On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (4 page)

But of course the music wasn’t meant to be heard outside its theatrical setting. It’s narrative tissue, psychologically dense because the shows are. Some musicals are revived because we love the scores:
Show Boat
,
Finian’s Rainbow
,
La Cage aux Folles
. Sondheim’s shows are revived because they’re so rich in content that we never quite collect them. We need to see them again just to figure them out.
Company
: marriage robs you of your freedom … and your isolation.
Follies
: why must beautiful youth end in bitter age?
A Little Night Music
: half the world are fools and the other half fall in love and
become
fools.
Pacific Overtures
: a lesson in the transformations of history.
Sweeney Todd
: opera ennobles all its people, even a ragbag nobody who becomes a serial killer. It sounds too tidy to parse them thus, so clear to the view. And, indeed, the development of those themes and procedures is rich, with all the why?s and excepts that we experience in life.

Now for a bit of analysis. The most influential series of shows in the musical’s developments are:

The Ned Harrigan-Tony Hart Irish farces of the 1880s, emphasizing immigrant New York as a setting and a style.

The Princess Theatre shows of the late 1910s, natural rather than exotic and boasting the innovatively clever songs of Jerome Kern and P. G. Wodehouse.

The Alex Aarons-Vinton Freedley musical comedies of the 1920s, built around a star performer and a star score (usually by the Gershwins).

Twenties operetta, in which the score was completely at the story’s service.

The Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein musical play of the 1940s and 1950s, reinventing operetta with adult storylines.

The Sondheim-Prince shows of the 1970s.

Note that the consistently evolving element in the list is the power of the narrative. Aarons-Freedley musical comedy is silly, but Rodgers and Hammerstein seek out “big” characters in spiky confrontations over serious issues. And when Sondheim adds to this format the slithery conjugations of his “playwrighting” scores, the musical blends entertainment into enlightenment.

Let’s tack a bit to the academic side. The late seventeenth to early eighteenth century Italian historian Giambattista Vico, in his
Scienza Nuova
, saw human events as cyclic, moving from a Theocratic Age through an Aristocratic Age to a Democratic Age, thence to an upheaval ushering in the next Theocratic Age, and so on. More recently, the literary critic Harold Bloom revised Vico’s paradigm for his study of Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Kafka, and others in
The Western Canon
. Bloom proposed an Aristocratic Age, a Democratic Age, and then a Chaotic Age. Ours. And we can, very loosely, apply this to the history of the American musical. The first age favors icons—
Evangeline
,
Adonis
, fairies, royalty. It is the time of
Robin Hood
,
The Shogun
,
The Three Musketeers
. Meanwhile, the Democratic Age has been stealing in, with feisty working-girl heroines and ambitious, up-from-nothing young lads—
The Girl Friend
,
Babes in Arms
,
The Pajama Game
.

And the Chaotic Age came in with Sondheim-Prince, for their offbeat subject matter creates offbeat forms, superseding the musical’s handbook as it had been developing for some hundred years and thus unsettling less adventurous spectators. Thus,
Company
is constructed of little one-acts, each with its own tiny storyline. In one, a married couple gets on each other’s nerves with goading little teases till the tension explodes in a mock karate battle. In another, the show’s unmarried hero enjoys a one-night stand until he realizes it might last more than one night.
Company
is a puzzle and these are some of its pieces; when all the pieces are assembled, they give us a narrative by other means. Yes, there is a sort of beginning (the hero is happy as a bachelor), middle (or is he?), and end (he’s finally ready for marriage), but they are not clearly demarcated. They are in
My Fair Lady
: the beginning (Higgins will “reclass” Eliza), the middle (she fails at Ascot but Succeeds at the Embassy Ball; they fight; she flees), the end (she returns). Or even in the plotless
A Chorus Line
: the beginning (“I hope I get it”), the middle (confessions), the end (“Will the following people please step forward?”).
Company
, however, is very free in form—or, rather, it is strict in form, but in a form that didn't exist before
Company
. As we’ll presently see, Sondheim-Prince is, above all, wholly original.

