On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (21 page)

As I’ve said, the
Pacific Overtures
score, at first very Eastern in intonation, grows progressively more Western as Japan is opened up to foreign influence. Halfway through Act One, “Chrysanthemum Tea” is still resolutely in a Japanese mode—or so it sounds to American ears—as we look in on the Shogun and his court, all a-dither over the looming presence of Commodore Perry’s warships (seen far upstage in a miniature replica of the evil-eyed
Powhatan
). The number is led by the Shogun’s mother, placidly fanning herself as group by group, courtiers try to exorcise the American demons: first a soothsayer; then two Confucians offering a quaintly implausible syllogism built around the moon’s reflection stirred in watery ripples; then a general supplication to the wind of kamikaze to destroy the foreigners; and nothing works. So the Shogun’s mother offers her own solution, in the very tea the Shogun has been drinking, cup after cup of it: poison. After all, with the Shogun dead, Perry will have no one of rank to deal with and might sail away.

This black-comic number is something of a celebration of the Sondheim touch in rhyme, uniting “herb,” “[su]perb,” and “[dis]turb[ances],” along with deft expressions suitable for a lady of standing: she describes the venomous tea as “an informal variation on the normal recipe.” Then, too, Kabuki practice took stage for one brief but intriguing moment when, at a report of rain, one of the black-clad stage-crew women suddenly appeared at stage right wrestling with an umbrella, turned completely around, and vanished, all within the space of a few seconds.

“Welcome To Kanagawa,” as I’ve mentioned, points toward a transformation of the musical style, but by the end of the act, just after the Americans in fact break land and sign treaties, the score more overtly Americanizes itself in the number that Sondheim singles out as his own favorite Sondheim song, “Someone In a Tree.” Its subject is history, so weighty and evident at a remove but, while it is happening, impenetrable, even invisible.

Well, fine—but how to express that in song? “What a shame,” the Reciter observes, “that there is no authentic account of what took place on that historic day” when the treaties were executed. As if in response, an old man appears, as the music begins. He saw the whole thing, he says, perched in a tree. His younger self then shows up to texture the discussion, as does a samurai who was hidden beneath the floorboards of the Treaty House, poised to spring up and slaughter the foreigners if trouble broke out. So he heard it all but saw nothing; and the boy saw it all but heard nothing—and that’s as close as you can get to matters of state, just as Japanese poetry often turns on tiny images that, by synechdoche, reflect patterns of vast human design. And all this is set to a beguiling five-note melodic cell over one of Sondheim’s outright toe-tapping rhythmic pulses, finding joy of the moment by stealing behind the Grand Affair to isolate something personable and intimate. The bigwigs are in the Treaty House, but outside in a tree is a nameless young boy enjoying a beautiful day. And that of course has long been one of the practices of the American musical—looking at people on a show boat while, around them, life undergoes its periodic cultural transformations; or democratizing the romance of a farmer and her cowboy suitor so their land can become the state of Oklahoma; or seeking faces to put on the AIDS crisis, in
Rent
.

Casting
Pacific Overtures
can’t have been easy, because the days when, say, the Swedish Warner Oland could merrily Asian his way through sixteen feature films as the Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan (and two Americans made seventeen more
Chan
s) were long over. Besides,
Pacific Overtures
makes its effect as an above all
authentic
Kabuki treatment of the American musical; it had to have an all-Asian cast. At least there was now a healthy supply of race-sympathetic performers available. When Rodgers and Hammerstein cast their Chinese-American musical,
Flower Drum Song
(1958), they resorted, of necessity, to a United Nations of color-blind hires; the principals took in only one Chinese actor (coincidentally enough, the second lead in Warner Oland’s
Charlie Chan
s, Keye Luke, as Number One Son), along with two Japanese, one Hawaiian, one black, and one white American, who left the show during tryouts to be replaced by … another white American.

