On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (7 page)

And there’s the lawyer she knew years before—who happens to be the love of her life.

Instantly, the action feezes while, in their thoughts, lawyer and actress connect once again. But now the Liebeslieder group takes the stage to tell us, in effect, what these two old friends are thinking, or what they should be thinking if they were wise enough to comprehend love and its discontents. “Remember?” one of the quintet sings. “Remember?” asks another. They get a song out of it, the music caroling merrily away as lawyer and actress pensively revisit that most fatal territory in the Sondheim geography, the past.

“Remember?” is broken into sections and intercut with narrative-driving dialogue scenes as the young wife, disturbed by the actress’s apparent familiarity with her husband, flees the theatre and this only technically married couple returns home. They’re just in time to miss an arresting turn of plot: the lawyer’s son and housemaid have just cut off a failed sexual union of their own.

The question of sexual congruity—not just who loves but who
needs
—is elemental in
A Little Night Music
, and now the Liebeslieder group buttons up the sequence with a last bit of “Remember?.” The rhyme scheme runs from “through” to “flu,” and now, as the actress’ rooms appear, she herself holding a glass of beer and eating a sandwich, the five so to say “concept” singers finish their analysis with an ironic “I’m sure it was—you.”

That last word is key, for the entire show asks us if we can ever know who “you” is. Why have the lawyer and actress, so well made for each other, been separated for fourteen years? Why is the lawyer married to a near-child who is in fact in love with the lawyer’s son? Why is the actress involved with a selfish lout without an ounce of culture or intellect? In a traditional musical, the lawyer or actress might have had a nostalgic solo reviewing their affair—or perhap a duet in which each tells a different story about the same events. It takes a concept musical to slip in a “Remember?,” liquidating the very notion of romance, of our ability to comprehend it. Instead of learning only what the characters know about themselves, we learn much more: what the
authors
know about the world.

And that is the concept musical in a nutshell. It doesn’t simply tell the story: it dissects the story. Thus, the public gets two Sondheim shows in one—what happened and what it means, complete with startling theatrical gestures and the characters’ occasionally revealing that they know they’re in a play.

This is the art of Sondheim, but also that of Prince. The key transitional show between the first concept musical,
Allegro
, and Sondheim’s own
Allegro
s is Kander and Ebb’s aforementioned
Cabaret
, which Prince not only produced but directed.
Cabaret
takes place in two distinct worlds. One is a humdrum “real life” in Weimar Germany and the other the magical cabaret itself, which comments on the real-life story in songs comic and biting. Thus, Nazi Jew-hatred is mocked in “If They Could See Her Through My Eyes,” the lament of a man in love with a socially incorrect female … a gorilla. But never fear: “She doesn’t look Jewish at all,” he sings at the end, for the concept musical often disturbs the average theatregoer’s comfort zone, another reason why the Sondheim-Prince titles dismayed some of the public at first.

Each of
Cabaret
’s two worlds counts its own inhabitants. The cabaret offers a sycophantic court led by the mischievous Emcee, while the real-life figures are middle class and self-defining. Only one character moves freely between the two spheres—the enchantingly peculiar Sally Bowles, who takes part in a real-life romance but also entertains on the cabaret stage, where nothing is real, especially life.

Because the concept musical is mercurial as a rule, ever renovating the genre, each concept show devises new ways to tweak format, and
Cabaret
’s best innovation occurs when, near the end, Sally sings the title number. At first, we take it for her club act. But then, in the original production, a curtain of streamers fell behind her, cutting her off from the cabaret, from everywhere. “Come to the cabaret,” she urged: hide from reality. The show had melted, so to say, into its message, though Sally was articulating the opposite of the evening’s theme. It was a warning by irony and, at the same time, a dramatic stunt, a coup. And its communication lay as much in how it was staged as in what it was saying. That’s how the concept musical works.

Here’s another example, moving back to Sondheim’s works.
Sweeney Todd
uses an eerie ballad as its theme song to frame the evening and supply transitions between scenes. A realistic musical might include such a piece, but it would have to be sung by a miscellaneous ensemble, representing an out-of-story guide, comparable to a novel’s omniscient narrator.
Sweeney Todd
, however, gives us its theme song in concept style, mixing the leads in with the chorus and thus letting them relate data to the audience that their characters do not have access to. Using a kind of Brechtian meta-theatre, the concept musical allows its players to slip into and out of character, so the last rendition of the ballad is given by the entire company, the principals stepping forward from where they were when the storytelling ended. They’re thus still in costume, yet not strictly in chime with their roles. They’re “ensemble” now, a concept crew. At the ballad’s last line, they turn to race offstage, except the two stars, originally Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury. One has been a deranged serial killer, the other his accomplice—and both just got killed. But now they’ve become actors in an epilogue.

Or have they? They appear still in character, she ambivalent in some hard to describe way and he as intense as ever. Rounding off the ballad, they, too, quit this very high-tech playing area, this reality puppet show. It’s over, right? No: in a concept musical, it isn’t over till the lights go out. At the last moment, they turn and, as the script indicates, “exchange a look.” But, as Prince directed it, what Cariou and Lansbury shared was not just the ending of a play but the spirit of solipsistic savagery that had been guiding it almost from the first scene. Lansbury went offstage right and Cariou straight upstage through a doorway. As he disappeared, he glared at the public while slamming the door behind him. It’s a promise: “I’ll be back!”

