On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (18 page)

So one can’t “smiley face” what happens in
Follies
, even if every revival does delete worrisome lines—about Sally’s suicide attempts (“I should of [
sic
] died the last time,” she ruefully admits) or the moment when one of the old showgirls says hello to Phyllis, who cuts her in half (“I never liked you, either”). They keep changing
Show Boat
, too. But in that case they’re trying to unify an epic that sprawls from musical comedy through musical play to operetta. In
Follies
’ case they’re trying to cheer up a woeful tale. What a nifty plan. Next, let’s do
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
with Adam Sandler.

Anyway,
Follies
already maintains a “cheer up” in its score, which is filled with irresistible up tunes. That’s why the show keeps coming back: the subject is dire but the music is in love with the audience. So, for example, the young versions of the four leads get “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow” and “Love Will See Us Through,” duets sung separately, then together, in what is called a quodlibet. Sondheim doesn’t usually write such pieces, because they reiterate rather than develop. Still, the two numbers dovetail beautifully. They as well provide a bit of dramatic dead giveaway, because directors love to slip a warning into the end, finding some way to indicate that, even as Ben pairs with Phyllis and Buddy with Sally, sparks still fly between Ben and Sally. They almost—just almost—end the number hand in hand.

Phyllis is red-hot and Buddy is sympathetic, but there’s something about that Ben and Sally thing. The “haunting” music that launches the show in the evocation of Erik Satie derives from a cut number, “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” a duet for Ben and Sally that, again, captures youth in its spring of wonder and delight. The eternal Girl says, You won’t desert me, right? And the eternal Boy says, We’ll be together for all time.

Does he mean it? Does she believe him? Yes. Because that is the joy of the magical place they’re in, the show-biz place, where kids are certain of the future and full of hope. They call it Loveland.

^*
These were three short piano pieces in antique style, written in 1888. In three-quarter time, they are marked “Slow and Sorrowful,” “Slow and Sad,” and “Slow and Serious.” (Sondheim’s is marked “Slowly—in 3.”) All three resemble one another closely, with a simple, flowing melody in the right hand and a halting alternation of bass note and chord in each measure in the left. Satie’s design, apparently, was to revive ancient Greek ritual dances, the sort of thing Isadora Duncan would use.

A Little Night Music

Aristocratic-romantic-erotic operetta, 1973

Based on Ingmar Bergman’s film
Smiles of a Summer Night
.

Music and Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: Hugh Wheeler.

Original Leads: Glynis Johns, Len Cariou, Hermione Gingold. Director: Hal Prince.

The French playwright Jean Anouilh categorized his works as
pièces noires
(dark plays),
roses
(sweet plays),
brillantes
(witty plays),
grinçantes
(grating plays), and
costumées
(plays set in the historical past). Anouilh’s
L’Invitation au Château
is a
brillante
, set in the winter garden of a mansion presided over by a sarcastic old baroness in a wheelchair as various characters pine for apparently unavailable lovers. The baroness, Madame Desmortes (translation: “of the dead”), is a typical Anouilh figure, somewhat like Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell but intimate rather than grandiose. She constantly reminisces about her affairs with various magnificoes, and overflows with wisdom about looks and courtship:

CAPULET
(The baroness’ companion): 
I was a girl of twenty, you know, once upon a time.

MADAME DESMORTES
: 
(looking at her) When, for goodness’ sake? … You’re a nice girl, Capulet, but … you’re plain. No one who is plain can ever have been twenty.

To add to the fun, the play features in its cast identical twin brothers, played by the same actor with the aid of doubles in shadow when he has to make a quick costume change.

After
Company
’s super-contemporary urban ant farm and
Follies
’ pastiche dazzle,
Ring Round the Moon
(
Château
’s English title, in Christopher Fry’s adaptation, which I just quoted) seemed a delightful novelty. In fact, in
Contradictions
, Hal Prince states that “right after”
West Side Story
, he and Sondheim discussed “doing a kind of court masque, a chamber opera … a gavotte in which couples interchange, suffering mightily in elegant country homes, wearing elegant clothes.”

The Anouilh was ideal source material, and Prince says he made an appointment to see Anouilh himself in Paris and pitch the project to him. Unfortunately, the musical as a form occupied a very low echelon in France. Intellectuals dismissed it as meretricious spectacle, both imported and homegrown—though at least, they might grudgingly admit, French musicals had wit and a sly charm. This may be why Anouilh stood Prince up: when the producer arrived for their rendezvous, he was told that Anouilh had merrily gone off to Switzerland. Outraged, Prince returned to America determined to find another piece to source the masque.

Two films came to mind: Jean Renoir’s
The Rules of the Game
(1939) and Ingmar Bergman’s
Smiles of a Summer Night
(1955). The Renoir is rather dark, but the Bergman is enticingly bittersweet. Sondheim must have alerted to the music heard over the credits, as a soprano and chorus sing “Bort Med Sorg och Bitterhet” (Away With Care and Bitterness), written by Bergman himself to the music of Erik Nordgren, who scored the rest of the film as well. The number arrests the ear with its inconclusive tone; like the story it precedes, it is densely light, anxiously joyful—and that sounds like a Sondheim musical to me.

