On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (26 page)

And
Into the Woods
’ first-act curtain gives us a visual warning of sequelae to come: while the cast celebrates the “happy ending,” a beanstalk suddenly shoots up to the sky. They don’t see it—but we do, and while the first beanstalk led Jack to treasure and what appears to be his sexual awakening, a second beanstalk in a Sondheim musical is bound to prove problematic. In Sondheimland, few get even one beanstalk; two promises the surfeit of instability and disappointment, the growing old of
Follies
, the liquid nature of love in
A Little Night Music
.

As it happens, that second beanstalk allows the Giant’s wife to descend to earth. She’s a widow now, Jack is why, and she wants revenge. This sets off the tumult between appeasers and defiers that busies much of the show’s second act. And of course fairy tales are rich in such hazards; they’re like westerns with magic. There was much talk of the extent to which Sondheim and Lapine were influenced by Bruno Bettelheim’s study of children’s wonder stories,
The Uses of Enchantment
, “simply because,” Sondheim dryly observes, “it’s the only book on the subject known to a wide public.” And one needn’t read Bettelheim to notice how fairy tales help children work out psychological anxieties of various kinds. One key passage of Bettelheim, right at the start of his book, does bring us closer to understanding how
Into the Woods
works, if only coincidentally: “Wisdom,” he writes, “is built up, small step by small step, from most irrational beginnings. … The most difficult task in raising a child is helping him to find meaning in life. Many growth experiences are needed to achieve this.”

Fairy tales specialize in those growth experiences; such voyages into the unknown are, for many children, their first taste of the world beyond the more or less intelligible one of home, family, and play dates with their coevals. The hazards of their lives entail day-to-day frustrations and penalties, little problems. No, you can’t have candy for dinner. Don’t ask Grandma why she has a mustache. Clean up your room or no
Legend of Zelda
.

Fairy tales, however, open up a cosmos in which the hazards are alien, the penalties conclusive … and there’s always a wicked witch.
Big
problems. Fiction for grownups can be fraught with paradoxical or simply impenetrable characters—Dmitri Karamazov, say, flinging himself from mood to mood without transition, murderous yet technically innocent; or the nihilistic yet ultimately self-sacrificing Sydney Carton; and is Jay Gatsby truly wonderful or is he just attractive and Nick Carraway gay? But fairy tales present basic and consistent characters—the weak father and vicious stepmother, the gobbling goblin, the sweet little kids, the clueless king, the savior prince. And, yes, the wicked witch, whose address is invariably:
the woods
.

Thus,
Into the Woods
gives us a bunch of adults and adolescents who are like the children who appear in or listen to fairy tales. They behave oddly—Jack, when not climbing the beanstalk, thinks he’s buddies with a cow. Cinderella is in league with birds who do her bidding. Little Red Ridinghood steals food. The Baker and his Wife seem normal, but they all have to undergo those growth experiences, directed by their “parent”—the Witch, who is, in the musical, not so much wicked as demanding.

Very demanding.

In fact, one of the show’s charms is the way in which it humanizes fairy-tale icons. The storybookland that Bettelheim describes is a remote and dream-laden realm, but when the Baker’s shop has a visitor, the Baker calmly tells his wife, “It’s the Witch from next door,” because, when you reside in a fairy tale, you have zesty neighbors. Further, we realize just how shadowy Jack, Red Ridinghood, and the other familiar figures always were before Sondheim and Lapine shed light on them—Jack is simple-minded yet, after his adventure in the sky, enlightened and poetic; Little Red is blunt and pushy; Rapunzel is an idiot; Prince Charming cheats on his wife. And it isn’t even an irresistible romantic fling. It’s sex, and then it’s over. “How alive you’ve made me feel,” the Prince says, leaving. And his momentary partner, the Baker’s Wife, asks us, “What was that?”

And, to a hesitant vamp, she slithers into “Moments in the Woods,” one of the score’s many numbers that bubble up out of the action without warning. Musicals used to have song cues; here’s one from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Flower Drum Song
(1958), from the time when Sondheim was launching his career. The show is set in San Francisco, and, at a party, someone asks Pat Suzuki if she’s going to move to Nob Hill. What? And give up Chinatown?:

SUZUKI
:
I’ve got to be where the action is.

GIRL
:
Where is that?

The brass unfurl in four snazzy chords, and Suzuki’s off and running, in “Grant Avenue.” Not only is the song embarrassingly supplementary: it hasn’t even been nested properly.

They don’t do that any more, and Sondheim’s shows are one reason why. At that,
Into the Woods
might be his most integrated score, because the book runs through the numbers just as the numbers run through the book. Further, the show is emerging as one of Sondheim’s most popular. It opened on November 5, 1987, at the Martin Beck Theatre, won enthusiastic reviews, ran 764 performances, and remains one of Sondheim’s most performed titles. Above all, the show’s endearing silliness mixed with calamity make it perhaps the richest work of Sondheim’s third period, dark with death yet reaching a transcendently uplifting conclusion.

Assassins

Revue on the motivations of American president killers, 1990.

Music and Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: John Weidman.

Original Leads: Patrick Cassidy, Victor Garber, Terrence Mann, Eddie Korbich, Debra Monk, Annie Golden, Jonathan Hadary, Jace Alexander. Director: Jerry Zaks.