Innovation in a form that some people still believed was ontologically intended to provide nothing but amusement was bound to prove divisive. Sondheim often tells a story that takes us back to
West Side Story
, at the start of his professional experience. Standing at the back of the orchestra on the second night of the New York run, he saw a man get up and leave a few minutes into the opening, a ballet of rival gangs, before even a note had been sung. Seeing Sondheim and assuming he was connected with the production, the man told him, “Don’t ask.”

And Steve knew immediately what had happened. This was the Tired Businessman of Broadway lore; he thought he’d drop in on a musical before heading home to the suburbs. He didn’t know anything about
West Side Story
itself, but the poster photograph of Tony and Maria running down a Manhattan street looked happy, and this was, after all, the 1950s, when newspaper columnists touted what they called “musigirl” shows—
Top Banana
,
Wish You Were Here
,
Can-Can
,
Ankles Aweigh
,
Li’l Abner
. And instead this guy gets weird jazzy riffs, unsettling syncopations, teenage hoods snapping their fingers and snarling when they aren’t leaping about like angry lizards. Then came the racial aspect, as a rival gang of Latinos challenged the white boys … and the tired businessman departed for Roslyn Heights.

And, says Sondheim, “That’s when I knew my career was in trouble.”

Of course,
West Side Story
was a hit. Overcapitalized at $300,000,
^*
it made a profit (according to its co-producer, Hal Prince, in his book
Contradictions
) of $1,090,000.
Company
and
A Little Night Music
, says Prince, were profitable in their first runs, too, if considerably less so. But critics and public were—again, at first—ambivalent about Sondheim’s shows. Even as they realized how stimulating and original these musicals were, their inner Tired Businessman longed for that old-fashioned show business in which, whatever else happens—despair, murder, the collapse of a democracy in a feudal epoch—the public has a guiltless good time. Thus, while the fresh rehearing of “Too Many Mornings” or “The Little Things You Do Together” in
Side By Side By Sondheim
reintroduced theatregoers to the music’s charm, Sondheim still had to persuade the public to think more expansively about his shows as wholes.

But then, why shouldn’t they? The cultural upheaval of the American 1960s affected virtually everything—how people regarded social clichés of class, gender, and sexuality; how they dressed; what they expected from the arts.
Psycho
,
Dr. Strangelove
,
Bonnie and Clyde
,
The Graduate
, and many other films marked a breakaway from Hollywood’s entertainment models, and rock had unseated theatre songs as the national music. Sondheim-Prince offered Broadway’s equivalent of all this, albeit on its own terms, as a kind of liberation of the musical.

Sondheim felt liberated personally: more relaxed. He could be tense with fools, easily irritated; he was less so now. On the other hand, he had always been reluctant to get into the fights that punctuate the rehearsal and tryout periods of every show, especially the musical. Some love a fight—Jerome Robbins, for instance. If there wasn’t a scrap in service, he’d provoke one. Some hate a fight but will battle to defend their place in a production. But where does a legitimate argument over art end and a plain old hard-on contest begin? When
Sweeney Todd
premiered in London, at Drury Lane, British television ran a documentary on the piece, including “reality” footage of the rehearsals. At one point, John Aron, playing the barber Pirelli—Todd’s first victim—learned that his only musical number was to be cut in half, and, with the camera whirring away, Aron and Prince got into some good old backstage geschrei. Typically, Sondheim was nowhere to be seen during this sequence. If a problem can’t be solved in something like a civil tone, he simply moves off the battlefield till order is restored.

