On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (5 page)

And
Sunday in the Park with George
(1984) is a painting—or, really, a navigation through art to discover how the creator relates to the life around him. This work launched Sondheim’s third period. The first covered his years writing lyrics only and composing musical comedies. The second was Sondheim-Prince. And now the third took Sondheim into physically smaller productions than heretofore, mainly with librettist and director James Lapine, pensive and measured where Hal Prince is impulsive and enthusiastic. In Sondheim’s aforementioned
Look, I Made a Hat
, he recalls realizing that his and Lapine’s “tastes [in art] were surprisingly alike.” “Surprisingly” because Lapine’s background lay in—this is Sondheim again—the “off-Broadway nonprofit theater,” and those “nurtured in that protective atmosphere think differently than we Great White Way dinosaurs who were raised in commercial theater do.”

Thus, Harold Bloom’s Chaotic Age seizes the musical, for Sondheim’s description of Lapine really means “experimental.” As the Sondheim-Prince shows were already innovative, the following set was doubly so, though some of the directors (such as Jerry Zaks and Susan Stroman) usually work in conservative precincts. Nevertheless, three of the third-period shows—
Sunday
,
Into the Woods
(1987), and
Passion
(1994)—were not only directed but scripted by Lapine, making him almost as central to this group of shows as the very collaborative (though never actually libretto-writing) Prince was to the previous group.

Then, too, the Lapine aesthetic, which turns a story into a suite of variations, as if that story were a symphonic theme, appears to govern the writing style of even the non-Lapine titles. For example,
Sunday
is about George (Seurat) only at first. Then it tells of a different George altogether, one who is both like and unlike the first George. One is obsessed (about “finishing the hat”: fulfilling the enchantment). The other is drifting. But doesn’t obsession create a loss of place in the world? And doesn’t one drift to avoid obsession, release oneself from enchantment?

Comparably,
Assassins
(1990) with a libretto by not Lapine but John Weidman, considers the differences among various president-killers to unify them: variations in search of a theme. And the theme, at last, is Lee Harvey Oswald.
Road Show
(2008), also by Weidman, is as interested in the vanished America of its two leads, the Mizner brothers, as it is in the two siblings themselves.

This was not true of
Company
,
Follies
, or
Sweeney Todd
of the Prince sequence. Nor was it true of shows written by Steve’s mentor, Oscar Hammerstein. Those works expand. The Lapine-era titles concentrate. The Harold Bloomian Chaos inheres not in any confusion in how these shows play but in their transgressively nonconformist atmosphere, that “nonprofit theater” attitude that Sondheim spoke of earlier. Of these latest Sondheim shows, only
Into the Woods
observes Broadway protocols, at least in its ample dimensions.
Assassins
risks angry controversy in its subject matter;
Passion
dares the unbelievable: beauty learns to love the beast.

Ironically, the more Sondheim challenged the rules for wide commercial acceptance, the more accepted he became. He even got offers from the Coast, a certain sign that a composer has caught the American ear. Lotte Lenya once said, “If you become a legend you must have made your point somewhere,” and we can revise this to “If Hollywood is calling, you’re the Great Gatsby, Gandalf, and the Statue of Liberty.” First it was Warren Beatty, who wanted Sondheim to score his films (though Sondheim preferred to write songs and leave the underscoring to others). Then it was Barbra Streisand, who wanted to record Sondheim songs with a certain amount of hand-crafting by Sondheim, to repurpose his lyrics to suit Streisand’s ID. Thus, Sondheim had attained a position that had never existed before, that of philosopher-king of the American musical, mainly because there was so much content in his shows. Even Oscar Hammerstein was not so exclusively eminent.

So it had to be Sondheim to denounce the American Repertory Theatre’s proposal, in 2011, to stage
Porgy and Bess
in a substantial revision. In a letter to the
New York Times
, Sondheim ripped the ART’s plan to shreds, basing his objections on comments made by the director, Diane Paulus, and the dramaturg, Suzan Lori-Parks. Sondheim’s first criticism was aimed at the billing of the production as “
The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess
,” because it made no mention of co-lyricist Du Bose Heyward, who thought up the novel
Porgy
and then, with his wife, Dorothy, wrote the play
Porgy
that served Gershwin as his matrix. Heyward’s was an essential
Porgy and Bess
credit; to leave him out was to leave George Bernard Shaw out of the credit for
My Fair Lady
.

In fact, the Gershwin estates have been demanding billing that eliminates Du Bose Heyward for a generation. But Sondheim’s more important objection concerned the planned changes to the work itself. “I wanted to flesh out the two main characters,” said Parks. “I think that’s what George Gershwin wanted.” Said Sondheim, “It’s reassuring that Ms. Parks has a direct pipeline to Gershwin and is just carrying out his work for him.” Sondheim’s basic point was that, in an acknowledged masterpiece like
Porgy and Bess
, changes of emphasis (in the staging) are acceptable, but changes of kind (in the text) are not.

This is entirely appropriate behavior for someone who spent most of the 1970s as president of the Dramatists Guild of America, which protects the rights of authors in their dealings with producers and directors. But more: this is loyalty, one of Sondheim’s salient personal qualities. Loyalty to his colleagues, to Hammerstein, to integrity of text, and to
Porgy and Bess
, which Sondheim regards as one of the greatest of all Broadway offerings (and which is, again, a work written for the popular stage along classical lines). And, while we’re at it, do not praise Agnes de Mille to Sondheim, because he recalls a dinner party many years ago in California at which de Mille deliberately spoke ill of Oscar Hammerstein, knowing how important he had been in Steve’s life. We should note, too, that it took Sondheim forever to break with the notoriously obnoxious Arthur Laurents, simply because they had worked together on shows that helped define Sondheim as an artist. And, despite his difficulties with Leonard Bernstein, Sondheim remained close to him on the personal level. Sharing the creation of
West Side Story
made the two more than colleagues: lovers, in the metaphorical sense.