Not quite a generation later,
Pacific Overtures
claimed an accurate cast, though some theatregoers may have been baffled about who was playing what. First billed was Mako Iwamatsu (appearing, as always, under his first name only), who was at least somewhat familiar after having been hideously murdered onscreen during the Steve McQueen adventure film
The Sand Pebbles
. But the second-billed Soon-Teck (also spelled Tek) Oh was a mystery, because, after the Reciter, the most important parts were the political functionary Lord Abe and the pair from “A Bowler Hat,” the assimilating Kayama and the xenophobic Manjiro. These three roles were played by, respectively, Yuki Shimoda, Isao Sato, and Sab Shimono, known to Broadway for having played Ito, the houseboy of
Mame
(1966).

So who was Soon-Teck Oh? Korean-born but raised in America, Oh played four roles: Kayama’s wife, who “dances” her “lines” in “There Is No Other Way”; two bits as a samurai; and a Storyteller who, in an elaborately ritualized sequence, narrates a parable about a ruler who slays the “barbarian” foreigners till even the lordly tiger makes kowtow before this king of kings. Throughout this episode, the Storyteller uses his fan to simulate the air of a sunny day in the forest, a butterfly, the sight and even sound of an approaching enemy, and other physical elements of his tale, in an extended tour de force.

As it happens, Oh was so skilled in becoming one with his characters that he virtually disappeared into the production. Worse, the intricate interlacing of Asian and American theatrical styles confused audience members who like their art pre-digested. In 1976, most of the public still expected musicals to be “easy”—what the television comic Milton Berle termed “lappy.” Berle liked jokes so obvious they so to say fell into the spectator’s lap. Most musicals in the 1950s, when Sondheim got started, were like that, even the smart ones. And we remember the man who walked out of
West Side Story
during the opening number—“Don’t ask,” he said—because it clearly wasn’t going to be a leggs-and-laffs show.

But Sondheim demanded more from the public, and parts of
Pacific Overtures
really are difficult to absorb at first viewing. Opening on January 11, 1976, at the Winter Garden, the show lasted 193 performances and has only gradually asserted its place in the calendar of classics. The 1984 off-Broadway revival greatly helped, if only because it was a second viewing, easier to absorb. This version was modest in scope, tempting some to declare that the original Broadway staging had been “overproduced,” which is another way of saying that the show’s conceptual complexity filled them with cognitive panic at first viewing but now sits comfortably within their reception zone.

Even then, some of the work’s unique features can bemuse—for instance the Reciter’s multi-tasking, as he veers from impartial emcee to fervent advocate. Here he’s intense, there he’s playfully irreverent. This is purely anecdotal, but Americans generally don’t seem to like the use of narrators on stage; their direct address of the audience profanes the romance of theatre. Narrators are so … Brechtian. Americans prefer a narrator like the Stage Manager in
Our Town
—folksy and nonjudgmental, unlike those hectoring narrators of the modern style who think they know everything. The Reciter is one of those—and he comes from an alien folk and he’s full of judgments. “We float!” he cries. But some in the house are thinking, Okay, but when does Boy meet Girl?

Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber Of Fleet Street

Operatic serial-killer melodrama, 1979.

Based on the eponymous play by Christopher Bond.

Music and Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: Hugh Wheeler.

Original Leads: Len Cariou, Angela Lansbury. Director: Hal Prince.

Sweeney Todd made his professional debut in a novel published in serial form in 1846–47 and entitled
The String of Pearls
. Thomas Peckett Prest is the presumed (and uncredited) author. This first Todd is a basic nineteenth-century villain, a savage who murders men for their valuables. In a business arrangement with a neighbor, Mrs. Lovett, Todd butchers the corpses, and a hired man, locked in Mrs. Lovett’s basement, combines the meat and breading into pies. When this employee tires of his solitary confinement, he is killed, and the next unwary hire replaces him.