Better,
Smiles
, with a stronger story than
Ring Round the Moon
, offered some of the elements that had attracted Prince and Sondheim to the French play. It lacked the twins, but it had the acerbic beldam in the wheelchair, the gavotting, interchanging couples, and the country house. And, lo, Bergman said yes—as long as the musical bore a title different from that of the movie. (Even the poster credits did not name the source, giving the line as “Suggested by a film by Ingmar Bergman.”)
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
(“A Short Serenade” but, literally, “A Little Night Music”), one of Mozart’s most popular pieces, gave the musical its name, suggesting the light-classical nature of the work. This is Sondheim’s operetta, his chamber opera, his hommage to some of his favorite composers. Aside from the aforementioned Liebeslieder Singers and their echo of Brahms, the vamp to a song called “In Praise of Women” sounds very like Rachmaninof, though Ravel’s
Valses Nobles et Sentimentales
casts a spell over everything in this “waltz musical,” particularly Ravel’s fourth number, marked “Assez animé” (Rather lively). In fact,
A Little Night Music
itself could easily have been called
Noble and Sentimental Waltzes
, for it treats of fine feelings and grand occasions and revels in dance forms, naturally the waltz but also the sarabande (in “Liaisons”) and mazurka (in the introduction to “The Glamorous Life”). It really is the court masque that Prince and Sondheim envisioned in the 1950s.

But who could write the libretto for a piece so … classy? Witty? Sophisticated? Or elegant, perhaps? This was clearly to be a musical that the American stage had not seen before. The setting alone—turn-of-the-century Sweden—was a novelty; operetta favored globe-trotting, but only to places known for picturesque attire: old New Orleans, François Villon’s or D’Artagnan’s Paris, the East, the West, the New Moon. Not, surely, the frosty North. And as for the class and wit, that really suggested
My Fair Lady
, whose book was written (more or less) by George Bernard Shaw. The waltz musical did not sound like a job for George Furth or James Goldman, or any of Sondheim’s collaborators so far.

And here librettist Hugh Wheeler enters the Sondheim scene. An Englishman who emigrated to the United States in the mid-1930s at the age of twenty-two, Wheeler was a mystery novelist who became a playwright, claiming three Broadway titles in the 1960s.
A Little Night Music
was his first try at writing a musical, but he then became a regular in the field, working with Hal Prince in particular—on later Sondheim shows; on the aforementioned
Candide
revisal; adapting Kurt Weill and Georg Kaiser’s
Der Silbersee
(as
Silverlake
) for the New York City Opera; even for Prince’s non-musical film,
Something For Everyone
(1970).

That last title turns a key into Wheeler’s art, for it is one of the gayest creations ever, and it is so entirely because of Wheeler. The film claims to be based on Harry Kressing’s novel
The Cook
, but it isn’t. Wheeler simply used Kressing’s premise of an employee gaining power over a family, and built upon it a campy black comedy in which servant Michael York uses bisexual charm to seduce, destroy, or kill everyone in his way as he takes over a noble but impoverished Austrian family. In the first reel, he encounters daughter Jane Carr with two dogs who take to York immediately.

“They only like thieves and murderers,” she tells him. “Which are you?”

“Both,” York replies, with an engaging smile.

Add to this the gay parish favorite Angela Lansbury as the head of the family, and the playing area is set for a kind of thief’s carnival in the Noël Coward manner, erected around a beautiful young man who uses sex as a weapon, a classic gay trope.

A Little Night Music
, for all its erotic undercurrents, has no real homosexual content. But there’s a heavy dose of gay in Wheeler’s treatment of the Old Woman figure, Madame Armfeldt, who is a lot closer to Jean Anouilh’s bitchy Klingon in a tiara than to Bergman’s character. Many of her lines echo the minty sarcasm popularized in Mart Crowley’s
The Boys in the Band
:

MADAME ARMFELDT
: To lose a lover or even a husband or two in the course of one’s life can be vexing. But to lose one’s teeth is a catastrophe.

Otherwise,
A Little Night Music
follows Bergman’s script quite closely, so the leads are generally paired off incorrectly at first. The narrative energy lies in correcting the distressed partnerships. Leaving out Madame Armfeldt, who is by seniority above the dance of lovers and liars, here is a précis:

Wheeler’s fidelity to Bergman was almost absolute; there are differences of emphasis but not of kind. For instance, in the film, the actress, Désirée Armfeldt, Madame Armfeldt’s daughter, has a little boy about four years old named Fredrik (presumably after the lawyer, Fredrik Egerman, and surely his child), who is little more than an extra. In the musical, Désirée has a daughter aged thirteen, named Fredrika, who takes an active role in the proceedings.

Or: in the film, the lawyer’s son, Henrik Egerman, plays piano and guitar; in the musical, he plays the ’cello—whose deep-toned elegy makes a better fit with the lachrymose divinity student. Then, too, in the film the Count forces lawyer Egerman to play Russian roulette, but has filled the revolver with soot, while in the musical the gun is loaded. When Egerman dislodges the bullet, however, it only grazes his temple.

There is one major change, in the theme of the night’s three smiles. In the film, it is introduced by Frid: philosophy from the most basic of characters, close to the earth and the elements, so unlike the airy folk with their rarefied manners. But in the musical, the theory of the three smiles is given to Madame Armfeldt, again the most jaded and worldly of characters, who unlike Frid views life from a great distance, with perspective. Thus, Wheeler simplified Bergman’s dialogue about these three smiles. When Frid explains the concept, it is improvised and wordy. But Madame Armfeldt has had many years in which to gather her thoughts. She is epigrammatic, fanciful but precise: