtitle suggests, Hirsch places Prince historically, analyzing his predecessors and colleagues with Hirsch’s own insights. Ilson does not deal much with the notion of the concept musical, suggesting that
West Side Story
might be the first in the line. This would not be the
Allegro
-
Love Life
-
Cabaret
-
Company
concept musical, obviously, but rather a musical that develops out of an idea—
Romeo and Juliet
in a Manhattan slum—that bends all the musical’s arts to its will. This reminds us how slippery the term “concept musical” really is. Hirsch’s use of it tends more to the orthodox. He also brings in arcane little surprises, as when Dorothy Collins recalls that, one night, Yvonne De Carlo didn’t want to take part in “Who’s That Woman?” and “just sat on the edge of the stage”—which, Collins thought, was perfectly in keeping with her character.

Prince issued his own take in
Contradictions
(Dodd, Mead, 1974), too short a book for all that he should have had to say even partway through his career, just after
A Little Night Music
. He does share his backstage with us, noting that, in 1954,
The Pajama Game
—a full-sized show—cost only $169,000 and paid off in fourteen weeks. But Prince also tells us, “A play should be budgeted so that it can exist at sixty percent capacity,” thus anticipating, again, what we might call Sondheim’s Catch-22: his shows may not pay off in their first production but they will become classics, uniting him, albeit loosely, with such figures as Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, and Gustav Mahler.

It is as if Sondheim’s works skip the hit-or-flop script and progress directly from their (so to say) entrance to the ovation at the curtain call. Back in the old days, musicals either banked or failed. There were no major “artistic” musicals—that is, as folks perceived them—till
Cabin in the Sky
,
Lady in the Dark
, and
Oklahoma!
, all in the early 1940s. Even then, they were only arguably art. It was
West Side Story
—that title alone—that imposed upon the form the belief that there were musicals and there were
musicals
, great ones, genius ones. Then came Sondheim-Prince and that dangerous term “concept show,” and by 1975 or so everyone viewed the musical differently. Now it
was
art, no argument, and fit for critical study.

So we turn to academia. Mark Eden Horowitz, a librarian (of Congress) rather than a professor, gives us
Sondheim On Music
(revised edition, Scarecrow Press, 2010), whose first half is an interview with the composer himself, helped along by musical examples. It’s arresting to hear Sondheim speak about popular music with classical understanding, because my driveline, again, is that Sondheim wrote art for Broadway. This is not about the difference between opera and the musical. It’s about the richness of meaning we find in the term “music theatre,” because American culture has too much there in it to be limited by category. Weill discovered this, to his shock, when, fresh off the boat from Europe, he saw a dress rehearsal of
Porgy and Bess
. One doesn’t have to write
either
an
Aida or
a
No, No, Nanette
.

We have then Joanne Gordon’s
Art Isn’t Easy
(Southern Illinois, 1990), Stephen Banfield’s
Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals
(Michigan, 1991), and Steve Swayne’s
How Sondheim Found His Sound
(Michigan, 2005), each with a different approach and each, like Horowitz, enriched by input from Sondheim. Swayne explores influences on Sondheim. Banfield takes apart specific aspects of Sondheim’s composed shows. Gordon, also concerned only with Sondheim the musician, provides a general walk-through of each title. Thus, Gordon pauses to note that all of those characters blundering in and out of the playing area of
Into the Woods
suggest not the Brothers Grimm but a Feydeau comedy, even Kaufman and Hart. “There are no revolving bedroom doors,” Gordon notes, “but in its intricate design the plot more closely resembles French farce than the clear linear didacticism of the traditional fairy tale.” Gordon also emphasizes Milton Babbitt’s role in the formation of Sondheim’s style, encouraging him to fashion large-scale works out of small musical cells. She quotes Sondheim: “If you look at a Bach fugue you see this gigantic cathedral built out of these tiny little motifs.”

It’s Composition 101: from Beethoven on, the endless development and transformation of key musical phrases became central to late-Romantic music—anti-Bach yet very aware of him—to the point that Wagner could erect the four operas of the
Ring
on virtually a single theme, the Rheinflow heard at the start of the sixteen-hour epic, to create new themes that are altered in turn. Some of the serious Sondheim scores adopt this practice to an extent,
Sweeney Todd
and
Passion
in particular. Leonard Bernstein used a comparable (but simpler) procedure on
Candide
and
West Side Story
, using, respectively, a single four-note and three-note theme to launch many of the numbers.
^*

Banfield’s more detailed survey breaks everything down to niche considerations. On
Pacific Overtures
, he offers mini-essays on “The Orientalist Tradition,” “The Phrygian Matrix and Stylistic Unity,” “Ritual Form and the Mimetic Interlude,” and so on. Another definition of the concept musical: “a show in which ‘linear’ plot is abandoned or downgraded in favor of vignettes.” Swayne devotes three pages to the topic, quoting six different sources of definition, none of which addresses its unique mashing of the linear and the spatial to give all characters access to the playing area whether or not they are “present” in the actual storyline. Banfield incorrectly traces the concept musical back to
Love Life
, which added the commentary vaudeville only after
Allegro
introduced the commentative chorus. And the “vignettes” theory suits only certain concept musicals. Still, it is refreshing to see critics attempting, like Aristotle, to describe what they see in the development of an art rather than try to dictate to it—like the “cool” movie-loving Broadway-musical haters of the late 1960s who demanded Broadway switch its sound to rock, trying to impose their will upon it. Let the artists make the revolutions.

In 2014 there appeared
The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies
, edited by Robert Gordon. Twenty-eight writers, mostly academics, deconstruct the subject on such matters as “Sondheim and Postmodernism,” “The Prince-Sondheim Legacy,” “
A Little Night Music
: The Cynical Operetta,” and “Queer Sondheim” (on the gay content, obviously, from his interpolation into an off-Broadway revue of 1964,
The Mad Show
, of “The Boy From …” through the added gay Robert-and-Peter exchange in
Company
and the relationship of Frank and Charlie in
Merrily We Roll Along
to Addison and Hollis’ romance in
Road Show
). Tackling the “visual world” of Sondheim’s shows, Bud Coleman doesn’t mention the concept musical, though striking stage pictures have been embedded in the format from the start. Part of what made
Allegro
unique was its design, allowing the action to “dissolve” cinematically from scene to scene with no break in continuity. Set changes in the 1940s were generally executed during blackouts while the orchestra cranked out the last tune heard till the scenery had been changed and the lights came up as the conductor signaled for a fadeout.
Allegro
’s black curtains and furniture on an otherwise open stage without painted backdrops and side pieces, the next set of actors moving into view as the previous set departed, allowed the show to establish a tempo of playing energy otherwise unknown to most musicals of the era.

Speaking of
Allegro
, Raymond Knapp’s
Sondheim Studies
essay reassesses the Hammerstein-Sondheim relationship. As Knapp sees it, Hammerstein accepted a “compromise” between artistic completion and commercial success, while Sondheim rejects compromise. This leads to an intriguing comparison of
The Music Man
and
Anyone Can Whistle
, as Knapp reveals how divergently the two treat common elements. Just for starters: in both, a stranger arrives in a small town, engages romantically with a local caretaker (librarian; nurse), and promotes a phony product (the band; conformism therapy). And of course
The Music Man
is in the Rodgers and Hammerstein style;
Whistle
is very much post-R & H in its edgy satire, a mode R & H adopted only once—in the second act of
Allegro
.

Elsewhere in the book, Matt Wolf tracks “Sondheim on the London Stage” (but watch out for captions accidentally switched on page 217). Like Sondheim himself, Wolf praises David Thaxton’s “scalpel-sharp take” on
Passion
’s Giorgio. Wolf loves also Judi Dench’s “aching, shimmering” Désirée at the National, along with Julia McKenzie’s Sally at the Shaftesbury, trying to revive “a love affair that exists mostly in her mind.” But there’s a lot in that
mostly
, isn’t there? Because
Follies
shows Ben now admitting his love for Sally and now denying that love. Which is it? Does Ben know? Did James Goldman? Even: are such things knowable? This is
post
-post-R & H.

Geoffrey Block’s essay examines the differences between
Smiles of a Summer Night
and
A Little Night Music
, and also those between
Passione d’Amore
and
Passion
. Had the adaptation of
Night Music
been more faithful, the musical would have ended up earthier, darker, sexier, with an emphasis on the two servants, Frid and Petra. As I’ve said, Frid is a compelling presence in the film; he all but overwhelms it with a coarse ease of life utterly beyond the more socially evolved characters. Sondheim’s decision to cut his solo, “Silly People,” reduces him to little more than a walk-on and also deprives the public of the chance to review the show’s metaphor of the night’s three smiles. While noting the loss, Block very originally points out that further cutting “Two Fairy Tales” means Anne and Henrik never get a full-scale duet, a strangely innovative treatment of operetta lovers. Then, too, it keeps their romance shady till we learn of it unequivocally (in dialogue) in the second act.