On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (25 page)

On the other hand, the music-theatre historian Scott McMillin, in
The Musical as Drama
, makes a powerful argument in favor of “disjunction” in the form. McMillin’s thesis—which he acknowledges as a spin-off from Brechtian theatre—sees the rough musical, with its disconnects and unassimilated elements, as a reinvigoration of the Extremely Integrated Musical, with its homogenized art. Yes, integration creates persuasive storytelling—
Oklahoma!
,
Brigadoon
,
My Fair Lady
,
The Music Man
,
A Chorus Line
, with all their features in harmony. But the best shows combining dissonant features—
On the Town
,
Cabaret
,
Chicago
—are very much with us, ceaselessly revived. (
Chicago
, in its Encores!-to-Broadway staging, is now one of the longest-running shows of all time.) They seem fresh decades after their premieres because their McMillinesque disjunction makes them vital and exciting—unpredictable, like an unreliable friend of enormous charm.
On the Town
’s symphonic ballets dropped into a chase-me-quick farce,
Cabaret
’s intrusive (yet deviously relevant) nightclub numbers, and
Chicago
’s vaudeville-within-a-play move past Rodgers and Hammerstein’s realism to revel in a vivacious surrealism, theatre piled upon theatre.

Thus,
Sunday in the Park With George
excites and touches us not through the
Oklahoma!
model (rocky romance + villain + community coalesces around hero = statehood) but through an innovative layout (Story 1 [art under siege] + Story 2 [art encouraged by love object from Story 1] = transfiguration) in which a narrative unfolds on two platforms, united at the very end.

So
Sunday
, the initiating work in Sondheim’s third period, is in at least one way his most revolutionary show till that point—and, perhaps, of his entire career. It was also, when it opened, on May 2, 1984, his most puzzling. True, even some Sondheim devotées balked at
Pacific Overtures
, but that work is crowded with event and at times intricately detailed, a history in which the kings and battles are just out of sight, beyond the horizon.
Sunday
, on the other hand, is spare, very easy to follow. Those who found it perplexing were not prepared for its Story 1-Story 2-fusion-finale structure. But one could argue that the best theatre is the kind that one isn’t prepared for. Sondheim’s oeuvre as a whole recalls Denis Diderot’s stated intention, in editing the
Encyclopédie
: “Changer la façon commune de penser” (To change the usual way of thinking). Sondheim has tried to change the usual way theatregoers think about musicals, to lead them into at times disjunctive art.

I say this even though the
Sunday
score is as character-driven as any in Sondheim—and expert character songs are what began to drive the musical when it entered its Golden Age, and what theatregoers are prepared for: “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” “Adelaide’s Lament,” “I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight.” Georges’s major solo, “Finishing the Hat,” offers a massive credo for the artist who has, in effect, two souls: one for the physical specimen living in the world and another for the out-of-body creator living in the canvases where he re-fashions the world. And note that this song is composed partly of isolated nouns, images, sounds—“grass,” “stick,” “dog,” “light”—in a reflection of Seurat’s pointillism.

Then, in Act Two, (the other) George has “Putting It Together,” in a completely different style, for George’s art is different from Georges’s. “Finishing the Hat” is a soliloquy, for the artist in his natural-born isolation. “Putting It Together” is a soliloquy set into an ensemble piece, for nowadays the artist must work the room, shake hands with the grants and commissions community, spark the PR circuits. This George would like to fly from it all, and, as he sings, he conjures up simulacra of himself (in black-and-white figurines that rise through the deck) to take his place in conversation with the crowd after his exhibition. Is it autobiographical? That is, is this Sondheim lamenting his position as the Broadway musical’s maximum leader, taking a ritual pounding as his shows fail to top commercial charts? even as they (gradually, albeit) ascend to classic status? Must he debate with his detractors? Here, figurines,
you
talk to them.

Barbra Streisand was so struck by the reportorial accuracy of “Putting It Together” that she asked Sondheim to recast the lyrics for her to record as her own autobiographical lamentation. Powerful though Streisand is, even she must argue with executives, as Sondheim must with the Tired Businessman because Sondheim left out the cancan girls, or with The Blob, spiteful because his latest show tried to sneak by without Elaine Stritch’s jazzamatazz one-liners.

And there is this odd event at the 1984 Tony Awards, when
Sunday
was up against Jerry Herman’s
La Cage aux Folles
for not only Best Musical but Book, Actor, Score, Direction, Costumes, and Lighting.
Sunday
got two other nominations as well, but won only Sets and Lighting;
La Cage
took all the important laurels except Best Actress in a Musical simply because it had no leading-woman role. When Herman accepted his Tony for Best Original Score, he very defensively said, “There’s been a rumor around … that the simple, hummable show tune was no longer welcome on Broadway. Well, it’s alive and well at the Palace [Theatre, where
La Cage
was playing]!”

Everyone thought Herman was attacking
Sunday
and Sondheim, though Herman admired Sondheim scores and surely would not have been so uncollegial in so public an arena. More likely, he was venting because his last three shows—
Dear World
,
Mack & Mabel
, and
The Grand Tour
—had failed. In 1975, the Tonys had even gone so far as to nominate for Best Score
A Letter For Queen Victoria
(which isn’t a musical) and
The Lieutenant
(a rock opera on the My Lai incident that few if any Tony nominators would likely have seen in its 9 performances), just to avoid giving a nod to Herman’s
Mack & Mabel
songs.

