Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (77 page)

In his first two shows of the 1980s,
Merrily We Roll Along
and
Sunday in the Park with George
, Sondheim directly confronted the issue of artistic compromise in his own work, an issue previously faced more obliquely by several of Broadway’s spiritual fathers surveyed in earlier chapters.
On Your Toes
addresses the dichotomy between art music and popular music and
The Cradle Will Rock
offers a devastating attack on compromising artists, but
Merrily
and
Sunday
may be unprecedented in the degree to which they explore the creative process and commercial pressures on artists.
Merrily
tells the disconcerting story of a Broadway composer, Franklin Shepard, who has sold out his ideals and his artistic soul, the road pointedly not taken by Sondheim.
Sunday
presents two portraits of artists. In act I we meet a fictionalized but nevertheless once-real artist in 1884, the uncompromising painter
Georges Seurat, who refused to sell out. In fact, Seurat reportedly never sold a painting in his lifetime. One hundred years later in act II, we meet his great-grandson, also an artist named George, a man who evolves from a compromising sculptor grubbing for grants and commissions to a genuine artist more like Seurat by the end of the evening.

Since
Merrily
is told in reverse, the disintegration of this Broadway Faust is all the more disturbing. When we first meet Franklin Shepard in 1980 as the graduation speaker of his former high school (a scene dropped from the 1985 revival), the once idealistic but now artistically sterile Broadway composer tells “young innocents a few realities” and introduces them to the two words that symbolize his abandoned ideals, “practical” and “compromise.” The older Frank says “compromise is how you survive”; the younger Frank answers that compromise is “how you give up.”

Twenty years earlier, but much later in the show, Franklin, his high school classmate and present collaborator Charley Kringas, and their mutual friend Mary Flynn, an aspiring novelist, sing “Opening Doors.” Sondheim has acknowledged the autobiographical aspect to this song: “If there is one number that is really me writing about me, it is ‘Opening Doors.’ That was my life for a number of years. It is a totally personal number. Luckily it fits into the piece.”
⁹⁹
In this song Frank and Charley are creating their first show, auditioning the material, facing rejection and disappointment, and struggling to reject compromising alternatives. Charley is typing and Frank is composing “Good Thing Going,” heard in its completed state earlier in the show when Frank and Charley sing it at a party in 1962. This is the party where Frank tells Mary, now a critic who has forsaken her dream to write a great American novel, that he has not composed the music for his own recent film. In fact, Frank has long since abandoned his creative partnership with Charley, who did not sell out, yet has become a distinguished playwright. Frank may be “Rich and Happy” in 1970, but he is also morally and artistically bankrupt and sad. By the end of Shepard’s career, which real-life audiences witnessed with disappointment near the beginning of the show, the selling of an artistic soul is complete.

In the creation of “Opening Doors,” Frank experiences considerable difficulty going beyond the opening phrase, which, not incidentally, is the phrase that most clearly resembles the idealistic anthem that he and Charley composed for their high school graduation (both at the opening and toward the close of the musical in its original production).
¹⁰⁰
When Mary calls to tell Frank that she is about to abandon her principles and her novel by taking commercial writing jobs, she sings this same opening phrase. Later in the song Charley and Frank audition the first several phrases of their future hit song for a wary producer, Joe Josephson.

Even without Sondheim’s admission, reaffirmed at the March 2008 public interview in Portland with Frank Rich, it would be difficult to overlook the autobiographical component of Josephson’s criticism, so closely does it correspond to the critical reactions which the modernist Sondheim, a close contemporary of the fictional Mr. Shepard, had by then been facing for more than two decades. Ironically, however, when Josephson tells them that “There’s not a tune you can hum.—/ There’s not a tune you go bum-bum-bum-didum” or that he will let them “know when Stravinsky has a hit,” he sings Frank’s tune. After this initial rejection, Charley and Frank continue to pitch their song. Josephson then abruptly dismisses them and sings his own: “Write more, work hard,—/ Leave your name with the girl.—/ Less avant-garde.”

At this moment the ghost of Rodgers and Hammerstein returns to haunt Sondheim as well as Franklin Shepard. The “plain old melodee dee dee dee dee dee” that Josephson desires is none other than the chestnut, “Some Enchanted Evening,” from
South Pacific
. Characteristically, Josephson does not know the words to this familiar classic and apparently does not even realize that he is trying to hum a Rodgers and Hammerstein song. In addition to several conspicuously incorrect pitches, Josephson also sings its opening musical phrase completely outside of its proper metrical foundation (with an extra quarter-note within a measure of 4/4 time, one extra beat too many for the measure).

Sondheim is reinforcing what we all know: that in 1958 as well as in 1981 a Rodgers tune was and is the ideal Broadway theater song and the standard by which Shepard—and Sondheim—will be measured. In defiance of this expectation, Charley and Frank refuse to alter their work and write a Rodgers and Hammerstein-type song, and instead join with Mary to create something new and all their own, an original revue. Within a few years the rejected song becomes a hit song in Frank and Charley’s new Broadway show, produced by Josephson. By the 1980s, people everywhere were beginning to hum Sondheim’s songs, too, and by the 1990s and 2000s more and more could be heard out of their original stage contexts in cabaret theaters, recordings, and television.
¹⁰¹
And although few, if any, of his songs match the familiarity of “Send in the Clowns,” and of course many songs by Rodgers, Sondheim’s songs have belatedly begun to receive broader recognition. Paradoxically, what was uncommercial has become, to an extent, evergreen (and belatedly commercial as well).

