On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (14 page)

As with the title song and its dancing villagers, “Bargaining” suggested what
Waltz
might have been like with a more adventurous score. It’s a fine one: but it generally lacks the surprise we get when Sondheim writes the score by himself—the truly unexpected numbers like
Company
’s “The Little Things You Do Together” or
Pacific Overtures
’ “Someone In a Tree.” And after all the devilry of
Forum
and
Whistle
,
Do I Hear a Waltz?
’s lyrics sounded as if, almost, someone else could have written them. It’s Sondheim’s only set that isn’t truly characteristic of what he does.

Sondheim did the show out of generosity rather than out of creative need: as a favor to Mary Rodgers, the composer’s daughter and a longtime Sondheim intimate, and to Arthur Laurents. That was bad enough; worse was the barren partnership with the unyielding and by this time old-fashioned Rodgers, devoid of the inspiration Sondheim would get from people like Jerome Robbins and Hal Prince. In the end,
Waltz
was ordinary by Sondheim standards: “No passion, no blood, and no reason to be” is how he put it in the recent television documentary
Six By Sondheim
.
Waltz
was rich in charm, but charm shows were fading in the 1960s—
The Gay Life
,
She Loves Me
, and
Flora, the Red Menace
were all lovely charm shows, and all failed.

Sondheim moved on, but that’s putting it mildly.
Waltz
was the last show in what we might call his first period, when he at times wrote musicals he didn’t compose himself. No more: and the second period further keynoted Sondheim as the musical’s resident intellectual, writing shows with passion and blood but, even more, ideas. Again, Sondheim calls his scores “playwrighting” because they further action and character development. However, they are also playwrighting because they operate without the “charm” tag once so basic to the musical. Like Shaw or Giraudoux, Sondheim grapples with the human condition and its discontents.

Company

Stream-of-consciousness cross-section of marriage, 1970.

Music and lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: George Furth.

Original Lead: Dean Jones. Director: Hal Prince.

A paradox: Sondheim is the disciple of Oscar Hammerstein, and he grew up in the Rodgers and Hammerstein era. Yet
Company
, arguably the most Sondheim of shows, is the musical that, more than any other, definitively ended the Rodgers and Hammerstein regime, with its straightforward structure made of dialogue scenes that build in power till they burst into song, emotionalizing the characters.
Company
offers songs interfering with dialogue scenes, commenting on them. Sometimes the songs emotionalize an idea rather than a character, and sometimes the songs get mischievous rather than emotional.

Company
is: bachelor Robert, the five couples he pals around with, and his three girl friends—but we can’t anticipate from that simple breakdown where the songs will fall or what they’ll express. More than most musicals,
Company
is a surprise. Three husbands introduce “Sorry-Grateful,” a touching ballad about one’s ambivalence in sharing life, and Robert himself sings “Someone Is Waiting,” another touching ballad. You could have guessed as much. But “The Little Things You Do Together” springs out at us as if from nowhere; its cue is a husband and wife physically fighting. (They’re actually trying out her karate moves. But still.) This number doesn’t specify anyone or guide narrative. It observes. And “The Ladies Who Lunch” is yet more removed from the action. A titanic “je ne regrette rien” from one of the wives, it’s really a specialty spot that momentarily turns
Company
into a revue instead of a story show.

But
Company
isn’t a story show. It isn’t a revue, either. It has a book, and, to complete the paradox, it is very much under the influence of
Allegro
. So
Company
doesn’t end the Rodgers and Hammerstein era? Indeed it does: because
Allegro
was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s UFO, as the French put it.
^*
In their canon,
Allegro
itself defied the Rodgers and Hammerstein genre. That format demands “fourth wall” realism (even in
Carousel
’s closing fantasy scenes), while
Allegro
is gestural theatre, using performers in deliberately unreal ways. Somehow, Hammerstein never could fit all the
Allegro
pieces together successfully, but Sondheim, Furth, producer-director Hal Prince, choreographer Michael Bennett, and set designer Boris Aronson “fixed
Allegro
’s second act” in
Company
. For here was a show that combined all the elements of the musical—in both writing and staging—into a whole as smooth as a pane of glass.

What is
Company
? It’s fast and trim yet something of a saga, a sweeping look at Robert’s life among his dates and coterie, continually asking him, Why are you alone? Now, who exactly is the “company”? Is it Robert’s friends, the couples? Is it his girl friends? Is it the troupe putting on this very show, so unlike the usual ensemble in a musical? Where are the cute boys and girls of the chorus, some superb singers and some superb dancers, cleverly blended together to look like singer-dancers? Prince cast the couples to
look
like couples—lived-in and “real,” not confident show-biz pros or singer-dancers. Or is the company Robert himself, the permanent third wheel in a succession of scenes, the guy who comes over for drinks and chat:
your
company?

It’s an easy role to cast, Robert, but difficult to play. He’s in his thirties, handsome, fit, magnetic: one of the most basic types in the casting pool. However, he is passive in his scenes with the couples while they variously support, provoke, resent, and understand each other. They’re the colorful figures, the energy that drives the show forward. Robert is, by comparison, a mystery. One character likens him to the Seagram Building—impenetrable without x-ray vision—and another says she sometimes catches him “just looking and looking.” They love him, they depend on him, they crowd him, they urge him. In certain ways, Robert is a direct descendant of
Allegro
’s protagonist, Joseph Taylor Jr.—a fine fellow who lets life happen to him instead of creating one for himself.

