On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (35 page)

Entering concept-musical territory, we should first consider
Allegro
, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s third show and the pioneer of the movement. This is a difficult work to record excerpts from, as the original cast (Victor) demonstrates, for
Allegro
was designed to be, above all, a staging, not simply a composition. Lacking the show’s open playing area filled with traffic as each scene “dissolved” into the next; and lacking the trade-off among the singing ensemble, the dancing ensemble, and the speaking roles, all working in a kind of chaotic unity; and lacking the character interaction that defied time and space, we have ten cuts of music theatre without the theatre. There are textual problems as well: Joe’s parents distract us with “A Fellow Needs a Girl” just when we want to get to know Joe himself; or Joe’s college date offers a sort of love ballad, “So Far,” then vanishes forever.

Worse yet, Victor’s
Allegro
did not sell well, a shocking comedown for R & H after Decca’s
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
helped acculturate the cast album in American life. True,
Allegro
’s music doesn’t compare to theirs—but it also doesn’t extract well. It’s worth noting that, in 1948, a few months after Victor released its
Allegro
, the record industry was feverishly transferring its 78s onto the new LPs and 45s (all the more so because an orchestra strike prohibited new recording for almost all of 1948), yet Victor let
Allegro
languish on its instantly outdated shellac discs. The performance did not come out on LP till 1965; even now, on CD, it doesn’t sound like the experiment that sparked two generations of nonconformist musicals, especially those by Sondheim. It apparently doesn’t even use all of the thirty-player orchestra heard in the Majestic Theatre during
Allegro
’s run, because interesting contrapuntal effects are missing.

The recording’s poor showing hurt
Allegro
’s reputation, for cast albums are more than souvenirs. They trace a show’s profile as artwork. A show without a valid recording is a ghost—but finally, in 2009, Sony released a two-CD
Allegro
from overture to finale, with lots of spoken dialogue and all the musical bits, no matter how small, to vitalize the narrative. The cast is fancy—Patrick Wilson as Joe, Audra McDonald and Nathan Gunn as his parents, Judy Kuhn for “So Far,” Laura Benanti as the unworthy wife, Norbert Leo Butz as Joe’s sidekick, Liz Callaway as the sympathetic nurse, and even Oscar Hammerstein (on an old tape) as the Philosophy Professor in a college scene.

Larry Blank conducts a solid performance, with a disciplined group for the very tricky seven-part choral encore of “You Are Never Away” and an exhibition cut of “The Gentleman Is a Dope.” The latter, the show’s best-known number, gives us a Hammerstein thinking almost in Sondheim terms, ironic and discontented. Rodgers, too, sounds unlike himself, creating a verse entirely out of one measure of four descending notes repeated twenty-two times without variation and launching the refrain on a b flat minor ninth chord, a doozy of a start. The number made a star of Lisa Kirk, who sang it in a trenchcoat in front of one of the production’s several black traveler curtains, a rare moment in this vivacious staging in which the Majestic’s playing area was closed off for something intimate. Back on Victor, Kirk sounds fine in a stand-and-deliver way; Callaway and Blank have more content.

Sony does have a problem in a somewhat recessed orchestra; not every detail comes through. For example, there’s a wonderfully strange episode in “One Foot, Other Foot,” a remarkable depiction of the exultation of a little boy who has just learned to walk. He shouts, he marches around the yard looking for mischief to get into, he feels the stirrings of liberty and individualism for the first time. The number catches all of that in a gala chorale—and then, suddenly, the orchestra cuts out except for the tympani, muted yet pounding under a chant-like section (at “Especially made for you …”). When the song’s main strain returns, the quixotic tympani rhythm is folded into the orchestral texture. Victor leaves this last bit out entirely, and while Blank’s percussionist plays it, one has to strain to hear it.