Growing comfortable with success in the 1970s, Sondheim adapted to the times. Candid photos of Steve with Bernstein and Robbins during
West Side Story
’s gestation show the debutant smartly turned out in jacket and tie; by the 1970s, he favored casual wear. Further, Sondheim became a magnet for anyone interested in the musical, the leader of the pack. In a novel published in 1977, James Fritzhand’s
Starring
, five characters are seen launching careers in show business, and each is an
à clef
figure. Suzann Jaffe is clearly Barbra Streisand; Fritzhand gives us precisely turned counterparts for her first Broadway show,
I Can Get It For You Wholesale
. Its garment-center setting creates Jaffe’s credit,
Seventh Avenue
, and even
Wholesale
’s composer-lyricist, Harold Rome, as Earl Milan, is given replicas of his work:
Destry Rides Again
turns up as
The Sheriff Was a Lady
.

Of course Fritzhand would make one of his leads a young songwriter, and of course he would be modeled on Sondheim. The character is Philip Ehrlich, more Sondheimesque in his professional life—
Company
shows up in the book as
Singles
—than in his offstage identity. For instance, Fritzhand doesn’t mention the most famous personal aspect of the Sondheim life, his love of games, from anagrams and those extra-tricky British crossword puzzles to treasure hunts with all of Manhattan as the hunting field.

One thing Fritzhand did get to was Sondheim’s sexuality: Philip Ehrlich is gay. Sondheim was closeted at this time, as was his most notable predecessor as Broadway composer-lyricist, Cole Porter. Indeed, Porter even married, albeit to an older woman who did not share his love of wicked fun; a hypochondriac, Linda Lee Porter was really only happy in an iron lung. Also unlike Sondheim, Porter slipped encoded double meanings into his lyrics, as when
Kiss Me, Kate
’s “Too Darn Hot” cites the attraction of “a marine for his queen.” Too, Porter favored the steamier sort of musical, not just musigirl but musiboy.
Jubilee
, about a royal family off on a madcap vacation, included a Tarzan figure called Mowgli who made his entrance in a peekaboo bearskin and attended a costume party wearing little more than makeup and sandals as an oversized Cupid.

Sondheim’s shows through
Merrily We Roll Along
hadn’t a trace of gay in them, even if
West Side Story
’s Riff is drawn from Shakespeare’s Mercutio, arguably Romeo’s former adolescent crush. In truth, there were so few gay characters in the musical before, say, the 1980s that they stand out—at that, less as milestones than as newer incarnations of the ethnic stereotypes that thronged musicals of the very early 1900s. In 1941, Danny Kaye played a flaming magazine photographer in
Lady in the Dark
, openly raving over a beefcake movie star with “This one is the end—the
end
!” In his
Times
review, Brooks Atkinson daintied his way around this flamboyant exhibit by calling Kaye “infectiously exuberant,” a euphemism if I ever heard one.

Fourteen years later, Ray Walston’s devil in
Damn Yankees
seemed distinctly minty by the attitudes of the era: a single man living in opulent interior decoration and up to devious manipulations with the aid of a sexy woman whom he goads into seducing a vulnerable young man—an amalgam of Truman Capote and Roy Cohn. By comparison,
Applause
, in 1970, seemed liberated in letting Lee Roy Reams play Lauren Bacall’s personal assistant with no more than a soupçon of swish. The tipping point arrived in 1983, with a gay honeymooning couple in
Dance a Little Closer
and, pièce de resistance,
La Cage aux Folles
, featuring gay parents who had raised a son.

Sondheim’s shows have so often dealt in period tales (especially of the nineteenth century) that they defy trendy accommodations. But the vivaciously contemporary
Company
eventually had to slip a bit of gay content into one scene to avoid seeming prim, even specious.
A Little Night Music
’s libretto bears an unmistakable gay flavor (about which more later). And Sondheim’s latest work,
Road Show
, has two gay principals. Still, the disparate nature of Sondheim’s shows so textures his output that one doesn’t think of them as “missing” a particular identity group. It’s not that these titles are heterocentric: it’s that they’re all different from each other, and rarified in their dramatis personae.
Company
is a Zeitgeist musical, sharp and hip. But the next piece,
Follies
, is a show-biz phantasmagoria. Then
A Little Night Music
is a romance, so
Pacific Overtures
is an epic and
Sweeney Todd
a thriller.