As with so much of modern play production—Peter Brook’s work comes to mind—that final gesture of defiance caps the show’s excitement in general. It puts a final button on the style of the production: it
feels
right. Art can be studied or improvisational; Sondheim is studied, eloquent in explaining what his music is meant to accomplish in specific detail. In an interview with Eddie Shapiro for his book
Nothing Like a Dame
, Donna Murphy recalled Sondheim giving notes on
Passion
: “Rarely was something just a musical note; it was about this whole life behind … why it was a quarter note, or … the tempo would be faster because she was closer to orgasm, and then [Sondheim] was going to pull [the tempo] back.

On the other hand, Prince is more instinctive, improvisational
naïve
, in Friedrich Schiller’s famous terminology, rather than
sentimental
. That is, Prince is at one with nature (or as much nature as contemporary Manhattan offers) and creates out of an unexamined urge rather than an articulated purpose. Sondheim, on the contrary, is the sentimental artist, seeking to reconnect with nature. In other words, Prince works within the world as he “feels” it. Sondheim examines the world from the outside, to claim a place in it. Prince is the smooth, Sondheim the rough.

This presents a kind of friendly antagonism, a chemistry that explodes in the rich theatricality of their shows. It may explain why the five Sondheim-Prince titles of the 1970s give us so much to think about. They have resonance and honesty but also the classic’s interior contradictions that keep us enthralled. If God is love, why is
The Divine Comedy
obsessed with ghastly punishment? Is Don Quixote a lunatic or a visionary? How did the senior Karamazov end up with sons so different from each other—a prude, a hysteric, a priest? Why doesn’t Wotan simply keep the Nibelung’s ring?

Don’t we have comparable questions about
Company
?
Follies
? The marvelous friction between Sondheim’s calculated playwrighting and Prince’s intuitive producing—in effect, their Harold Bloomian Chaos—certainly brought something new to the musical, for most preceding masterpieces, such as
Show Boat
and
Carousel
, were conceived and executed in harmonious circumstances.
^*
Then, too, such shows came along at a time when everyone agreed on what a musical
was
. By the time of Sondheim-Prince, the musical had become so protean that there was disagreement on the very purposes of the form and how it should comport itself. This is why the term “concept musical” lost its meaning so quickly: today, there is no single definition even of what constitutes a musical, period.

It is only fair to note that Prince hates the whole “concept musical” thing. It seemed to paste a brag on his work that he had never intended, creating, he says, a “backlash” from those who felt uneasy at these shows and were looking for something to blame them for. Further, and to repeat, Sondheim hates the theatre of Bertolt Brecht and would not be caught dead letting anything “Brechtian” occur in his works. “The cartoonish characters and polemic dialogue,” he wrote in the second volume of his collected lyrics, are “for me, insufferably simplistic.”

Nevertheless, Brecht and the concept musical share qualities we think of as thrilling—moments when a play seems to crash off the stage into our imagination, creating a realism beyond theatre and, simultaneously, a theatre beyond realism.

Think of that scene in Brecht’s
Mother Courage
when the protagonist’s younger son is executed (offstage) because, instead of ransoming him for the demanded price, she tried to bargain. Now he is dead, and, worse, when they bring his corpse in, she must pretend that she doesn’t know who he is. Brecht’s stage directions say only that she shakes her head, but in the playwright’s own production for the Berliner Ensemble, the Mother Courage—Brecht’s wife, Helene Weigel—let out a silent scream, an O of despair so titanic it could not be given voice. This bit of, as they used to call it, “business” has achieved a bullet point in the annals of post-Stanislafsky stagecraft, a kind of stylized naturalism that takes one’s breath away. There is nothing simplistic about it. Still, it is absolute Brecht, confronting the audience with his worldview while stimulating it with honesty.

Sondheim gives us something comparable in
Follies
, when the four leads have been showing off in a private Follies of their own, one gala number after another … till the last of the four, leading a hat-and-cane strut with the chorus, blows his lines, shakes, stutters, and finally breaks down as the show retreats from him, liquidating itself as his own sense of self dissolves.

Now, for the first moments of all this, spectators new to
Follies
think it’s the actor, not the character, who has lost his way, and thus are hurled into the drama, sharing his terror. Because, in the world of Sondheim-Prince, anyone who struts is a fraud: strutting is a mark of confidence, and the naturalism of Sondheim’s musicals insists that everyone of talent or intelligence is either ambivalent or in denial.

^*
Nobody realizes how incoherent
Show Boat
is, because coherence was not an issue for audiences when it was new, in 1927, and from the 1940s on it has been seen in homogenizing revisions. It now appears to be a musical play of the Rodgers and Hammerstein type, though its genre is more precisely musical comedy with the soul of a spoken play and the heart of an operetta. And then there’s “Ol’ Man River,” a genre in itself.

^*
Agnes de Mille directed as well choreographed the show, but during the Boston tryout Hammerstein stepped in as unbilled play doctor.
She
said it was because his script revisions were too last-minute for her to function effectively.
He
said she wasn’t up to the job.

^†
Seeking Kaufman’s permission to perform the show at Williams, Sondheim sent Kaufman the script encased in a heavy binder. Kaufman gave his assent and returned the script without the binder, presumably because it didn’t fit inside the envelope he used. Many years later, Sondheim amused himself by making an issue of this with Kaufman’s daughter, Anne, who dutifully went shopping for the nicest binder she could find. Protecting the family name, she then sent this prize to Sondheim. By return note, he joked, “It’s about time.”

^*
After presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie’s bestseller of 1943,
One World
, which became the focus of a movement hoping to install a global social and legal administration—which of course ultimately took form as the United Nations.