Nevertheless, Sony has reinstated an all but lost title of great influence. Immodestly, I’d recommend inspecting the series of
Allegro
stage shots I put together for
Rodgers & Hammerstein
(Abrams, 1992), with access to all the Vandamm keysheets of the Broadway and touring production as well as amateur snapshots taken during the Boston tryout, to get an idea of how this extraordinarily visual show behaved. The pictures reveal how time and space were smudged to emphasize the parable-like story in a unique staging plan—another way of defining the concept musical, whose narratives often take on the iconic nature of the fable. Is
Company
’s Robert a person or a symbol?

Note that Sondheim himself took part in this
Allegro
, delivering its most important speech, in the finale, just as Joe is about to make the decision of his life—to leave material success behind for personal fulfillment. And of course this is a key Sondheim notion: that we create our lives with the application of free will. Yes I said yes I will yes. Ironically,
Allegro
’s characters are virtually nothing like Sondheim’s. The hero is corny, his parents are lovely, and though his wife fails him, it’s partly because she sees life differently than he does. In
Allegro
, everyone knows how he wants to live (though Joe is thirty-five when he finally attains that knowledge). In Sondheim, many are permanently confused.
Allegro
’s form inspired Sondheim, but his content is his own.

Though Sondheim was around for
Allegro
’s rehearsals, he told me that he doesn’t recall the finished show all that well, as he had had to return to college early in its tryout. Still, there’s a taste of
Allegro
in
Company
, if only in its use of an open stage populated by characters coming and going freely in one another’s lives. And is Marta’s “Another Hundred People” a complement to “So Far”—a look at dating etiquette from a love object with, paradoxically, no real vocation in the narrative? While admiring Dean Jones’ fervent Robert in the original cast (Columbia), we should listen as well to Anthony Perkins, for he was after all the man the authors had in mind for Robert. The Jackpot label CD’ed two Perkins LPs from the late 1950s,
Tony Perkins
(Epic) and
On a Rainy Afternoon
(Victor) on a single disc. Is this the real Robert—sincere and pleasant but uninflected? The mysterious stranger as best friend, in old and new standards to a soft-jazz combo? “The World Is Your Balloon,” from
Flahooley
, is typical, with a lively flute descant over the vocal and an improvisational piano break. Nice. But while the song is optimistic, Perkins is oddly noncommittal. On the
Flahooley
cast album (Capitol, Angel, DRG), Barbara Cook and Jerome Courtland thrill the same number with personal involvement.

Victor’s cover art shows Perkins smiling as he strolls along the Central Park Mall, deserted in the rain: Robert alone, happy to be so. Yet we turn to Perkins’ 1960 appearance in Frank Loesser’s
Greenwillow
(Victor, Columbia, DRG) and hear him tear mightily into the surging “Summertime Love” and “Never Will I Marry.” The latter is a kind of parergon to
Company
, Robert’s credo till the scene with Elaine Stritch wrenches him toward the resolution of “Being Alive.” Perkins was a puzzling character, moving from Quaker (in the film
Friendly Persuasion
) to
Psycho
, gay in life and then straight in marriage. Yes, the authors asked him to play Robert—but did they perhaps also make the role on Perkins in the first place, inadvertently using stray bits of Perkins’ ambivalent sexuality? There is something uncanny about Robert, something “off” that never gets defined. Robert “doesn’t have the good things and he doesn’t have the bad things,” says one of the other men. “But he doesn’t have the good things.” What exactly does that mean?

Two
Company
DVDs give us the show in full true, Image with pungent support (including Patti LuPone’s Upper West Side Evita of a Joanne) for Neil Patrick Harris’ straight-arrow Robert in a New York Philharmonic concert staging. Image gives us also the 2006 Broadway revival, with a less colorful group behind Raúl Esparza’s nuanced Robert and director John Doyle’s idiotic notion that actors in musicals should supply their own instrumental accompaniment.

Returning to the old idea that musicians play and actors act,
Company: Original Cast Album
(New Video Group) a look at the recording sessions, lets us study Sondheim at work. A perfectionist, he catches one of the “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” trio on a wrong note in a tricky scat pattern, and is as involved in coaching the drama as the music, an auteur of shows. Watching Dean Jones sing “Being Alive,” his features so animated and in the moment, reminds us how intense he was in the role—and note Elaine Stritch’s grin early on, delighting in this ultimate Stritch part (even if she has trouble satisfying the bigwigs in the “Ladies Who Lunch” takes). This documentary was to be the first in a series of reality tapes of Broadway recording sessions, but the producer suddenly left for work in Hollywood, and this was the project’s only issue.