This is a physically small-scaled show, assembling in songs and sketches the famous presidential assassins and would-be assassins of various eras, from John Wilkes Booth and Leon Czolgosz to John Hinckley and Sara Jane Moore, to have a look at who they were and what they wanted. The piece was first mounted at Playwrights Horizons on December 18, 1990 (with a critics’ date of January 27, 1991), in a spare production using projections to create locale. Each of the characters appeared in the dress of his or her epoch, and the sheer unreality of this highest of crimes—the killing, in effect, of a country—was emphasized in the way they all had personal access to each other. Thus, in a scene in a saloon, Charles Guiteau (who killed James Garfield) ran into Samuel Byck (who hijacked a plane hoping to crash it into the White House to kill Richard Nixon), attired in the Santa Claus suit he affected. Unhinged as all of them are, Guiteau nevertheless has a sense of humor, and he sang a snippet of Christmas carol at Byck as they passed each other.

It’s a simple show, but deceptively so, because the librettist, John Weidman, didn’t simply assemble the killers: he analyzes them. This succession of seemingly unrelated scenes moving to and fro in time and space and veering in attitude from the comic to the shocking delves into what drives these people toward their evilly ultimate act. John Wilkes Booth avenges the humbling of the South, Czolgosz (who killed William McKinley) wants retribution for the oppression of the working class, Sara Jane Moore (who tried to kill Gerald Ford) thinks it’s a joyride, and so on.

Then, too, juxtaposing figures from different ages gives the show a flavorsome theatricality in large and small ways. Small: in the bar scene mentioned above, Booth the actor is sitting at a table reading
Variety
(which wasn’t founded till several generations after Booth died). Large: the last scene, the only one played (in the original staging) on a fully three-dimensional set, presented a room filled with shelves and boxes of books and one young man in a very sixties outfit of jeans and white T-shirt. After a few moments, the audience realized that this was the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas and the young man was Lee Harvey Oswald. As Playwrights Horizons’ artistic director, André Bishop, wrote in
Assassins
’ published text, “This moment inevitably evoked gasps of surprise and occasionally horror.”

Even so, much of Weidman’s script hews to the zany side of things, as in Guiteau’s relentlessly glad-handing personal style—he’s everybody’s best friend, until he isn’t—or the fantasy universe in which Byck resides. To return to that scene in the bar—a dump of a place—Byck asks the bartender if Nixon has been around:

BARTENDER
:
Who?

BYCK
:
President Richard Nixon.

BARTENDER
:
We don’t get many presidents in here, pal.

And Guiteau, who bops in immediately after, calls out, “Barkeep, your wine list, please,” as if sweeping into some fabled
boîte de nuit
.

All the mixing up of these enraged loons and their crimes is pure concept-show thinking, that unrealistic realism in which characters can commune though separated by space and time because it is their ideas that are communing. What brings together Byck and Guiteau—and Booth with his
Variety
, and Hinckley, Czolgosz, Giuseppe Zangara (who tried to kill FDR)—is not Weidman’s playful side but their fury, mustered by Booth, the founder of their movement. In
Pacific Overtures
, Weidman’s history is a development of transitions and revolutions. In
Assassins
, history stands still, as witness to something that never changes: the unfathomable malice of the born loser. The show counts a Balladeer among its cast, serving as a kind of narrator. But it is really Booth who gives these freaks their inane sense of mission. Back in that bar, Zangara furiously complains of his stomach pains, which nothing can soothe: “I give up smokes! … I move Miami! … I take appendix out!
Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!
” So of course:

BOOTH
:
Have you considered shooting Franklin Roosevelt?

ZANAGARA
:
You think that help?

BOOTH
:
It couldn’t hurt.

Assassins
’ humor peaks in scenes between Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme, the one so scatterbrained and the other so calmly demented that they echo the antics of Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz. Moore is so clumsy with a gun that she accidentally shoots her dog:

FROMME
:
You brought your
dog
to an assassination?

MOORE
:
What was I supposed to do with him, leave him in the car?

They’re on their way to kill Gerald Ford, who happens along, stumbles in the clueless awkwardness he was famous for, and even pets Moore’s dead animal:

FORD
: Good doggie.

Unfortunately, audiences at
Assassins
seem at times to be uncomfortable about this aspect of the show. I’ve seen three productions, and even the funniest bits can elicit little reaction, as if no one wants to be the first to laugh out loud when the evening’s topic is somber. Critics at the premiere appeared to dismiss the work’s difficult subject matter and its intelligent treatment of that subject as if they were the same thing; mostly poor notices prohibited a transfer to Broadway. Ironically, the two-month run was not only sold out but the hottest ticket in town.
Assassins
immediately went on to other stages, and it finally got to Broadway, in 2004.

Perhaps this musical is enjoyable despite itself—a twist on the musical’s time-honored mandate to be nothing
but
enjoyable. And, as most of the score is pastiche—country narrative, cakewalk, soft-rock ballad—it’s one of Sondheim’s most overtly tuneful scores, with none of the jagged, syncopated vamps that confuse the less venturesome listener (as in
Company
’s “The Little Things You Do Together” and “Another Hundred People”).
Assassin
’s songs hew closely to the dark side of Weidman’s scenario even so, and they concentrate on the killers, though “How I Saved Roosevelt,” a merry march episode using John Philip Sousa’s “El Capitan,” traces the actions of bystanders who foiled Zangara.

Then, in 1992, Sam Mendes directed
Assassins
at London’s Donmar Warehouse in one of the first of the “smaller than the original” English Sondheim stagings that have become chic of late, both at the Donmar and the Menier Chocolate Factory and on off-Broadway as well. Mendes felt there was a hole in the latter part of the show that a song should fill, and Sondheim realized that nothing in what he had written expressed the popular reaction to news of each assassination in the days before social media made everything instantly viral. “The chain of grief” is how Sondheim puts it, and he wrote it into the show as “Something Just Broke,” letting various unknowns tell us where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.