The fin-de-siècle classical modernists are rarely accused of compromising their ideals, but they are, like Sondheim and Seurat, equally faulted for lacking artistic passion. Sondheim also shares with his modernist counterparts a profound awareness of his classic predecessors and self-consciously responds to his tradition in varied and profound ways. Just as the European
modernists recreate the past in their own image, so Sondheim pays allegiance to and reinterprets his tradition and makes it his own. At the center of this tradition are the integrated musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Sondheim’s one-time collaborator and long-time mentor, respectively. Sondheim’s shows depart from the Rodgers and Hammerstein models stylistically and dramaturgically, especially in their subject matter and in their use of time and space. But at least from
Company
on they preserve the concept of the integrated musical. As with Rodgers and Hammerstein, the morethan-occasionally compromising characters in a Sondheim musical sing lyrics and music that reveal their essences and nuances and move the drama, narrative or non-narrative, uncompromisingly forward.

Sondheim, like Seurat and his modernist musical counterparts, Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, has long since demonstrated his ability to move on, to learn from the example of his mentor Hammerstein who wrote “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and to give the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition renewed life in “No One Is Alone.” Throughout his more than fifty-year career on Broadway, Sondheim has successfully combined the musical trappings of musical modernism and created works that encompass an extremely broad dramatic range. Like Beethoven, who radically reinterpreted the classical style without abandoning its fundamental principles, in a larger sense Sondheim’s modernism might also be construed as a reinterpretation rather than a revolution. Nevertheless, despite this allegiance to the innovative but traditional principles of Hammerstein and Robbins, Sondheim’s music is more dissonant and less tonal than his predecessors’—with the possible exception of Bernstein’s tritone-laden
West Side Story
—and his characters are usually more neurotic and even occasionally psychotic.

Like Seurat and the modern George, Sondheim is willing to rethink his theatrical legacy to say something new. The ingenious incorporation of past models in the pastiches of
Follies
would reappear in subsequent shows, most extensively and literally in
Assassins
.
¹⁰²
In this respect, Sondheim’s shows are very much analogous to
Show Boat, On Your Toes, The Cradle Will Rock
, and
West Side Story
, to name only the musicals discussed in the present survey that prominently display popular and classical allusions. Sondheim succeeded in moving the Broadway musical to a new phase through words and music supported by imaginative solutions to perennial dramatic problems. At the same time, Sondheim’s approach to the musical can be placed firmly in the great tradition from
Show Boat
to
West Side Story
. The Broadway musical from the 1920s to the 1950s could hardly ask for a worthier heir or more enchanted evenings.

The composer’s career was thus marked by popular success and critical doubt; in the years since his death, these motifs have remained central to his musical and musicological reputation…. For some time his works remained objects of contempt, and even when he was not openly derided, he was often conspicuous by his absence, failing to merit more than a cursory mention in many supposedly “comprehensive” studies of the American and British musical
.
¹

The above panegyric, purposely misquoted, contains one important omission that should be cleared up without delay. In place of the anonymous “composer’s career,” the author of the passage, Alexandra Wilson, put forward a particular composer. The composer named by Wilson in her critical reception study
The Puccini Problem
is actually Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), who composed operas rather than musicals and received little more than “cursory mention in many supposedly ‘comprehensive’ studies of twentieth-century music,” rather than in “studies of the American and British musical” as misstated in the passage. Instead of the anonymous “composer’s career,” try to imagine the name Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948) at the outset of the excerpt. Aside from the not unimportant fact that Lloyd Webber, at the time this second edition of
Enchanted Evenings
is
written (2008), is only sixty years old and still quite active in the musical theater domain, the parallels in reception history between Lloyd Webber and Puccini are arguably present, perhaps uncannily so. The composer of
The Phantom of the Opera
has, in fact, like Puccini, so far endured an unresolved dissonance between high popularity and great wealth on the one hand and relatively low critical stature and recognition on the other. Before resuming our focus on the critical contradictions that surround the remarkable career of Lloyd Webber, it will be useful to review its well-known highlights.

While still a teenager, Andrew, the talented son of a prominent composer and teacher at the London College of Music, William Lloyd Webber, teamed up with Tim Rice to write a fifteen-minute staged cantata based on the biblical story of Joseph and many brothers for the students of a boys’ school, Colet Court, in 1968. A slightly longer version was recorded and then expanded still further into a full-length musical that was performed in London in 1972 as
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
. By that time, Lloyd Webber and Rice in 1970 had produced a two-record concept rock album based on another biblical theme, the last days of Christ told from the perspective of his betrayer Judas Iscariot.
Jesus Christ Superstar
, a stage realization of this album, significantly sung throughout, became a modest hit in New York in 1971 and a major hit when it opened in London the following year.

Andrew Lloyd Webber in 2004.

After the failure of the first version of the more traditional
Jeeves
(1975; revised as
By Jeeves
in 1996) with the playwright Alan Ayckbourn, the following year Lloyd Webber and Rice produced another two-record concept album in a mixture of rock and Latin styles based on the stormy life and early death of Eva Peron, the controversial and charismatic wife of Argentina’s authoritarian leader Juan Peron. Under the guidance of Harold Prince,
Evita
, first in London (1978) and the next year in New York, developed into another successful through-sung musical (i.e., with minimal spoken dialogue) on a provocative political theme. In retrospect, it is clear that
Evita
, the longest running imported musical until that time, was the true launching pad for the second British musical theater revolution (the first being the comparably earth-shaking arrival of Gilbert and Sullivan exactly one century earlier). By the time he was thirty, Lloyd Webber thus had created three significant works for the musical stage. The greatest successes would follow in the next decade.