On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (36 page)

Is
Follies
the
Show Boat
of the millennium, forever to be remodeled? The 1987 London
Follies
(First Night) offered a wholly rewritten book (by James Goldman, frantically pepping up the tone), while Sondheim contributed four new numbers and changed a few of the old songs’ lyrics. It was musical-comedy
Follies
, a Peter Pan
Follies
that won’t grow up. Phyllis’ confession of adultery in “Could I Leave You?” was now a mere threat. Ben’s Folly, the new “Make the Most of Your Music,” staged on a Ziegfeldian staircase as the choristers leaped out of a vast piano, didn’t implode climactically. So he isn’t a fraud, after all? Even “Broadway Baby” was soft-grained, a croon. In 1971, Ethel Shutta was defiant, and in 1985 Elaine Stritch goofed and gloated. But Margaret Courtenay in London sounds tender; it’s supposed to be an anthem, a De Sylva, Brown, and Henderson ode, like their “The Birth of the Blues” and “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”

Oddest of all is the album’s omission of the opening music, the most atmospheric in the history of the musical and a potent link between Sondheim and the classical world in its Erik Satie-esque evocations. To be fair, London’s
Follies
played very well, with more attractive scenery (by Maria Björnson) than the original had, and the twenty-one-man pit was expanded for the recording to thirty-two, with two harps. But of the lead quartet—Diana Rigg, Daniel Massey, Julia McKenzie, and David Healy—only McKenzie leaves her mark, creating an unusually aggressive Sally. She also suggests what a crossover
Follies
might sound like, with her near-operatic instrument.

A two-disc set made on the 1998
Follies
at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse, now with Laurence Guittard, Dee Hoty, Donna McKechnie, and Tony Roberts (TVT), includes the “Broadway Baby” three-voice coda and the bolero. It also returns us to major star cameos, missing from the London cast. Phyllis Newman and Liliane Montevecchi are held over from the Philharmonic, Kaye Ballard sings “Broadway Baby,” and, as originally staged, Ann Miller tackled “I’m Still Here” while moving from stage right to stage left and back as she gradually came forward in a kind of career-defining March to the Footlights. Once again, an expanded pit (of thirty-six players) lends a symphonic atmosphere to the grander pieces, and Jonathan Tunick himself conducts. The album’s best feature is an appendix of eight numbers, six titles cut before the New York premiere and two alternates for Phyllis’ Folly. True, these songs have been taken down elsewhere. But TVT presents them as cast recordings, using the Paper Mill people with the full orchestra. When Guittard and McKechnie work their way through the dropped “Pleasant Little Kingdom” to its revelation that Ben has been in love with the wrong woman all his adult life, we can virtually hear the music breaking into “Too Many Mornings” (as it originally did) and visualize the staging.

The 2011 revival (PS Classics), which originated in Washington, D.C., offers Bernadette Peters, Danny Burstein, Jan Maxwell, and Ron Raines in a roomy reading that programs a great deal of dialogue. Oddly, while the production itself used a repurposed book, the two discs use cut-down versions of the 1971 libretto. It makes one wonder if the pendulum will swing back to welcome more faithful
Follies
revivals. The performance is quite good, strengthened by James Moore’s excellent conducting and superb sound engineering to capture boutique refinements in Tunick’s orchestrations. One year after this release, the saga of the
Follies
discs was brought full circle when Bruce Kimmel’s Kritzerland label reissued the original cast in a remastering designed to lift the haze that had hung over the tapes since 1971.

Considering
A Little Night Music
, one might start with Maurice Ravel, for his influence on Sondheim’s style is most acute in this work. Pierre Boulez, usually dry and uncommitted in the Romantic composers like Wagner, is excellent in the French Impressionists, and Boulez’s complete Ravel set (Sony) with the New York Philharmonic and Cleveland Orchestras is ideal, especially for the
Night Music
-like
Valses Nobles et Sentimentales
and
La Valse
(which finds echo also in the more sweeping climaxes in
Follies
). The more one hears Ravel, the more Sondheim sounds like a French Impressionist himself. The
Night Music
film (Henstooth Video) has a rotten reputation, but its opening and closing sequences preserve the original staging (in a replica production at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien). Further, it’s interesting that the project attracted one of the era’s most prominent movie stars, Elizabeth Taylor, to play Désirée. It was perhaps another sign that Sondheim was becoming a cultural icon, someone whose proximity lent one prestige. It’s a little like knowing Beethoven.

