On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (11 page)

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Often referred to as “Momma Rose,” she is never called that in the show. A few characters address her as “Madam Rose,” and librettist Arthur Laurents popularized it; bit by bit, it has been catching on.

A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Forum

Whirlwind farce utilizing iconic characters of ancient Roman comedy, 1962.

Music and lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart.

Original lead: Zero Mostel. Director: George Abbott.

This was Sondheim’s third hit in a row, and the first time Broadway heard an all-Sondheim score. The title derives from the standup comic’s traditional ramp-up to a joke:

COMIC
: A funny thing happened on the way to the show tonight. Fella stopped me on the street and asked for a buck. Said he hadn’t had a bite in three days. So I bit him.

Thus, for the title alone, the public was supposed to understand that
Forum
was a comic’s craze-’em-up, a hellzapoppin. Stereotypes—sweethearts, arrogant military man, randy old husband and termagant wife, et al.—get into non-stop scheming and disguises, taking twists and double-twists till you couldn’t recount the plot for a million dollars.

The driveline follows the slave Pseudolus (Zero Mostel) as he tries to win his freedom by bringing his young master (Brian Davies) together with the girl (Preshy Marker) he loves. Who happens to be the latest acquisition of the procurer Marcus Lycus (John Carradine), promised to an army captain, Miles Gloriosus (literally “Braggart Soldier,” Ron Holgate). Who turns out later to be the girl’s long-lost sibling, separated when they were stolen in infancy by pirates. And so on, in what is possibly the funniest libretto of all time. A sample: Pseudolus attempts to pry the girl, a Cretan, from Lycus. How to play it, how to … Ah! This’ll work: Crete has been ravaged by a plague:

LYCUS
:
Is it contagious?

PSEUDOLUS
:
Did you ever see a plague that wasn’t?

Or consider the henpecked husband, Senex (David Burns), on his mother-in-law:

SENEX
: A hundred and four [years old] and not one organ in working condition.

Oddly, the book has few jokes as such, mainly given to Pseudolus; the script is an interlock of character lines that derive fun not from what is said but from who says it—how the words reflect a worldview. Thus, the captain amuses because he sees himself as perfection. The shrewish wife (Ruth Kobart) regards her husband as a ninny, the captain as socially thrilling, and everyone else as exasperating—probably on purpose, just to spoil her day. Every statement they and the rest of the cast make leaps out of their individual personalities, so the common view that
Forum
is a reunion of old vaudevillians is a bit misleading. Vaudeville’s humor was nothing but jokes.
Forum
is cleverer than that. Its style was old and hokey—“vaudevillish,” we might say—but its content was new.

Directed by George Abbott,
Forum
played entirely in one piece of scenery. Not a unit set capable of modifying its views: a single, fixed location. It represented the facades of three houses in a Roman street, backed by a cyclorama onto which mood-defining projections were thrown, to underline the plot’s ever-shifting attitudes, from romance to mayhem.
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Further, there was virtually no dancing, just some gleeful pacing along the stage during “Everybody Ought To Have a Maid” and gyrations from the bordello girls when Lycus showed off his inventory.
Forum
was a musical cut down to an essence of zany fun.

The score matches it well. The early 1960s saw a number of extremely comic musicals in which nearly every number was a jest of some kind—
How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying
(1961) and
Little Me
(1962) are two such—and
Forum
is funny even in its ballads. It is well known that, in this one show, Sondheim defied the standard practice of the Hammerstein score and its emotional expansion (as with
Oklahoma!
’s “People Will Say We’re In Love”) or thematic development (in the testosterone territorialism of “The Farmer and the Cowman”). Instead, Sondheim’s
Forum
songs give the audience relaxation zones between each next sequence of bumper-cars madness.

Even so,
Forum
’s score does embrace the action at times, characterizing the boy in “Love, I Hear” and the girl in “(I’m) Lovely,” slipping into the plot in “Impossible,” as the boy and his father vie for bragging rights over the girl, and capturing the show’s lopsided delight in the perky discords of “Pretty Little Picture.” Such numbers may seem dramatically virginal next to the way later Sondheim scores marry their librettos, but
Forum
’s music sweetens the show, fleshes it out. That may be why the songs bunch up in the first half of Act One—to endear the characters to us while we’re getting used to them. After all,
Forum
is essentially a gathering of the inhabitants of late burlesque—strippers and clowns—in the format of situation comedy using the dialogue of a Restoration wit dreaming he has been reincarnated as Groucho Marx. Once the musical tone has been set, the songs appear less frequently. Having humanized the high jinks, they can let the plot run its course.

One song did not work at all. It even threatened to sabotage the show. Out of town,
Forum
began with “Love Is in the Air,” a gentle ballad with a hippety-hop vocal line. Sondheim thought enough of it to include it among the
Forum
titles he published, under his own imprint, Burthen Music Comp., Inc.
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It apparently led audiences into anticipating a light comedy, and, when they didn’t get one, they froze on the show. The reviews were hostile and ticket sales so poor that, at one matinée in Washington, D.C.,
Forum
played to some fifty people. Even the show’s director, George Abbott, so often the fixer of musicals suffering tryout confusion, had no idea what had gone wrong. “I guess we’ll have to call in George Abbott,” he said.

They called in Jerome Robbins, who immediately isolated that sweet-toned First Number as the culprit. He told Sondheim to write a new piece to match
Forum
’s high-pitched craziness, and Sondheim came up with “Comedy Tonight.” The show opened in New York to rave reviews and gave Sondheim his longest Broadway run.

