Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (68 page)

In his eloquent memoir
Original Story By
, Laurents, writing about the stage version of
West Side Story
, concludes without false modesty, that this show was richer in content and quality than innovation:

As for those inflated claims, if
West Side Story
influenced the musical theatre, it was in content, not form. Serious subjects—bigotry, race, rape, murder, death—were dealt with for the first time in a musical and as seriously as they would be in a play. That was innovative; style and technique were not. They had all been used piecemeal in one way or another before…. The music for the dances is extraordinarily exciting; that music and the basic story are the lasting strengths of the show. The difference between the music of
West Side Story
and other shows, however, is in quality, not in purpose…. What we really did stylistically with
West Side Story
was take every musical theatre technique as far as it could be taken. Scene, song and dance were integrated seamlessly; we did it all better than anyone ever had before. We were not the innovators we were called but what we did achieve was more than enough to be proud of.
²⁴

While the musical and dramatic techniques of
West Side Story
may have been nothing new, the thought, complexity, and seriousness with which they were employed were exceptional. It was in the domain of overall quality that the show was innovative—it raised the bar (and the barre) for what a musical could be, beyond even the ambitious standards of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s collaborations of the 1940s and early ’50s. Their new post–
West Side Story
shows such as
Flower Drum Song
and
The Sound of Music
began to look a little artificial in comparison to Wise’s film version of
West Side Story
in 1961 (but not the film version of
The Sound of Music
, which Wise also directed).

Although the movie may exert less appeal today in the context of the similarly accomplished and even grittier
Chicago
and
Sweeney Todd
adaptations, Wise’s (and Robbins’s)
West Side Story
—with its contemporary urban setting, ubiquitous and stunning dancing, and careful use of recurring sung and orchestral musical motives creatively augmented by location photography on the streets of New York—remains still something of a rarity in musical films where control over the soundtrack was typically facilitated by working on indoor stage sets. Anyone who has seen the opening of the film, with its unforgettable bird’s-eye view of Manhattan office towers and slums,
brings that memory with them to even the best staged revival of the show. Wise brought taste and sophistication to his direction. Although he changed the show quite a bit, he brought it enduring fame and introduced the realistic, contemporary musical to a much broader audience, first across the United States, then around the globe. On September 3, 2006, the American Film Institute placed
West Side Story
behind only
Singin’ in the Rain
(1952) as the Greatest Film Musical of all time.
²⁵

Within two years after creating the lyrics for
West Side Story
(1957) to music by Leonard Bernstein, Sondheim, who wanted to be a Broadway composer-lyricist, reluctantly but again successfully wrote the lyrics only for a show to Jule Styne’s music for the canonic
Gypsy
(1959), also directed by Jerome Robbins. Sondheim’s second foray into Broadway lyric writing brought him into direct contact for the first time with a major star, Ethel Merman, and Sondheim contributed greatly to the creation of her character, Rose. Merman’s role in
Gypsy
capped a long career studded with star vehicles dating back to
Girl Crazy
(1930).
¹
Sondheim’s next show, the wacky but well-crafted farce,
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
(1962), marked his long-awaited Broadway debut as a lyricist
and
composer at the age of thirty-two.
Forum
won the Tony Award for best musical, and at 964 performances enjoyed a longer run (200 performances longer) than any future Sondheim show. Even during these early associations with acclaim and popularity, Sondheim was generally relegated to the background, barely mentioned in the reviews of
West Side Story
and
Gypsy
and bypassed as a nominee for his work on
Forum
.

Perhaps the major achievement of his next musical,
Anyone Can Whistle
(1964), again with a libretto by
West Side Story
and
Gypsy
author Arthur Laurents, was that despite the show’s disappointing run of nine performances,
Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records had the foresight to produce a commercial original cast recording. One year later Sondheim completed his trilogy of collaborations with composer legends begun with Bernstein and Styne when, against his better judgment, he wrote the lyrics for Richard Rodger’s
Do I Hear a Waltz?
(the fourth and probably final Laurents libretto that Sondheim set), an unpleasant and increasingly acrimonious experience for all concerned. The result was a quickly forgotten and subsequently neglected musical that despite its troubled genesis deserves to be heard and seen more often.
²

Stephen Sondheim in 2007.

After two hits (as a lyricist), one hit as a composer-lyricist, a flop, a disappointing run, and five fallow years Sondheim, in tandem with Harold Prince, erupted on Broadway between 1970 and 1973 with a creative explosion:
Company
(1970),
Follies
(1971), and
A Little Night Music
(1973). From this trilogy
Company
has been most frequently singled out for its historic and artistic significance as a pioneering exponent of the so-called concept musical. Not atypical is the assessment by Thomas P. Adler in the
Journal of Popular Culture
that
Company
was “every bit as much a landmark musical as
Oklahoma!
”
³
Eugene K. Bristow and J. Kevin Butler conclude their essay on
Company
in
American Music
with a similar epiphany: “As
Oklahoma!
was the landmark, model, and inspiration for almost all musicals during the three decades that followed
its opening,
Company
became the vantage point, prototype, and stimulus for new directions in musical theater of the seventies and eighties.”
⁴

By 1973 Sondheim, now forty-three, had composed the lyrics to two of the most critically acclaimed shows of Broadway’s Golden Age and music and lyrics for another five shows, including a trilogy that inaugurated a new age. Over the next twenty years Sondheim’s next seven shows (three with director Prince, three with librettist-director James Lapine, and one with director Jerry Zaks) would provide Broadway with some of the most compelling, innovative, thought-provoking, and often emotionally affecting musicals of their, or any, time. Sondheim, although arguably a central figure in these collaborations, was not entirely responsible for all the remarkable qualities audiences and critics appreciate in these shows. In fact, the only show he initiated himself was
Sweeney Todd
.

Sondheim’s shows have lacked in immediately popular appeal, but they are everywhere lavished with deep and lasting critical praise. In the long run, most of his works have acquired a consequential audience of lovers and aesthetes, year after year. The relatively short initial runs of even his most successful shows as composer-lyricist or their revivals therefore do not accurately reflect the influence and popularity of his work within the musical theater community. Here are the first performance runs of the twelve shows between 1962 and 1994 for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics, in numerical rather than chronological order:

Obviously, Sondheim’s towering reputation must be based on other factors, including critical esteem and widely available excellent audio and video recordings. Despite these relatively modest, and sometimes even less than modest runs, with the exception of
Passion
and the two-month workshop of
Bounce
(formerly
Gold
and
Wise Guys
) in 1999 and its brief return
for a two-month New York Off-Broadway engagement in 2008 as
Road Show
, every Sondheim show has also received a major New York revival of some sort—Broadway, Off-Broadway, Staged Reading, New York City Opera—and innumerable productions in regional and community theaters, colleges, and high schools throughout the United States, and in opera houses throughout the world. After a popular
Forum
revival in 1996 (715 performances) starring Nathan Lane, then Whoopi Goldberg as the slave Pseudolus, the short twenty-first century has already witnessed a Sondheim Broadway revival nearly every year:
Follies
(2001),
Into the Woods
(2002),
Assassins
(2004),
Sweeney Todd
(2005),
Company
(2006), and
Sunday in the Park with George
(2008), and as a lyricist
Gypsy
(2003 and 2008) and
West Side Story
(2009). Sondheim’s work, while lacking in initial popularity, appears to be gaining longevity and ubiquity.

Sondheim, a native New Yorker whose father could play harmonized show tunes by ear after hearing them once or twice, was the beneficiary of a precocious, suitably specialized musical education. While still a teenager and shortly after the premiere of
Carousel
, Sondheim had the opportunity to be critiqued at length by the legendary Hammerstein, who, by a fortuitous coincidence that would be the envy of
Show Boat
’s second act, happened to be a neighbor and the father of Sondheim’s friend and contemporary, James Hammerstein. Sondheim’s unique apprenticeship with the first of his three great mentors, Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, one of the giants of the Broadway musical from the 1920s until long after his death in 1960 (see the chapters on
Show Boat
and
Carousel
), might serve as a Hegelian metaphor for Sondheim’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of modernism and traditionalism, high-brow and low-brow. His great aesthetic achievements have been as a loyal revolutionary (not unlike Beethoven) who thoroughly engaged with—rather than rejected—Broadway’s richest traditions. Before his collaborations with three major composers in this tradition as well as Robbins and Laurents and Merman, Sondheim was able to learn invaluable lessons about the craft of Broadway from one of its greatest pioneers. Sondheim never forgot Hammerstein’s priceless lessons in how to write and how not to write a musical. To help his student develop his craft and discover his own voice, Hammerstein suggested that Sondheim write four kinds of musicals to develop his craft.
⁵
For the next six years Sondheim would attempt to follow this advice.