Meanwhile, the romantic lead, Mark Ingestrie, and his fiancée, Johanna Oakley, become involved in the tale; the rank odor of the butchered flesh pervades a local church, creating public alarm; and justice finally catches up with Todd, who is hanged, though not before poisoning Mrs. Lovett. She collapses just after her latest prisoner—Mark Ingestrie, who was thought murdered for most of the novel—explodes into Mrs. Lovett’s shop through a secret passageway, telling her customers, “I fear that what I am going to say will spoil your appetites.” The anonymous author helpfully describes the scene: “How the throng of persons recoiled.” The titular string of pearls, though crucial evidence in the case against Todd, appears but here and there in the narrative.

Was there a Sweeney Todd? He is at least a venerable urban legend in London, and
The String of Pearls
had not completed its serial publication when George Dibdin Pitt offered the first of the tale’s many theatrical adaptations. In 1973, Sondheim, in London for its first
Gypsy
, with Angela Lansbury, happened to see Christopher Bond’s new version of the play. Almost all of Sondheim’s musicals originated with someone other than himself: Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins conceived
West Side Story
(though Robbins hogged the credit), David Merrick got the idea for
Gypsy
, George Furth launched the
Company
project, Hal Prince dreamed of an elegant European
je ne sais quoi
that ended as
A Little Night Music
, and so on. But
Sweeney Todd
the musical was Sondheim’s inspiration, and it was going to be his
Porgy and Bess
: an opera.

Sondheim doesn’t use that term for his works—he billed
Sweeney Todd
as “a musical thriller”—because opera is over
there
and Broadway is over
here
. Still, the espressivo level of the
Sweeney Todd
music is nothing like what Broadway normally hears. Further, it was Sondheim’s intention to set Bond’s text as a series of numbers separated by underscored dialogue. Music would thus haunt the show, as in the kind of symphonic commentary pioneered in Hollywood soundtrack accompaniment by Erich Wolfgang Korngold in the 1930s. Sondheim’s model would, however, have been Korngold’s younger contemporary Bernard Herrmann, a specialist in thrillers from
The Devil and Daniel Webster
(1941) through
Psycho
(1960) and
The Birds
(1963) to
Taxi Driver
(1976). We might recall that Herrmann made an important contribution to a film that vastly impressed the young Sondheim,
Hangover Square
—especially its
Concerto Macabre
, which could almost be a subtitle for
Sweeney Todd
.

No wonder this was the project that Sondheim initiated himself: it was a chance to write his own
Hangover Square
. He started work without a librettist, simply putting Bond to music. However, this meant prolonging every scene’s running time. As the composer says, in
Sondheim & Co
., “I did the first twenty minutes and … I was only on page five of Bond’s script.”

So, rather than marinate Bond in music, Sondheim invited Hugh Wheeler to effect a script out of Bond for Sondheim to work from. Wheeler may seem an odd choice, given his aforementioned lack of sympathy for the way music coordinates action and emotion in music theatre. But Wheeler was English, and
Sweeney Todd
is an extremely English piece, a typical product of that culture’s strange love of lurid crime stories. And, indeed, the
Sweeney Todd
book, though slim next to the huge score, is adroit in keeping the tale in motion, for
Sweeney Todd
is plot-heavy, as a thriller needs to be.

True, the original novel is busier. But Bond’s retelling complicates while it simplifies, for, while dropping numerous subsidiary characters, Bond gives Todd and Mrs. Lovett motivations they utterly lack in all earlier versions of the tale. For one thing, the barber is no longer a mercenary evildoer but a revolutionary, striking out at a corrupt system that empowers cruelty and scorns the helpless. Mrs. Lovett, formerly a mere opportunist, is now Todd’s romantic vis-à-vis, not that he cares. In truth, one of the humanizing elements in this Guignol of torn throats and eaten flesh is Mrs. Lovett’s abiding love for Todd, which has sustained her for the fifteen years of his absence and which has kept her from pawning his set of chased-silver
^*
razors. Anyone else as poor as she would have given them up for money. But she had a dream, a kind of ghoulish version of Sally’s dream in
Follies
: someday we will be together. Thus Bond transformed a mere page turner into a study in how people behave when living on the brink.