I spent some time with
Night Music
recordings in
Anything Goes
, my history of the American musical, so let us explore only the Barcelona cast album, as it sheds light on the nature of Sondheim’s genre. Spanish zarzuela, very little known here, is a unique form, too rich to match up to a simple definition. Where to start? Think of
No, No, Nanette
performed by opera singers. There are very serious zarzuelas as well, but the point is that zarzuela is a form of musical with a highly elevated vocal complement. So we expect
Musica Per a una Nit d’Estiu
, sung in Catalan (on the K label), to be a sort of operatized Broadway. Then, too, the many stage shots in the CD booklet give us a cast that looks “opera”: less pretty than able. And, right at the start, as the Liebeslieder Singers assemble in cadenza, we hear even more swank vocalizing than the score calls for.

As the zesty performance progresses, however, we realize that this is no operatic Sondheim, no zarzuela-izing of a musical. The orchestra is cut down a bit from the Broadway pit, without a harp—so important in this music—and the cast is drawn from not zarzuela initiates but actors who either sing just well enough or less well than that. Désirée, indeed, is a diseuse. So this isn’t zarzuela style at all, but an attempt to catch Sondheim in his own sphere, that of “music theatre,” that elusive form pitched somewhere between musical comedy and operetta wherein the music matters but the drama matters, too. But the music matters. This is what Sondheim brought to Broadway from
Company
on: a genre that scarcely existed before him. There are a few instances:
The Threepenny Opera
, or Ravel’s short opera
L’Heure Espagnole
—yes, Ravel again, the ghost looking down on Sondheim’s shows and wondering why he never uses the jazz that Ravel so loved about American music.

No
Night Music
cast album includes “Silly People,” but George Lee Andrews gives us an original-cast performance on
Sondheim: A Musical Tribute
(Warner), a benefit evening held at the Shubert Theatre on the “Weekend in the Country”
Night Music
set in 1973. Andrews’ cut was left off the LP, but it’s on the CD (Victor), along with Nancy Walker’s slow-build-from-resigned-to-titanic “I’m Still Here” and an “aww” cut of Sondheim himself playing and singing “Anyone Can Whistle.” The audience thinks it’s his confession, but Sondheim doesn’t care whether he can whistle or not. As I’ve already said, it’s not his song; it’s a song for a character in a show.

Pacific Overtures
(Victor) is never mentioned among the great cast albums—
Gypsy
, say, or a house favorite,
Jamaica
, which zooms right out of your speakers with Caribbean magic. (And
Jamaica
’s composer and lyricist, Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg, are Sondheim favorites.) No doubt folks fail to register
Pacific Overtures’
disc because it lacks an Ethel Merman or Lena Horne to anchor it in the memory; on one level, show biz is about fame. Even so, the original
Pacific Overtures
is a tremendous performance, far outclassing the British opera cast (Victor), indifferently sung and undramatic, and the 2004 revival (PS), with an underpowered Reciter from B. D. Wong and a tiny pit (rescored by Tunick, and very adroitly; but still). Note that “Welcome To Kanagawa” has added words, for Sondheim felt that some of the jokes didn’t land. “We’re always open,” the madam cries, as she and her cohort glide away; that’s a new line. The original Broadway production was taped for viewing in Japan; the intrepid may find it online.

Sweeney Todd
’s original cast (Victor) preserves Len Cariou’s ravening gargoyle; the DVD (Warner), caught on tour with some replacement casting, offers George Hearn’s barber, opposite the irreplaceable Lansbury.
Sweeney
buffs should sample the 1936 English film—primitive, but of a rough vigor—with the symmetrically named Tod Slaughter as Todd. From a distance, he looks, most asymmetrically, like Cyril Ritchard.