Yet folks believed that Herman’s “simple, hummable show tune” was a slap in Sondheim’s face, because, while his tunes are in fact hummable, they are not simple. Sondheim didn’t merely intellectualize the musical: he intellectualized the music in the musical.

But let me return to that moment in
Sunday
’s second act, when the characters in the painting bow to their creator. As a director, James Lapine scorns the grand manner. It’s another difference between his style and that of Hal Prince, who knows that great theatre has great moments, when the stage is electrified by a sudden shift in tone in the visual—a
coup de théâtre
, as the French put it. It could be the moment in
Company
’s “Side By Side” when, one by one, each of the men indicated his partner with a “take a bow” hand, leaving Robert to indicate … no one. Or the moment in
A Little Night Music
when the dinner party materialized in a table of guests facing upstage, in steely Madame Armfeldt facing down, and, behind them all, in a tapestry dropping into place from the flies: a suave assembly of the moving parts of baronial luxury.

No doubt Hal Prince would have made something sumptuous of the bowing in
Sunday
—it is, after all, the visual climax of an extremely visual piece. Lapine’s crew, however, were directed to underplay their salute; there was no deep homage from the creations to their creator. Nonetheless, it remains a striking moment in the history of the musical, especially so in this possibly very personal work: when art thanks the artist.
Understands
him. “Art isn’t easy” is a key lyric in the piece, sung by George; it could as well be sung by the audience: because art isn’t supposed to be easy. It treats elements the mass public finds disturbing—irony, contradiction, malice, destruction. And notice that even Jerry Herman, whose shows are easy to enjoy, felt he had been isolated on Broadway. Well, life is short but art is long. You’ll be happy later.

^*
In my own translation of
jatte
from the 1988
Le Robert
dictionary: “A rounded vase, very wide at the top, without edges or handles.” Thus, the island was dubbed “The Big Vase.”

^*
For instance, Louis, the lovably boring baker of the painting, becomes Billy, a sarcastic art-world hanger-on; and Yvonne, an artist’s lively wife in the 1880s, turns into Naomi, a scowling musician. There is one arresting parallel: the actress who plays Georges’s mother in Act One reappears in Act Two as a writer on art—in fact, George’s severest critic. Does this reference Sondheim’s vexed relationship with his own mother? One of the mysteries of Sondheimland. Another mystery: for some reason, Lapine called both artists “George,” though the first one is of course George
s
Seurat.

Into the Woods

Interlocked fairy tales, 1987.

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

Original Leads: Bernadette Peters, Joanna Gleason, Chip Zien, Tom Aldredge, Robert Westenberg, Chuck Wagner. Director: James Lapine.

Three stories initiate the action. One is
Cinderella
. Another is
Jack and the Beanstalk
. The third is the authors’ invention,
The Baker and His Wife
, into which
Little Red Ridinghood
was inserted.

A Narrator keeps the play moving along, providing explanations, backstories, and the like, and a very long First Number (beginning with “I wish”) sets all three tales into play, with the principals separately
needing
something that will lead them into that unsettling bit of geography, the nearby forest.

That First Number is the title song, a rondo with an irresistible clip-clopping refrain that suggests the excitement (and anxiety) of taking off on an adventure. But what is the woods, exactly? It’s a crucible, a learning or defining test. It’s danger, temptation, treachery, sex: the unknown in all its forms. You daren’t go, yet you must go. And it has its attractive or at least harmless side. “The woods are just trees,” runs one of Sondheim’s most amiably seductive lyrics, “the trees are just wood.”

Nevertheless, there’s nothing “just” about these characters. Jack is a little nuts. Cinderella has occult powers. The Baker and his Wife live next door to a Witch. And then the pair find themselves off on one of those scavenger hunts that Sondheim used to fashion in his youth. Only those hunters were scouring New York on a lark. In this show, the hunters are
in the woods
, where lives change or even end.

This second Sondheim-Lapine musical has, among other distinctions, the busiest plot in the history of the form.
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Forum
runs a melee of a storyline, but it at least centers on a protagonist, Pseudolus, and his quest for manumission.
Into the Woods
has no clear-cut protagonist. Who is the essential figure? The Baker would appear to be the leading role, his quest (to sire children) the most far-ranging of the many in the show. But it is the Witch who drives the action, she who runs the scavenger hunt that occupies the Baker and his Wife for most of Act One. Further, the Witch is the star part: for Bernadette Peters in the original production, Julia McKenzie in London, Vanessa Williams in the 2002 Broadway revival, and Meryl Streep in the 2014 film version. True, the Baker’s dramatic arc dominates the second act. But this really is an ensemble show with a few showy roles.

It is certainly a more unified work than the previous Sondheim-Lapine title,
Sunday in the Park With George
—though, oddly, it had a comparable “intermission problem.” With
Sunday
, some felt that the second act lost the compelling fantasy of the first act. With
Into the Woods
, a few members of the audience thought the show had concluded at the end of Act One and had to be dissuaded from going home. True, the last thing one hears as the act ends is “Happy ever after!,” while first acts are supposed to end suspensefully. Laurey spurns Curly to go off with Jed. Dolly vows to win her half-a-millionaire.
Chicago
’s Roxie fakes pregnancy—will she get off, after all?

Into the Woods
’ first act ends in a departure from the rules, something Oscar Hammerstein tried several times. Thus,
Show Boat
’s first-act finale offers the classic Boy Gets Girl, which more usually
closes
the evening.
Allegro
’s first act ends the same way, though in that case we have been warned that the Girl is not worthy of the Boy.