That is, until
Allegro
’s climax, when, for the first time, Joe Taylor breaks out and chooses the way he wants to live. This moment is likened to a little boy’s learning to walk—his late mother and grandmother appear as they did early in Act One, when little Joey took the first steps of his life. Similarly, Sondheim sees Robert as a youngster, goofing around in life till, at the end of
Company
, in the song “Being Alive,” he attains maturity. In an interview with Robert Sokol in
The Sondheim Review
, Neil Patrick Harris (who played Robert in a New York Philharmonic staging in 2011) said Sondheim told him that
Company
is about “a boy becoming a man.”

In other words, Robert isn’t afraid of commitment: he’s simply enjoying himself in a state of total freedom. Many Sondheim characters live in a form of slavery—frustrated wives in
Follies
and
A Little Night Music
, much of the population of Japan in
Pacific Overtures
, the working class in
Sweeney Todd
, the artist heroes of
Sunday in the Park With George
, Seurat a slave to his art and his great-grandson a slave to the politics and commercialization of art. And
Forum
’s Pseudolus is literally a slave. So Robert is unique, moving with absolute liberty through his world, helping out, refereeing, superintending the recreations. As Harris put it, “He’s sort of a talk-show host.”

Right. But then, as all of
Company
’s information clicks in, Robert realizes that his freedom is compromised by a worrisome solitude. Liberty has become a prison. In “Being Alive,” he asserts a new attitude: now he wants to be half of a union, difficulties be damned. Another of those eleven o’clock songs that, in Sondheim shows, is less a star turn than a moment in which the entire work revolves on its axis and reverses its energy (as in
Gypsy
’s “Rose’s Turn,”
Anyone Can Whistle
’s “With So Little To Be Sure Of,” and
A Little Night Music
’s “Send in the Clowns”), “Being Alive” moves Robert, step by step, with encouragements from his “company” (Joanne’s “You’re not a kid any more”; Amy’s “
Want
something! Want
something
!”), to the realization that he can’t live on friends. He needs romance, a
best
friend … marriage. In John Doyle’s 2006 Cincinnati staging (later seen on Broadway), the performers played the instruments of the reduced orchestration themselves. Robert was the exception—to this moment. For now Raúl Esparza, the Robert, sat at the piano to accompany his own “Being Alive”: a compelling objective-correlative for what is happening in the action. Music is love. Robert plays music for the first time: Robert learns to love.

That may sound a bit fanciful, but then
Company
itself is an almost imaginary piece, a sort of “realism-but.” To return to Neil Patrick Harris’ interview with Robert Sokol: Sondheim told Harris that, on one level,
Company
takes place entirely in Robert’s mind. He sings, in the title number, about “All those photos up on the wall,” and
Company
shows us what he’s thinking as he looks at those photos. This musical is a dream, a collage of impressions. Thus, the other characters can irrupt into the action any time they want to: none of it is really happening. All we know for certain is that Robert is this amazing guy and everyone wants to know him.

So it’s all the more ironic that, just after the show opened—on April 26, 1970, at the Alvin Theatre—the Robert, Dean Jones, wanted to quit the company (that word again, taking on many extra meanings) because of personal problems. He was going through a divorce, which made the material dangerously real to him, and Hal Prince replaced him with Larry Kert. The original Tony in
West Side Story
, Kert had worked for Prince again in
A Family Affair
(which Prince directed, taking over during the tryout) and as a replacement Cliff in
Cabaret
. So Prince knew that Kert, though a wonderful singer, was a less than compelling actor. With more time at his disposal, Prince might have looked harder for a new Robert. But Jones was very unhappy and anxious to leave. So Prince made a deal with him, which ran something like: Give me an opening night so that the critics see the show at its best, and I’ll let you go within two weeks.

Then Kert took over, leaving something of a blank spot in the center of the work. Even so, the notion of an attractive and sophisticated bachelor, so utterly reconstructed from the Curlys (in
Oklahoma!
) and Sky Mastersons (in
Guys and Dolls
), only emphasized how new
Company
was, how fresh its attitudes. I single out Curly and Sky precisely because they, like Robert, are seen as very active in their respective communities, Curly’s cowboys in a “cold” range war against the farmers and Sky’s gamblers and touts of Damon Runyonland. Robert, too, claims a community, but it’s the fractured world of knowitall New Yorkers, one that—you’d think—wouldn’t “sing” as easily as Curly’s wild west or Sky’s cartoon outlawry. Again, that only made
Company
all the more special: intense and persuasive. If Dean Jones had been appearing as Curly or Sky, he might easily have played out his contract, for those roles are, however interesting, utterly untroubled. Curly and Sky know who they are; Robert only thinks he does.

As it was, Larry Kert was glad to play such a charismatic character, and he certainly looked the part. I knew a bunch of gay men who developed crushes on Kert at least partly because George Furth had given him a remarkably charming persona to fit into. I even knew one man who waited outside the stage door and knocked out an affair with Kert starting that night.
Company
was, all told, extremely glamorous, for all its “real” people in plain clothes. It was Manhattan, smart talk, wisecracks, and
now!
sex rolled into one.

Many people who are not professional writers used to take up writing as a hobby, or to articulate feelings about their lives, or just for relaxation. Being an actor, George Furth took up writing plays, and that’s how
Company
got started, as a series of one-acts in which various third parties would interact with various married couples. Most of Sondheim’s shows in his Prince era began life in a form different from the one they ultimately attained.
Follies
was a murder mystery (actually a who’lldoit rather than a whodunit), with none of the Ziegfeldian pageantry.
Pacific Overtures
was a straight play.
Sweeney Todd
was going to be through-sung.