BBC television revisited the legend in 2006. Like Christopher Bond, scenarist Joshua St. Johnston gave Todd an explanatory backstory: he suffered as a child in Newgate debtors’ prison, so his first victim is an evil jailer. Ray Winstone plays Todd as oddly impassive, though his motivation for serializing his bloodlust is jealousy of the young boy friends of appetitive Mrs. Lovett (Essie Davis). It’s an arresting production in all, but without Sondheim’s score the story feels shrimped down; the opera is social, political, epic. By its end, with the stage all but soaked in death, we’re exhausted. But when the BBC version ends, we’re simply puzzled. “Why did you do it?” the chief investigator asks Todd: “I must know.” But all Todd says is “Because I could … and then … I couldn’t not.” So he doesn’t know any more than we do.

Sondheim buffs treasure the first
Merrily We Roll Along
album (Victor), but the two-disc sets representing the expanded score of the revision(s) tell us more about Frank, who is, after all, the protagonist. Comparable to
Company
’s Robert in the emphasis on his friendships and a certain air of mystery, Frank has not emerged as a great actor’s challenge, as Robert has. But then he lacks a “Being Alive,” a finish, because
Merrily
’s reverse chronology makes a climactic number impossible; the show climaxes at eight o’clock, not ten-thirty. On Jay, Maria Friedman’s intensity makes Mary almost the lead with a very dramatic cast from a staging in Leicester, while Colin Donnell, an excellent Frank for Encores! (PS), is let down by a mostly soggy group. Maybe it’s time to stop casting Charlie as a nebbish and let a Pippin play him. Kyle Dean Massey or Bobby Steggart in horn rims is what Kaufman and Hart had in mind for that character in the first place. As with
Pacific Overtures
, the original
Merrily
can be found online if you know where to look.

Sunday in the Park With George
’s two recordings mislead us because of their scoring. The original cast (Victor) was beefed up with a large string section, and the 2005 London staging (PS), another of those chic chicklet mountings, went with a tiny chamber pit. Even with two instruments added for the recording, the sound is feeble. But the DVD (Image) took the show down exactly as it was originally performed and is thus the only record of how the music sounded. Of course, this very visual piece must be seen to be savored, and, further, the pairing of Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters gives us a typical Sondheim couple: the guy is crazy and the girl is dependently independent. It’s Hapgood and the Nurse of
Anyone Can Whistle
,
Follies
’ Ben and Phyllis, a crimeless Todd and Mrs. Lovett.
Passion
switches the genders.

Into the Woods
. Here, once again, we have a DVD of the original staging (Image), though the London production, directed by Richard Jones in designer Richard Hudson’s wall of doorways that suggested the inside of a cuckoo clock, made much more of the blithely dire atmosphere of the traditional fairy tale. In New York, the characters looked like New Yorkers in costumes; in London, they looked like illustrations from an antique volume of Grimm. The London production was also funnier than New York. At one point, Julia McKenzie’s Witch came up through the floor to her waist, in a little outfit that made her legs about two inches long, to prolonged laughter in the house. The London cast album (Victor) is also a humdinger in sheer sound, as Jonathan Tunick’s scoring comes through with all Sondheim’s niche underthemes intact. Note, too, the interpolation of a new song, “Our Little World,” for the Witch and Rapunzel, to explore the show’s central motif of the rapport between parents and children. Unlike some other Sondheim additions for London (such as
Follies
’ “Country House” and
Assassins
’ “Something Just Broke”), it sits comfortably in the compositional style of the rest of the score.

Into the Woods
’ 2002 Broadway revival (Nonesuch), led by Vanessa Williams, makes small changes here and there and allows both Princes to double as wolves (the new Wolf plays opposite the Three Little Pigs). But why doesn’t Williams put on a “wicked” voice as the Witch, before her transformation? This show is partly about the lack of security in human relationships. In Rodgers and Hammerstein, stability is threatened, then reclaimed. In Sondheim, there is no stability. It seems only logical that the driver of
Into the Woods
’ plot start as one thing (the evil Witch—and she should sound like one) then turn into something completely different (a glamor goddess). Anything can happen in the woods: that’s the problem.