Now in his eighties, Sondheim enjoys an unusual celebrity based entirely on his work, safe from tabloid gotcha!s. Many of his friends were not aware that in the 1990s, he met a young songwriter from Colorado, Peter Jones, and embarked on a romantic liaison. It was not Sondheim’s first such involvement, but his first serious one, succeeded by a second affair, with Jeff Romley.

Before that, Sondheim’s most important relationships were those with his collaborators, liaisons of art—those whom he has learned from and, himself, instructed. Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne, Hal Prince, James Lapine, and above all Oscar Hammerstein. Shortly before he died, Hammerstein gave his photograph to Sondheim, inscribing it, “For Stevie, my friend and teacher.”

^*
Beggar on Horseback
made it to Broadway as a semi-musical in 1970, at Lincoln Center. The original text was retained, but Stanley Silverman and John Lahr musicalized the central dream sequence as a Ziegfeldian pageant that anticipated parts of Sondheim’s
Follies
.

^*
Only very elaborate musicals of the 1950s cost that much.
My Fair Lady
, the most lavish production of the 1950s before
West Side Story
, cost $360,000, and
Saratoga
, the most lavish production of the 1950s after
West Side Story
, cost $480,000. But
West Side Story
didn’t remotely rival their colossal sets-and-costumes bill.

Sondheim’s Mentors and the Concept Musical

When Stephen Sondheim first began visiting Oscar Hammerstein’s farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, the youngster was barely a teenager and Hammerstein was in his late forties. It is hard to imagine anyone who had logged more experience in creating musicals, and very, very good ones at that. He had written or co-written over twenty-five of them, including classic titles. A Hammerstein libretto sought out above all logical opportunities for music-making while keeping its narration sensible; Hammerstein lyrics were so wedded to character that one could follow the action through the songs alone. However, for the decade preceding young Steve’s more or less joining the Hammerstein household, every Hammerstein show had been either a modest success that left no reputation behind or an outright failure.

As I’ve said, Hammerstein was even then collaborating with Richard Rodgers on
Oklahoma!
, the work that would restart Hammerstein’s career, as a master of the “musical play”—neither a fun-filled musical comedy nor a lyrically expansive operetta but a work combining elements of both forms into insightful storytelling based on powerful character interaction. By the time of the final Rodgers and Hammerstein title,
The Sound of Music
(1959), there was scarcely a musical of any kind that hadn’t been influenced by musical-play reforms.

However, Hammerstein had long been engaged in filling the musical with content. For one thing, he was attracted to tales made of genuine conflict, not cute twists and contrived quarrels. For instance, out in North Africa with the French Foreign Legion: what if dashing Margot Bonvalet just isn’t into that geeky Pierre? What if she secretly thrills to the studly hurly-burly of the freedom-fighting Red Shadow? What if the Red Shadow carries her off to his tent of passion? Now she fears the Red Shadow. She longs for Pierre. But what if they’re
the same guy
? That’s
The Desert Song
(1926), which Hammerstein co-wrote, with Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel, to Sigmund Romberg’s music.

Further, Hammerstein was the musical’s first writer to specify character in song lyrics. Pierre sounds prim, his alter ego the Red Shadow comes off as passionate, and Margot sounds sensible with a romantic streak that sometimes overpowers her. The first reason that the famous twenties operettas have survived (if marginally) is the music. But the second is the way Hammerstein pursues the narrative through the music: in
The Desert Song
,
Rose-Marie
,
The New Moon
, and that proto-musical play
Show Boat
. Indeed, Hammerstein is perhaps the musical’s only major lyricist-librettist before
Oklahoma!
who maintained a worldview: have compassion, beware the despotic male, and trust the strong woman, a combination of themes that reached apotheosis in
The King and I
.

Hammerstein has a folksy image, painted in by “Ol’ Man River” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” not to mention the “lark who is learning to pray” in
The Sound of Music
’s title song. Yet the Hammerstein Sondheim knew was sophisticated, not merely intelligent but wise, and quick and sharp in retort. The difference between the man Hammerstein was and the characters Hammerstein wrote about were striking, and never more so than in the third Rodgers and Hammerstein show,
Allegro
. An experimental musical that divided its public into admirers and scoffers,
Allegro
also occasioned young Steve’s first experience in the commercial theatre, when he was still in college. With the show scheduled to play its tryout in September of 1947, Steve was able to spend the latter half of his summer vacation from Williams as a “gofer” during
Allegro
’s rehearsals. Along with
West Side Story
ten years later,
Allegro
was, by Steve’s own admission, “the show which shaped my professional life.”

Arguably the most significant musical that most people have never heard of,
Allegro
tells of a doctor, Joseph Taylor Jr., who is led to seek material success treating rich hypochondriacs. Answering a subconscious call from the small-town people he came from, he suddenly renounces his fancy practice, reclaims his ideals, and heads for home to begin his life anew.

It’s a dangerously ordinary story. Other musicals of 1947 offered more picturesque tales: of a pot of leprechaun gold that grants three wishes (
Finian’s Rainbow
), a ghost village in kilts (
Brigadoon
), Tchaikofsky’s love life, heterosexual in this version (
Music In My Heart
), con men on a madcap rampage in bygone days (
High Button Shoes
). What made
Allegro
special was not its plot but its execution, for Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote it to defy traditional realism. The action took place on a mostly bare stage on which a group of reciter-singers in “chorus” costumes would address both the public and the protagonist as if embodying a bizarre theatrical id. People would die only to reappear, figments of someone’s recollections, and other people would turn up in places they had no physical access to.