On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (24 page)

With all his experience, couldn’t Prince tell from the audience reaction that they most certainly were in trouble? So many people walked out on
Merrily
that a joke ran around town that you couldn’t get a cab at intermission. The public laughed at serious lines and ignored jokes, sure symptoms of a flop. Morale backstage was so bad that, at an early preview, James Weissenbach, who was playing Frank, couldn’t hang a picture in his “new apartment” scene with Mary because the tech failed him; shooting a helpless look at Ann Morrison, he walked off the stage.
^*

Newspaper columns ran with tales of disaster, as they love to do, and there may well have been a pile-on by The Blob, which had endured five Sondheim-Prince masterpieces in a row in the 1970s and was fed up with genius. All the same,
Merrily
’s failure—very bad reviews and a two-week run—was largely
Merrily
’s fault. The sense of failure was so pervasive that RCA Victor, who had the recording rights, at first declined to go ahead, which would have made
Merrily
the only Sondheim musical not to get an original-cast album. Cooler heads, as they say, prevailed, and the recording was a hit.

Then, in 1985, Furth and Sondheim (with director James Lapine) created a revision in La Jolla, California, cast with grown-ups John Rubinstein, Chip Zien, and Heather MacRae (with Marin Mazzie as Beth). Now the high-school play atmosphere was dispelled, but so thoroughly that the frame of a graduation ceremony—a key link with the play
Merrily
—was dropped, losing “The Hills of Tomorrow.” Furth tried to give the principals more profile, though Mary’s writing career remained mysterious (exactly what does she publish?) and Charley was still a naggy twerp. In fact, both still see Frank as
her
husband and
his
songwriting partner for life, which makes them as selfish as they enjoy thinking he is. Frank wasn’t put on earth to serve as a tool of their agendas; he needs to establish his own agenda and get into the dangerous Sondheimland of free will and its consequences. It’s no doubt unhappy that his will includes taking on another man’s wife—Gussie, married to the producer of Frank and Charley’s Broadway show. But it’s really Gussie who makes the moves, not Frank:

FRANK
:
I could never live with you leaving Joe for me.

GUSSIE
:
I’m leaving him for me.

In the 2012 Encores! concert staging, this scene was directed (by James Lapine again) very sensually, as Elizabeth Stanley’s Gussie didn’t just seduce Colin Donnell’s Frank but took him apart piece by piece. Their transaction is built around a number newly written for the 1985 revision, “Growing Up,” which begins as Frank’s soliloquy—giving us a first chance to understand him—and then becomes Gussie’s siren’s song. The Encores! staging showed us, unmistakably, a being confronted by irresistible temptation. The musical’s Frank is a strong man, but Gussie’s wish to make him her alpha male was stronger, urged along in the music by a chromatic run (one of the score’s melodic cells) that, when Frank sang it, was hesitant and thoughtful but, when Gussie sang it, became slithery and bewitching.

But then, all of the changes in the score made in 1985 clarified the action. A new opening, “That Frank,” replaced the original’s “Rich and Happy” with a different view of Frank, as sung by his Hollywood cohorts: he’s
good
at producing movies, so no wonder he changed careers. “The Blob,” cut on Broadway, as I’ve said, was reinstated, amplifying Gussie’s character—a strategic improvement, as she is the musical’s equivalent of the play’s Althea Royce, not just a leading actress but the embodiment of the security and glamor that Frank wants to make his own. Royce is that famous excuse for artists who started off keen but failed in their second act, the bitch goddess Success. She lures you, corrupts you, destroys you—or so runs the myth. In truth, doesn’t she give back to you what you give to her? Stay keen and don’t die young. Be William Faulkner, not F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Or be Moss Hart. Frank is Moss Hart, or Oscar Hammerstein, or Stephen Sondheim: anyone with the intelligence and talent to make interesting things happen in the arts; and every single one of them has the right to define “interesting” on his terms. But Hart, Hammerstein, and Sondheim were adventurous in what they did, Hammerstein more than Hart and Sondheim more than Hammerstein. Richard/Frank is, in the long run, not adventurous.

He is successful. Again, it’s
Allegro
’s Joseph Taylor Jr. as Dr. Feelgood, throwing away his skill—his soul—on la-di-da hypochondriacs. Joe Taylor is an everyman, a kid with growing pains and a yearbook page and anxieties. Franklin Shepard is special, which is why he attracts admirers who believe he will solve their problems. There’s an excitement about him, and every time
Merrily
is produced with a charismatic actor as Frank, the show works. Otherwise, it strains for meaning, because the role is underwritten and only makes sense when we can
see
what Frank is: a savior.

Paradoxically, the musical
Merrily
is both very faithful yet rather untrue to its source. To repeat: in the musical, we lose a substantial piece of information about why the hero is so determined to achieve financial independence: to protect himself from the kind of beating he took during his first marriage. No one, we almost hear him cry, will ever own me again! But the musical also improved on that hero, trading the somewhat high-strung Richard Niles for the more fascinating Franklin Shepard, a wonder boy on whom everyone needs to project his or her fantasies. He’s a savior, yes—but of no redemptive power whatsoever, because he’s too self-absorbed to relate to others.

Is that why he gave up the very creative vocation of composer for the bureaucratic post of movie producer? Like so many Sondheim shows,
Merrily We Roll Along
raises more questions than it answers. But raising questions is the theatre’s mandate. It may be that we’re never going to know what drives Franklin Shepard, just as we never quite understand the Franklin Shepards we meet in life. The better we know them, the more they confuse us. One
Merrily
lyric runs, “It started out like a song.” It always does, doesn’t it?

^*
He did come right back, but in the end he left the show, replaced by his understudy, Jim Walton.

