On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (32 page)

But the movie gets real. For the first time,
Into the Woods
takes us
into the woods
, not into a set with a backstage and Pop at the door. A tangle of flora. Fog. Swamp. Most of it’s dark even in daytime: the place of crucibles, of testing and mysteries. There’s an almost spiritual feeling to the action now, reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
. Wilder uses the novel to inquire, in overtly religious terms, why his handful of characters met death when, while traversing a gorge, their bridge collapsed. Wilder’s conclusion, never directly stated, is that each had unknowingly finished his life’s work: there was no reason for any of them to go on living.

Into the Woods
is the opposite: everyone’s starting out. The movie’s physicalizing of the woods emphasizes this, as you see just how spooky and unexplored free will is. It’s the Sondheim challenge: are you ready for the consequences of your life choices? And to be true to thyself? As Ben says, “It’s knowing what you want, that’s the secret.”

^*
The cycle really took off with the Mary Martin
Peter Pan
(1955), though that production came from Broadway—and, in 1956, CBS presented
High Tor
with Bing Crosby and Julie Andrews, from the Maxwell Anderson play that Sondheim wanted to musicalize in college. Arthur Schwartz and Anderson wrote the score.

^*
Two very short scenes at the opera show us what looks like a Wagnerian mountain sequence. They would have given Sondheim a rare chance to pastiche nineteenth-century opera, but the bit was composed by Thomas Pasatieri.

^*
Fun Fact: In the opening sequence, as the Jets amble through a basketball court, one of them tosses a ball to one of the players. The latter later became Hollywood’s least favorite stage father, Kit Culkin, sire of Macauley.

A Selective Bibliography

First of all there are Sondheim’s two lyric collections, published by Knopf,
Finishing the Hat
(2010) and
Look, I Made a Hat
(2011), and not just because of the lyrics. Here we have an artistic testament in the form of notes on the shows, on each song, on his predecessors, especially lyricists (e.g., “Lorenz Hart—Jaunty and Careless”), and on the writing and producing of shows generally. Cut songs and songs created for incomplete or unknown projects abound, as do tales of life among the savages backstage. Thus the books are half-and-half: one half the lyrics themselves and the other half Sondheim’s (to quote one of the two subtitles) “Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany.”

Sondheim is the most eloquent of all songwriters at what the craft is made of. Some of them have little to say on the matter, instinctive rather than intentioned in their art. If you ask Sondheim why, in “Waiting For the Girls Upstairs,” Ben and Buddy recall the stage doorman as Max while, in the past, their younger selves call him Harry, he’ll tell you that it reveals the twisty enchantments of memory, and how hard it is to be certain about What Happened. But ask, say, Richard Rodgers why the unusual phrase starting on a major seventh in “This Was a Real Nice Clambake” (at “Galloped down our gullets”) turns up again in “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’,” and Rodgers would have no answer.

Sondheim’s mini-essays range widely, from “Critics and Their Uses” to “Awards and Their Uselessness,” and the books are copiously illustrated, not least with stage shots of various productions. Two pages taken from the
Anyone Can Whistle
souvenir book, however, come from the pre-Broadway issue, and thus make do with rehearsal “candids.” It’s a piquant selection, with everyone in street clothes trying to look theatrical: Sondheim revving up Lee Remick while Arthur Laurents and Angela Lansbury seem miffed; Sondheim at the keyboard, Remick and Lansbury assuming “characteristic” poses. There’s even a snap of Lansbury with Henry Lascoe, who kept undermining her confidence during the testy tryout and then died of a heart attack before the New York opening.

