On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (16 page)

In fact,
Company
is the show that introduced the mature Sondheim style in song. There is, for example:

One: The “playwrighting” plot number, in “Barcelona.” This is in effect a dialogue scene turned into music, on the morning after Robert has enjoyed a sexual encounter with a stewardess. Made almost entirely of an exchange of very short lines, the song catches his sleepy trance and her wistful regret with an eerie realism. A much more elaborate version of this type of composition is the opening of
Into the Woods
, a vast rondo in which a number of plotlines are initiated, united by the refrain of the title melody, the whole thing taking up fifty pages of vocal score.

Two: The pastiche number, in “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.” This one brings us back to the days of close-harmony “girl groups,” as they were termed. Usually sister threesomes—the Boswells, the Andrewses—they sang everything from slow-dance ballads to raveups but were often best known for novelty songs with a unique hook in the lyrics, as with the German tang of the Andrews Sisters’ “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” or the combination of war and jitterbug in “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy [of Company B].”
Company
’s equivalent offers Robert’s three girl friends—Kathy, the would-be homebody; April, the stewardess, a bit of an airhead; and Marta, the hipster (“The pulse of this city, kiddo, is me”)—in a jump blues, given as a performance piece complete with a bow at the end. Sondheim’s scores often delve into pastiche, perhaps most dazzlingly in the opening of
Pacific Overtures
’ second act, “Please Hello.” A playwrighting number as well, it treats the diplomacy of international emissaries engaging with a Japanese official: an American, to a Sousaesque march; a Brit, in Gilbert and Sullivan patter style; a Dutchman, in a waltz clog to the clacking of wooden shoes (on Japanese temple blocks); a Russian, in a wail of the steppes in f minor; and at last a Frenchman, in an Offenbachian cancan.

Three: The showstopper solo, in “The Ladies Who Lunch.” Perhaps it was inevitable that Joanne would have something special to sing, as Elaine Stritch was known as much for her voice as for her expertise in tart badinage. But her number stands apart from the rest of the
Company
score; it almost doesn’t even belong in the show. An ironic eulogy for the kind of woman Joanne might have been were she not utterly nonconformist, it does not relate to the show’s theme, as the other songs do. It’s simply great music-making, though it does demand a top-notch singer, confounding Hal Prince’s wish to cast realistically rather than theatrically. Later Sondheim showstoppers are rooted in a work’s scenario—
Follies
’ “I’m Still Here” and “Could I Leave You?,” for instance.
Sunday in the Park With George
offers, in “Finishing the Hat,” an artist’s credo that encapsulates not only the show but, arguably, Sondheim’s canon as a whole: in the artist’s life, the art comes first.

Four: The ingeniously verbal comic number, in “Getting Married Today.” Sung by Amy, frantic at the thought of graduating her love affair to marriage, this one puts the singer through several verses of lines jammed together, feverishly hurtling forth with scarcely a second’s breath break. There are funny lines within it, but the central jest is watching Amy zooming along while trying to keep her diction apt and her air intake indiscernible. Typically for Sondheim, this is also another playwrighting number, for Amy’s hysteria is packaged with a church-choir soloist backed by choral Amens and snatches of dialogue from Paul and Robert and Paul’s own rather clueless vocals. Interestingly, Amy’s lines in this musical scene are her only real solo opportunities in the
Company
score, yet we infer that she is the only woman of the couples whom Robert could love as a husband. (His proposal comes later in this scene, and a cut number, “Multitudes of Amys,” emphasizes his attraction to her.) Thus, an important character never gets her Wanting Song. She would in a conventional show, but
Company
is so unconventional that we don’t know how important Amy really is: because Robert doesn’t, despite his proposal. This is another reason why
Company
gives the director and his troupe so much to play: the piece is deliberately left blank or ambiguous here and there, leaving the actors to choose what to project, how to specify.

Indeed,
Company
truly is an actors’ musical; few other musicals give the crew so much to explore. Take Sarah and Harry, the dieter and the drinker who end up in a karate fight. Is this a Strindbergian war of the genders, or just edgy play in the James Thurber manner? Or David and Jenny, who spend their scene smoking toke with Robert until … well, is it until David makes her stop against her will or until he senses that she
wants
him to stop her?

Again, all this interpretive room links
Company
to the postwar spoken drama, to, say, Sam Shepard or Edward Albee. But it also looks back to Oscar Hammerstein, for many of his characters can be tilted by actor’s choices. Why is
Oklahoma!
’s Laurey so ambivalent about Curly? Is
The King and I
’s Mrs. Anna a progressive or a scold?
Company
marked a breakaway from the musical As It Was, but also from Sondheim’s work before it. This title initiated Serious Sondheim, when he—as I’ve said—intellectualized the musical. It already was art, but from now on it would be controversial.

^*
As “objet volant non identifié,” literally “unidentified flying object” but, idiomatically, the work unlike the other works in a creator’s oeuvre.

^*
Furth’s acting career never reached breakout, but he did achieve a limited immortality in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, as Woodcock, who stands up to Paul Newman and Robert Redford when they rob a train. Twice. FURTH: “I work for Mr. E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad, and he entrusted me …”

Follies

Gloomy pageant on disenchantment after the Expulsion From Eden, 1971.

Music and Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: James Goldman.

Original Leads: Alexis Smith, Gene Nelson, Dorothy Collins, John McMartin, Yvonne De Carlo. Directors: Hal Prince and Michael Bennett.

On April 4, 1971, Sondheim returned to the Winter Garden—the site of his first Broadway outing,
West Side Story
—for a show billed, in the manner of the day, as “a new musical.” This is the greatest understatement in the history of new musicals, for
Follies
is an epic in miniature, a review of the past while examining the present, the most intimate of spectacles in its confidential outpourings, and, like
Allegro
, a work that divided theatregoers’ reactions, from “fabulous” to “depressing.”