Sunday in the Park with George

Possibly autobiographical study of the passion of the artist, 1984.

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

Original Leads: Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters. Director: James Lapine.

For many decades now, people in the lively arts have been decrying their seamy underside, the part the public is largely unaware of. “A grand profession but a dirty business” has been attributed to so many actors, opera singers, ballet dancers, and so on that, for all we know, it dates back to Aeschylus. The problematical “human” side of the arts industry takes in everything from lie-cheat-and-steal producers and two-faced playwrights to the “Darling, you were marvelous” first nighters in your New Haven dressing room who race back to Broadway to tell everyone you know, “My dear, his collapse is complete!”

The Blob is back. “We’re in a business,” James Lapine says, in
Sondheim & Co
., “where they love nothing more than to build you up and tear you down,” and it was The Blob that spread bad words about
Merrily We Roll Along
’s New York previews so relentlessly that, in effect, the critics reviewed the dish rather than the show itself. Sondheim told me that, at one preview, two men chased him up the aisle attacking the show virually into his ear, sheer venom, The Blob. And, of course, when Sondheim’s next piece broke out of the Sondheim-Prince line to forge a new partnership with James Lapine, The Blob was quick to infer—and advertise—a rupture in Sondheim’s relationship with Prince.

There wasn’t one, and Prince would stage another Sondheim show some years later. Nevertheless,
Sunday in the Park With George
marks the start of Sondheim’s third period, dominated by collaborations with Lapine. As both librettist and director, Lapine comes out of the off-Broadway experimental stage, as opposed to Sondheim’s background in the Big Broadway of
West Side Story
,
Gypsy
,
Do I Hear a Waltz?
. His Prince shows of the 1970s form a quintet of unparalleled experimentation, true—but they were all the same carried out within a main-stage viewpoint, that belief that, historically, Broadway is where important American theatre happens.

Lapine’s venue was offbeat—and he was unfamiliar with musicals in general. In
Look, I Made a Hat
, Sondheim mentions that Lapine didn’t know Leonard Bernstein’s
Candide
score, which is somewhat like a movie director not having seen
Bonnie and Clyde
. In fact, as Sondheim and Lapine discussed possibilities for a musical of their own, they finally arrived at a painting, Georges Seurat’s
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
,
^*
in which various figures sit or stand on their day off: a company of strangers isolated in their thoughts on an in fact not vase-like but serpentine spot of land in the Seine. (The island is not in central Paris but to the northwest, after the river passes through the city’s famous parts and curls back around toward St. Denis, about ten kilometers north of Notre-Dame.) Seurat’s picture fascinates because it seems so full of something or other yet so still and unyielding, so … storyless. It’s a mystery, Lapine and Sondheim thought. Something’s missing. Then one or the other said, “It’s the artist.” He can’t be seen, yet only he is aware of what he has left out: because he knows all the stories.

And that was the musical they wrote—or, at least, the first half of it, opening up the lives of the people in the picture from the viewpoint of the artist. In a bold move, the musical’s second half jumps from the time of the painting, the mid-1880s, to a hundred years later. Again, the action revolves around an artist, apparently the great-grandson of Seurat, an American also named George. As Seurat was radical for his time, so is his counterpart, using electricity in his exhibitions as Seurat used pointillism, employing tiny dots of different colors instead of broad brush strokes of solid or slightly modified shades.

Sunday
’s first act, set, in effect,
inside
the
Grande Jatte
painting, has the advantage of Seurat’s piquant imagination; he footnotes the painting for us even as he lives it along with his creations. The second act, set in a museum and then back on that island in the Seine, now crowded with high-rises, can seem antiseptic by comparison, but in fact the show’s inner life is left hanging at the intermission, and is resolved only at the evening’s end. Here is the action in outline:

Act One: Distracted by his work, Georges neglects his mistress, Dot, and struggles for acceptance in the face of public scorn. Does no one understand how desperately he needs to substantiate his vision? His mother, his subjects, even Dot? Furious at Georges’ refusal to give himself emotionally to any love but art, Dot—who is pregnant, presumably with Georges’ child—leaves for America with another man.

Act Two: The politics and commercialism of the modern-art scene depress George. His predecessor died very young, unaware of how posterity would honor him; thus, George feels as lost as Georges felt unaccepted. Then, on La Grande Jatte itself, Dot appears to him just as she looks in the painting, heartening George with the same music with which she took her angry leave of Georges in Act One, the rejecting “We Do Not Belong Together.” Only now it is “Move On,” reassuring and forgiving. Better: understanding who he is. The familiar painting reforms itself as we watch, and, at the music’s climax, in a gesture at once tender, epic, and shocking, Georges’ subjects bow to George, in homage to the mission of the artist, redeemed and encouraged to continue his work.

This should explain why the show’s halves, which seem to some onlookers to be two different musicals, in fact form a single continuity that isn’t rounded off till the very end, when the trumpet sounds the two notes of the “Sunday” theme, terminally binding the old story with the new one. Further, a single cast plays the two sets of roles, though there is no relationship between the painting figures in Act One and the museum habitués in Act Two.
^*
However, the same actor appears as Georges and then George, and one actress plays both Dot and George’s grandmother, who takes part in his exhibit. The pairing is deliberately off-kilter, akin to that of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett, the man so obsessed and the woman so sportive: instead of Boy Meets Girl it’s Musical Play Meets Musical Comedy. But then,
Sunday
is not a smooth work but a rough one, with odd parts, starting with those two “mismatched” acts. Most Sondheim shows are smooth—in another word, consistent. In fact, most musical shows, period, are smooth, because rough confuses the public. It’s so … surprising.