Everyone involved with the show tells the tale the same way, so it must have happened, yet it’s still a strange story. Some hit musicals have opened perfectly.
Hello, Dolly!
: curtain up, chorus people ranged in “little old New York” poses hymn Dolly’s praises, trolley trundles on with passengers, lady in purple dress lowers her newspaper—it’s Dolly; we cheer—and sings a great establishing number, “I Put My Hand In.”

But some hit musicals have opened oddly.
My Fair Lady
: Covent Garden operagoers look on as buskers run through a pointless dance. It does take an Instagram of the show’s analysis of class: the haughty, dressy elite versus the ragamuffins. But it gives no hint of the wit and wisdom to come.

Forum
’s tryout turnaround is possibly the most famous backstage story in the book of Sondheim lore. But why this show suffered when others don’t is a mystery. Is it possible that
Forum
’s difficulty lay not in the sweet nature of “Love Is in the Air” but rather because the lyrics emphasize romance?
Forum
has nothing to do with romance. Its love plot is a generic formality used to kick the plot into motion (Pseudolus gets his freedom if Boy Gets Girl). Anyway, farce is not a romantic form generally.
The Man Who Came To Dinner
is about egomania.
Noises Off
is about how art attempts (and fails) to order the chaos of life.

Another famous Sondheim story concerns
Forum
’s star, Zero Mostel, who was a gifted but selfish performer. “You don’t give awards to the show,” he cried, when
Fiddler on the Roof
, Mostel’s next Broadway job after
Forum
, won a trophy. “You give the awards to
me
!” It was Mostel’s habit to decorate over the course of a run, changing lines and business, so toying with his role that he would break out of character. When reproached, Mostel defended his ad libs, even stating that playing a show’s run in its opening-night conformation was performing in “monotone.”

As it happens, ad libbing was once very much a part of a star clown’s performing etiquette. If Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers, or their colleagues saw an opportunity for an unscheduled laugh, they would grab it. It kept the art lively, and the public didn’t expect a performance that had been “frozen” on opening night. However, this tradition began to die out in the 1930s; by Mostel’s day it was over. Further, Mostel’s inventions were often vulgar. In
Sondheim & Co., Forum
’s co-librettist Burt Shevelove recalled his outrage in hearing Mostel, in a summer tour in the 1970s, spicing up
Forum
with childish violations of taste. Thus, when the plot demanded the use of a corpse, Shevelove and Gelbart played along with:

PSEUDOLUS
: Gusto! Gusto, the body snatcher! He owes me a favor!

It’s funny because the notion of someone running around ancient Rome with the name Gusto and the profession of body snatcher
is
funny. But Mostel changed it to:

PSEUDOLUS
: Gusto, the body snatcher! He owes me a snatch!

And that’s cheap and stupid.

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Nowadays, the multi-function unit set or the single-location set are common. However, they were all but unheard of in
Forum
’s 1962, though the English musical
Stop the World—I Want To Get Off
unfolded entirely in a circus ring in 1961 (and was seen here the next year, five months after
Forum
).

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Through the twentieth century into the 1960s, a show’s first song sheets appeared simultaneously with its first performances, in New Haven, Boston, or the like (which is why some titles that were cut before New York, like “Love Is in the Air,” ended up, however briefly, in print). The plan was to take advantage of sheet-music sales if a title should suddenly soar into hit status—“Night and Day,” “If I Loved You,” “Hey, There.” The 1950s was the last decade in which such hits were common, for rock and the garage band were to sweep away show tunes and the home piano. Sondheim took “burthen” from Jerome Kern, the last composer to refer to the refrain of a song by that term.
The Oxford Companion To Music
, Ninth Edition, tells us that it was originally “Burden,” as in “faburden,” in use from the tenth century and a term of changing meanings. It denotes, mainly, the harmonization of a choral piece, then only the bass line, and at last the main strain of a song. That is, following the verse (e.g., “Dere’s an ol’ man…”) comes the burthen (“Ol’ man river…”) The word is more often encountered as the French
fauxbourdon
and the Italian
falsobordone
.

Anyone Can Whistle

Satire on conformism, 1964

Music and lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: Arthur Laurents.

Original Leads: Lee Remick, Angela Lansbury, Harry Guardino. Director: Arthur Laurents.

Billed variously as “a wild new musical,” “a musical fable” (like the authors’
Gypsy
), and simply as “a new musical,”
Anyone Can Whistle
was originally to be called
The Natives Are Restless
, the title of its (later cut) opening number. The natives inhabit an impoverished town ruled by a venal Mayoress and her three officials. When a fake “miracle” rock gushes saintly water, attracting pilgrims, the town stands to become profitable—but at this point the plot veers into that of a different show altogether. In this new storyline, the inmates of the Cookie Jar—the local insane asylum—mingle with the pilgrims and must be identified and isolated. Why? Because. But they aren’t insane. They’re nonconformists.

That’s why they were locked up: individuals are dangerous to repressive regimes. But now their rebellious Nurse has taken charge of the storyline. She’s not a Cookie, but she doesn’t Fit In any more than her charges do. If the world is corrupt, why accommodate it?

Clearly designed as the show’s heroine, the Nurse warns us that some sort of savior is on his way. But, in another cut number, “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” she assures us that he won’t arrive in a heroic commotion. He’ll just arrive. And about ten seconds later, he does—to a burst of trumpets.