But then,
Follies
is fabulous and depressing. It’s also a very textured and deceptively complex piece, so let’s deconstruct its layers one at a time. First the four leads:

BEN
:
an imposing public figure. His profession is never stated, but he seems to be a cross between Henry Kissinger and Gore Vidal.

PHYLLIS
:
Ben’s wife. Chic, smart, and fearless.

BUDDY
:
a traveling salesman. A good guy, but corny. Forever in love with

SALLY
:
whom he married. Sally is dumb and frustrated, because she didn’t want Buddy. She wanted Ben. But Ben and Buddy were close, or seemed to be—no one is close to Ben except Phyllis—so Sally may have married Buddy to be close to Ben.

There are four other leads: the same four people, except we see them as they were some twenty years before:

YOUNG BEN
:
suave, ambitious, opportunistic.

YOUNG PHYLLIS
:
nice, open, unformed.

YOUNG BUDDY
:
the same guy he’ll become, but unaware of how miserable he’ll be with

YOUNG SALLY
:
because when they married she was cute and amusingly unpredictable.

Now the scenario.
Follies
takes place at a show-biz reunion in a theatre that once housed a series of revues comparable to the
Ziegfeld Follies
. On the eve of its demolition, the Ziegfeld—here called Dimitri Weismann—throws a party for his former players. There is no story per se, no beginning, middle, and end. As the guests parade before us, reminiscing and bragging, we learn about Phyllis and Sally, who were members of Weismann’s corps, and about Ben and Buddy, who courted them.

But let’s be more precise. Buddy courted Sally. Ben’s courting ranged more widely, because, while he was interested in Sally, she was too simple to serve as the consort of the grandee Ben planned to become. But Phyllis, intelligent and adaptable, could educate herself. When Elaine Stritch first heard
Company
’s “The Ladies Who Lunch,” she thought a reference to “a piece of Mahler’s” concerned something from a bakery. Phyllis
was
like that: culturally limited. However, to live up to Ben’s expectations, she learned who Gustav Mahler was, and what concerts are about, and why people listen to—and, better, write—symphonies. She’s a game girl; that might even be her salient quality.

Meanwhile, as the evening wears on, the central quartet’s problems rise up and engulf them, especially Ben’s self-hatred, Phyllis’ anger at his neglect of her, Buddy’s deflated marriage, and Sally’s belief that Ben is her white knight. Finally, their misery and ire erupt in a
Follies
to end the follies: a revue that is set, ironically, in a place called Loveland. Each of the four gets his or her specialty, but Ben, as an “Is everybody happy?” vaudeville sybarite in top hat with cane, falls apart during his turn. Loveland dissolves, and the quartet finds itself alone in the empty theatre, alone in life. Now they leave, Ben and Phyllis perhaps to make the best of a vexed but suitable marriage and Buddy and Sally to endure an even worse one. The party—the very idea of a
Follies
itself—is over.

And the score? About half consists of character numbers for the four leads. The other half is pastiche numbers revisiting the show biz that the Weismann
Follies
would have thrived on—the tenor in tails’ “bring on the dollies” anthem, “Beautiful Girls”; the De Sylva, Brown, and Henderson salute to the starry-eyed grunt, “Broadway Baby”; the Ziegfeldian spot, in which the lyrics of a song dictate the theme of the following dance, here a Mirror Number, “Who’s That Woman?,” in which the movements of aged, former showgirls are haunted (that is,
mirrored
) by the ghosts of the kicky little tricks they used to be; the ode to an exotic address, “Ah, Paris!”; and so on. Thus
Follies
’ songs keep the ear accustomed to shifts in the timescape from the present to the past and back again, for the entire show is built upon the juxtaposition of what we were and what we are, asking, How did we become so unsatisfied?

This confrontation of past and present adds yet another layer to
Follies
’ pile-up of memes. The present is haunted, the four leads are haunted, show biz is haunted, America is haunted, and
Follies
is haunted: by the recollection of bygone days. Days before—depending on which level of the
Follies
dig one excavates—the Vietnam War soured us on the American mission to democratize the world. Or before the entertainment platform of Ziegfeld and his beautiful girls was compromised by rock and gay. Or before Ben realized that free will doesn’t necessarily make you happy.

So Hal Prince and his co-director, Michael Bennett, filled their stage with ghosts. A choice collection of spooks owned the show’s first five minutes, to the accompaniment of Sondheim’s use of classical pastiche, to match the hommages to old pop music. In the style of (but more richly harmonized than) Erik Satie’s delicate
gymnopédies
,
^*
the ectoplasmic population of the Weismann Theater (
sic
) materialized alone, in pairs, in groups: the dead, made up in black and white, as if silent film was whispering in Technicolor, so much a part of what was once thought of as American life that they haven’t quite departed just yet.

Preparing for the party, Weismann’s service staff bustled about, utterly unaware of the secret
Follies
the ghosts were putting on: first the Butterfly Girl, a replica of Ziegfeld’s resplendent (and mononymous) Dolores in her fabulous winged gown by (the similarly mononymous) Lucile, gliding as serenely as time across the stage. Then other models appeared, then six dancing girls in top hats, silently mouthing some old lyric—Gene Buck? Ira Gershwin?—as they moved toward us in formation. Bennett’s dancers were under strict orders to keep to a count in their head, ignoring the orchestra and the tense rhythms of the party wait staff or they’d be thrown off, for the ghosts weren’t in sync with what was happening at the party. That was
now
. The ghosts were
then
.