On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (8 page)

^*
Brahms used a two-piano accompaniment, and the show alludes to this by starting and ending with one of the Liebeslieder men hitting a few keys on a stage piano.

^*
Show Boat
’s producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, harried the authors with demands for more laughs but otherwise let them alone.
Carousel
saw a bit of static between its director, Rouben Mamoulian, and choreographer, Agnes de Mille, because he had a musical sensibility and she was territorial. Both wanted to lead the band.

Sondheim’s Shows

Saturday Night

Lighthearted musical comedy on the traditional American theme of Be Yourself, unproduced, 1954. Premiere England, 1997.

Based on an unproduced play,
Front Porch in Flatbush
, by Philip G. and Julius J. Epstein.

Music and lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: Julius Epstein.

After Sondheim’s apprentice musicals in his college years,
Saturday Night
was the work planned to effect his entrée on Broadway. The action, set on three successive Saturday nights, tells of young Brooklynites trying out courtship tactics while one of the boys, seeking to aggrandize himself, gets into legal trouble. The Epstein brothers, known primarily for screenplays (including
Casablanca
), based their reckless protagonist on a third Epstein sibling, using a figure popular in American art, the lovable rogue. This particular one is obsessed with success as a style: getting ahead is what a smart young gentleman
does
, like knowing how to dress or when to tip.

The show’s producer, Lemuel Ayers, was one of Broadway’s major set and costume designers. His credits took in dazzling work on
Song of Norway
,
Bloomer Girl
,
My Darlin’ Aida
, and
Kismet
, and he had produced (and designed) two Cole Porter shows,
Kiss Me, Kate
and
Out of This World
, truly spectacular-looking productions. Ayers had put on straight plays as well, but he saw
Front Porch in Flatbush
as a musical—possibly a second
Guys and Dolls
(1950), imbued with the argot and character of a lowdown New York subculture. It was an out-of-character project for Ayers, who concentrated on period shows with opportunities for high-toned vocalism; the six shows cited before
Guys and Dolls
above were virtually all operettas or operetta-related. But then, Ayers had just handled the sets and costumes for
The Pajama Game
(1954), a contemporary working-class piece utterly lacking in show-off optics or legit singing, and it turned out a smash. Frank Loesser had written
Guys and Dolls
’ songs, and Ayers wanted Loesser for
Saturday Night
. However, Loesser was busy with (immediately) Samuel Goldwyn’s
Hans Christian Andersen
movie and (in the long range)
The Most Happy Fella
. So Sondheim got the job, the show to open during the 1955–56 season (which turned out a poor one for musicals, though
My Fair Lady
arrived in March).

It is tempting to speculate on how
Saturday Night
would have affected Sondheim’s career if the show had been produced after all. And it’s especially intriguing to meet the composer-lyricist on his first professional outing, twenty-four years old and eager to assert himself, working in a form he never returned to, traditional multi-scene musical comedy using more or less simple character motivations to drive the plot and unambiguous character songs to expand it emotionally. Later Sondheim shows aren’t traditional anything, and his characters struggle with neurotic problems, just as people in the audience do.

Thus,
Saturday Night
is something of an homage to the fantasy world of musical comedies like, say,
The Gingham Girl
and
Good News!
, both from the 1920s,
Saturday Night
’s time setting. Such shows inhabit an essentially carefree world. People know who they are, and their only problem is usually romantic and temporary, though
The Gingham Girl
’s heroine wants to build a cookie business and the college students of
Good News!
obsess over the Big Game.

Saturday Night
’s anti-hero, Gene, knows who he is, but restively, unhappily. A runner on Wall Street, he has access to the world of the rich and social, yet only as an outsider. He wants in. To explain him to us, Sondheim gives him one of the most basic implements in the musical’s toolbox, the Wanting Song. Gene’s is “Class,” set to a mildly cocky swagger and, endearingly, showing how little Gene actually knows about the usages of the great world, as when he pictures himself stylishly ordering “a large demitasse.” There’s a key line in this number, on that very American notion that a commoner can be king. Gene understands that there may be some alchemy involved, but he thinks it’s all exterior—clothes and manners. He has contempt for “some people” who are happy buying a bit of this and that “on the installment plan.” Not Gene. What he is is useless to him: “I want to be what I can!”

Interestingly, “Some People,” the Wanting Song of Madam Rose,
Gypsy
’s anti-heroine, expresses similar hopes. But to Rose, it isn’t about style. It’s about determination. Gene’s worldview is materialistic: he wants to be rich. Rose’s worldview is artistic: she wants to be famous.

And that’s not a joke. Whether in
Saturday Night
, the much darker
Gypsy
, or the naturalistically fantastical shows of the Sondheim-Prince era, the songs are a portal into the meaning of the piece. That wasn’t true of
The Gingham Girl
or
Good News!
. These two “Some people” songs drive their respective shows’ plot momentum even as they observe character, especially of the pushy and selfish but all the same spectacular Rose. Her lyrics reveal that she thinks renown is synonymous with guts. If you’re famous, it
is
art.
Saturday Night’s
“Class,” however, gives us an unspectacular fellow, even something of a loser.

But then,
Saturday Night
’s characters are strictly from the neighborhood. Later, Sondheim will give us jazzy New Yorkers, fairy-tale folk, even John Wilkes Booth and Squeaky Fromme.
Saturday Night
’s crew, by contrast, lacks color. The show is plotty, as fifties musical comedies tended to be, but these boys and girls of Flatbush are believable to a fault: dull. Sondheim enlivens them in the opening title number, as one of them plays a ragtime piano solo to punch up a humdrum situation: four dateless guys hoping for a hook-up. And “In the Movies” allows two girls to make ironic remarks on the difference between Hollywood scenarios and real life. Hollywood is self-sacrificing mothers and Rudolph Valentino; real life is this musical.

It was daring, really: to confront sexy, zany, rowdy musical comedy—in the age of
Wonderful Town
,
Can-Can
, and
Damn Yankees
—with a taste of the ordinary. Perhaps that was why no producer offered to take over the project when Lemuel Ayers suddenly died, of leukemia. In 1960, however, after working with Sondheim on
Gypsy
, Jule Styne (a producer as well as composer, who co-presented four musicals written by others out of sheer enthusiasm for talent) decided to resuscitate
Saturday Night
. Grateful but uneasy, Sondheim went along with it till the audition stage, when, feeling that his compositional level had outstripped what he was capable of six years before, he halted the proceedings. This reveals an important aspect of Sondheim’s art: his musical style ceaselessly evolves, and he finds it difficult to return creatively to ancient history.

When
Saturday Night
was finally given an airing, in 1997 at the small Bridewell Theatre in London, the score revealed Sondheim glowing with melody and as clever as one can be while justifying the characters’ narrow cultural background. Chicago saw the show in 1999, and it finally reached New York in 2000 (some forty-five years late), at an off-Broadway house, the Second Stage Theatre, scored by Sondheim’s usual orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, and with a Broadway-level cast.

The work went over very well, and it’s amusing to see Sondheim composing those “hummable” tunes that his detractors love to accuse him of never writing. On the other hand,
Saturday Night
’s uncomplicated characters seem to need endearing melody of a basic kind, and when a band vocalist solos on “Love’s a Bond,” one feels the tune could almost—mind you, I say
almost
—slip into a
Good News!
revival without vexing the soundscape. Later, when Sondheim composes for the troubled leads of
Follies
or the demented creatures of
Sweeney Todd
, the music grows more textured.

Unfortunately, this air of all too ordinary lives having a bit of adventure handicaps
Saturday Night
and keeps it from taking a major place in the Sondheim oeuvre. And, as for speculation about how it might have fared on Broadway in the mid-1950s, I don’t believe it would have succeeded, because it was so unlike the other musicals of that time. They were big, with singing and dancing choruses, lots of scenery, and a rota of big-deal production numbers.
Saturday Night
has no chorus, its decor is modest, and there is little opportunity for exhibition dancing. Today, we are used to offbeat musicals—even those that, like
Saturday Night
, are unconventionally conventional, doing the usual things in a unique way. But critics and the public of the 1950s would have been skeptical. It might have harmed Sondheim’s career, so it is just as well that it didn’t turn up till much later: because, with no
Saturday Night
in the counting, Sondheim’s first three Broadway shows were all hits.

West Side Story

Gesamtkunstwerk
on gang violence, 1957.

Suggested by Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
.

Music: Leonard Bernstein. Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: Arthur Laurents.

Original Leads: Larry Kert, Carol Lawrence, Chita Rivera. Director: Jerome Robbins.

Experimental artwork doesn’t usually attract a mass audience, but
West Side Story
is one of the most popular American musicals, even if it took the movie adaptation (1961) to win the piece its national public. All the same, Sondheim at first wanted no part of it: a composer doesn’t write lyrics to someone else’s music. As I’ve said, Oscar Hammerstein urged him to take advantage of this opportunity to work with top talent, for besides composer Bernstein and librettist Laurents there was director-choreographer Jerome Robbins (working with co-choreographer Peter Gennaro). Designers Oliver Smith (for the sets) and Irene Sharaff (for the costumes) were high on the go-to list themselves, though one wonders how important clothing design was in a show about kids who run around in jeans and T-shirts. Further, this was Sondheim’s first professional union with Hal Prince, the show’s co-producer with his usual partner, Robert E. Griffith. The credits thus bulged with talent to an embarrassing degree, and daddy knows best, so Sondheim signed on.

West Side Story
was originally to have treated hostilities between Roman Catholic and Jewish gangs, as
East Side Story
—but had there ever been organized tribal violence of that kind? A Catholic-Jewish gang war? It sounds imaginary, and the authors gave up on it till the news started to tell of antagonism between natives and immigrant Hispanics in Los Angeles. Suddenly, a modern retelling of the war between Shakespeare’s Capulet and Montague clans seemed naturalistic.

Yet the show took on a dreamlike quality, a very romanticized naturalism. One reason was its heavy reliance on dance. Granted, the era’s musicals were saturated with choreography. Yet somehow the way Robbins and Gennaro laid out the routines united movement and narrative as seldom before. Perhaps it was because this above all youthful story kept erupting in the extroverted energy of the young, whether in the joyous “Dance at the Gym” or “The Rumble,” when the Jets and Sharks met in combat and the first-act curtain fell on a stage decorated with two corpses—the most shocking curtain to that point in the musical’s history.

Then, too, musicals of the day juggled a succession of sets alternating from full-stage views to forestage views with sometimes cumbersome mechanical transitions, while
West Side Story
moved almost cinematically from view to view. The full stage was almost always in use, with smaller sets rolled on for the alleys, a bridal shop, a bedroom. Thus, there were none of the stop-and-start hiccups of the usual production; this gave
West Side Story
a unique air of suspense and inevitability as it charged from event to event.