Capitol’s Dick Jones wanted to record all of
Follies
’ expansive score, but the label balked at a two-LP release, and numbers were abridged or missing.
^*
Not till 1985, fourteen years later, did
Follies
get a full reading, when Victor took down a New York Philharmonic concert. This is the
Follies
that most effectively habilitated the all-star treatment, running to Betty Comden and Adolph Green for “Rain on the Roof,” Elaine Stritch for “Broadway Baby,” Phyllis Newman to lead “Who’s That Woman?,” Liliane Montevecchi for “Ah, Paris!,” faded Metropolitan Opera diva Licia Albanese for “One More Kiss,” and, lo, Carol Burnett for “I’m Still Here.” Burnett gives it a grand slow build, with aplomb. Again, however, isn’t this more properly the anthem of a third-rater?
^†
Burnett is too big for the spot. It’s about survival against odds, not deserved success.

The Philharmonic’s four leads are George Hearn, Lee Remick, Mandy Patinkin, and Barbara Cook, and while it is an article of faith among
Follies
buffs that the original 1971 quartet is
hors concours
, this is very flavorful casting from top to bottom, and the audience reactions recall a very special night (actually two, September 6 and 7, with cuts drawn from each to perfect the release). Paul Gemignani conducts on the grand scale—hear him pull the Philharmonic back for a Big Statement of the main theme at the first forte in the Prologue, usual in
Follies
performances today but not heard in 1971 (led by Harold Hastings, Hal Prince’s longtime house conductor).

This is not a note-complete
Follies
, however. The delightfully bizarre bundling of three numbers that caps “Broadway Baby” was omitted, along with the “Bolero d’Amour,” a lush ballroom piece composed by not Sondheim but the show’s dance arranger, John Berkman. Yet the performance resonates with the confidence of a work that, though disputed when new, is now a classic and knows it. The 1971 recording is bound into
Follies’
doleful story; this 1985 concert revels in its star turns, not least when Patinkin’s high-energy Buddy himself provides the voices for the fake Margie and Sally in his Follies turn and snaps like a firecracker. He even goes into a show-stopping cakewalk tempo at the last strain, as if to take the entire hall with him when he exits. With excellent stereo separation and the whole
Stavisky
soundtrack LP transcribed as a bonus on the CDs, this
Follies
is all but essential.

The DVD release of the concert (Image) cuts out much of the performance to include rehearsal footage, though we do get Sondheim, recalling that “One More Kiss” was the first number written, as he wanted to explore the pastiche platform and thus started out with the oldest model, the Romberg-Friml love waltz (though the music more truly echoes late Franz Lehár, at the time, say, of
Paganini
and
Der Zarewitsch
). The various performers’ musings lack originality, though they present a valid Beginner’s Sondheim, and Elaine Stritch tells a funny divorce story and, indicating her carryall, says, “I heard the cameraman say, ‘Move the bag’—I thought he was referring to me.” Once the concert begins, though, the tape really takes off, giving us a guide to staging this epic without sets or (mostly) choreography. The camera takes us backstage as the “Weismann Girls” await their cue during “Beautiful Girls,” and, as they appear, one by one, perfectly timed, we feel the excitement of the event—Burnett, then Cook, Comden, Montevecchi in fantastical black chic, Newman, Remick.
Follies
tends to attract the big talents, but this has to be the most distinguished cast in the show’s lifetime.

However. The concert ultimately tries to cheer the show up—and the Sally, all but comatose at the end in 1971, is now calmly ready to abandon her dream of Loveland, while Phyllis tells Ben, “I’m glad we came.” No, she isn’t. A reprise of “Waiting For the Girls Upstairs” followed, as if the four leads were nostalgic rather than discontented, and Weismann delivered a sermonette leading into a full-chorus “Beautiful Girls” finale.