Also essential is Craig Zadan’s
Sondheim & Co
. (Harper & Row, 1986), whose first edition dates back to 1974, relatively early in Sondheim’s second period. The book’s strength lies in its interviewees: Harold Prince, Arthur Laurents, James Lapine, Leonard Bernstein, Angela Lansbury, Bernadette Peters, Len Cariou, Hermione Gingold, Flora Roberts (Sondheim’s longtime agent), Thomas Shepard (Sondheim’s longtime cast-recording producer), and Sondheim himself. All speak quite freely about their experiences, and the latest edition runs through the San Diego tryout of
Into the Woods
. Zadan narrates skillfully, but it’s the communicants recounting their adventures in Sondheimland that make the book basic to Sondheim study. We get Michael Bennett reflecting on the difference between the Roberts of Dean Jones and Larry Kert; then Anthony Perkins goes backstage on opening night to hear Jones say, “I tried to make that part mine but I couldn’t.” That’s odd—has there ever been a better Robert than Dean Jones? Perkins—whom they more or less made the role on—remarks, as others do, that Roberts are “always unappreciated,” and he was “happy I wasn’t in it.”

More: we learn that the concert called
Sondheim: A Musical Tribute
was originally to feature the “I’m Still Here” of Ethel Merman. No: it needs a second-rater, or a first-rater who never quite topped out. Merman held all Broadway in fee. It was Nancy Walker who got the spot, and that’s perfect: a superb talent too often mired in swamp shows like
Copper and Brass
and
The Girls Against the Boys
, though she finally reached national celebrity as Mrs. Morgenstern, mother of Valerie Harper’s Rhoda. Yet more: We get Ron Field flabbergasted that no one else on the
Merrily We Roll Along
production is worried about the amateurish cast. “I can’t believe,” he says, imaginarily speaking to the staff, “you don’t know what I know.” Finally Hal Prince fires him, and Field replies, “Thank you.”

Last of the essential books is Ted Chapin’s
Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical
Follies (Knopf, 2003), based on notes Chapin took when, still in college, he served as a production assistant on the show, rather as Sondheim did on
Allegro
. There have been many books devoted to the making of a show, from
Show Boat
through
Fiddler on the Roof
to
The Producers
, but Chapin’s stands out for its narrative vitality. He has a novelist’s touch in characterization: Fifi D’Orsay is high-strung and given to muttering; Gene Nelson is game if overparted; Alexis Smith is pleasant, but don’t push your luck. (One wonders if Phyllis’ “I went my own damn way and don’t make waves” was written after Smith was cast.) Chapin doesn’t deal with the writing of
Follies
, but with its production, from the days leading up to the first rehearsal all the way to the recording session, with an account so experiential that, as the out-of-town premiere nears, we feel as keyed up as the cast.

The book’s wealth of detail will fascinate
Follies
buffs. Jon Cypher, not John McMartin, was to have been Ben. The Loveland showgirls’ pastoral dresses were so wide they had to be hung in the flies backstage and carefully lowered onto the performers. The Sally and Margie in “Buddy’s Blues” were originally two men in drag (and a photo documents the casting). We hear about the famous and very prescient review in which Harvard undergraduate Frank Rich saw
Follies’
nostalgia in a crumbling theatre as the “funeral” of the American musical. We read an early version of the “Girls Upstairs” lyrics (at today’s “Girls on the run …”) that isn’t in
Finishing the Hat
. We see Sondheim coaching the performers, adept at addressing a glitch “with precision and without hesitation”—but then he tells the Sally and Margie that they both “
do
love Buddy.” I thought Sally married Buddy dispassionately, on the rebound from Ben. And Chapin himself speaks to the “problem” with James Goldman’s libretto with “Jim’s brand of humor is very subtle and not joke-oriented at all,” which does run against the musical’s oldest tenet: whatever else you do, you have to be funny. Indeed, this is why, till relatively recently, the form was called “musical comedy.”

Michael Bennett insisted (vainly) that Hal Prince call in Neil Simon for a fun-me-up of one-liners. So
Follies
isn’t a laffs show in the end—but what other title provokes such loyalty, memories, wonder for its players as well as for the audience? Way at the end of Chapin’s book, the original Young Buddy, Harvey Evans—who left high school to dance for Bob Fosse in
New Girl in Town
, where he was featured in a softshoe pas de trois with Gwen Verdon and Harvey Jung, and took on show after show, including
Anyone Can Whistle
, thereafter—announces how his gravestone will read: “Here lies Harvey Evans. He was in
Follies
.”

Moving on: a very useful work is
Broadway Song & Story
(Dodd, Mead, 1985), transcribing Dramatists Guild panels and addresses. Sondheim’s two biggest first-period titles,
West Side Story
and
Gypsy
, get the panel treatment, with all three authors and Jerome Robbins on the first and just the three authors on the second, as Robbins was unhappy with differing views on how
West Side Story
came about. There is also a panel on “The Anatomy of the Theater Song,” with Sondheim, Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Sheldon Harnick, and twenty-two pages of Sondheim alone on “The Musical Theater,” in which he finds a very apt explanation for why his shows gain wide acceptance only eventually: they are “unexpected” art. When folks anticipate one kind of entertainment and you give them another, they rebel reflexively, though they may come around after getting used to your style—even if one can never really “expect” what Sondheim will do next. Each of his shows is different not only from conventional musicals but also from each other.

Sweeney Todd
has a “making of” book, too, on the legend and its adaptations: Robert L. Mack’s
The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd
(Continuum, 2007). Like others, Mack adduces
Hangover Square
to an understanding of how Sondheim expanded his theatre into opera in his
Sweeney Todd
; considering it as a revenge tragedy, Mack says it has “far more in common with Aeschylus’
Orest
[
e
]
ia
and Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
than … with [the stereotypical crime melodrama]
Maria Marten
.”

Years ago, if you asked someone if he had read
Treasure Island
or
Ivanhoe
, he’d say, “No, but I read the Classics Comic.” We call them “graphic novels” now, and Thomas Peckett Prest’s novel has made the journey (Classical Comics, 2012), available in both “original text” (that is, using the author’s words) and “quick text” (simplified) versions. The comic, running to one hundred sixty pages of art, is stunningly brought off. Other titles in the series take in Shakespeare, the Brontës, and Bram Stoker’s own
Sweeney Todd
,
Dracula
.

Now to biographies. Hugh Fordin offers
Getting To Know Him
(Random House, 1977), on Oscar Hammerstein. A number of the subject’s confederates—including Agnes de Mille, Joshua Logan, and Mary Martin—spoke to Fordin, giving the book a flavorful Broadway atmosphere. Sondheim, too, shared recollections, and also wrote an introduction, which begins “I didn’t know him well, but he saved my life.” For Leonard Bernstein, a secondary mentor to young Steve, try Jonathan Cott’s
Dinner With Lenny
(Oxford, 2013), twelve hours of conversation catching this ebullient polymath at his best. He leaps from topic to topic—Ella Fitzgerald’s “Rock With Me,” forgotten monologuist Ruth Draper, Sting’s Mack the Knife, Herbert von Karajan on his deathbed, begging Bernstein to take over the Berlin Philharmonic. Hammerstein was known as “Ockie” and Bernstein as “Lenny,” and there the apparent resemblance ends; one can imagine how different the two mentoring experiences were for Sondheim, Hammerstein so methodical, focused, heterosexual and Bernstein so mercurial in a gay stream-of-consciousness rap. Both men had a competitive side, yet both were generous. So there is resemblance after all.

For Jerome Robbins, Amanda Vail’s
Somewhere
(Broadway Books, 2006) does the job nicely—and note that she chose a Sondheim lyric (or word, at any rate) for her title. Some critics want to pry loose from the Sondheim canon the works he did not compose, but this is to misunderstand how central the writing of lyrics is in the writing of musicals. It assumed that the music is the driver and the words no more than facilitate, but would another lyricist have substantiated as well as Sondheim did
West Side Story
’s potent blend of mean-streets grunge and fantasy romance—with “The Jets Song” on one hand and “One Hand, One Heart” on the other?
Somewhere
, in a place so grim and hopeless, is a magical image. And would another lyricist have given
Gypsy
’s Rose words that clarify, for our hearing, a personality that she herself doesn’t understand?