On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (30 page)

This scene occurs during the brothers’ sojourn in Alaska, digging for gold. After an assayer prices their strike at $24,300, they start for home. But the next boat doesn’t leave till tomorrow morning, and, as the pair consider their options:

CARD SHARP
 (at the table of chance with fellow gamblers): I don’t suppose you boys’d care to play a little poker?

We in the audience are thinking, Are they that stupid? Don’t they know a setup when they see one? But no one listens to us:

ADDISON
:
Poker? Gee, I don’t know … (He looks at Wilson)

BOTH MIZNERS
 (merrily):
Why not?

CARD SHARP
 (to his fellows):
All righty, move over, boys. We got some new blood in town!
^*

Disaster. Yet, to the extent that it is comic at all, it is sitcom humor, not character humor—that is, the fun is applied externally to a situation rather than allowed to arise on its own. Sitcom humor was prevalent in the fifties musical, Sondheim’s launching pad—but his shows ran on character humor. Here’s a sample, from
Gypsy
’s second act, when Rose, daughter Louise, and their troupe wind up in a burlesque house. As one of the strippers admires Louise’s needlework on a costume, librettist Arthur Laurents sets up a terrific laugh, and note how the scenelet builds in not only power but character logic—you can’t fight a mother—to reach the punchline. (My stage directions, not in the published script, derive from the audiotape of Ethel Merman’s last night of
Gypsy
’s New York run):

TESSIE
:
My! Look at them ladylike little stitches! That miserable broad who makes my gowns must be usin’ a fish hook!

LOUISE
:
What do you pay her?

TESSIE
 (Fast, businesslike, offering a deal):
Twenty-five bucks a gown and I provide the material.

ROSE
 (Quiet but strong):
Thirty.

TESSIE
 (Trying to bargain):
She’s new in the business!

ROSE
 (Louder now):
Thirty!

TESSIE
:
Who’re you? Her mother?

ROSE
 (Titanic):
Yes!!!

TESSIE
 (Immediately, total surrender):
Thirty. (Which gets a huge laugh, then applause, and briefly stops the show.)

Sondheim’s musicals—whether he was composer-lyricist or just lyricist—almost never resort to sitcom humor because he worked with imaginative and resourceful book writers. I quoted the sitcom moment in
Wise Guys
to example a very rare moment when a Sondheim show behaves like standard fare. It’s the exception that tests the rule, which, broadly stated, holds that Sondheim has reinvented the musical by opening it up psychologically and thematically while elevating its musical component. Many writers have called the musical “America’s opera,” meaning (roughly) that smart and gifted people tilted “musical comedy” into “music theatre”: analytic, expressive, even overwhelming. Popular art is supposed to be disposable. But the great musicals keep coming back, too rich to collect at first hearing, second, third.

And that’s altogether true of Sondheim’s musicals. The main reason is probably the sheer abundance of first-rate music, just as with
Show Boat
,
Oklahoma!
,
Cabaret
. A classic show has a classic score. But there is as well the playability of the Sondheim people—the character depth that gives actors so much to develop. We never fully absorb these shows because there’s so much
there
in them, which is not the case with many older classics—
Annie Get Your Gun
or
Kiss Me, Kate
, for example. They’re wonderful entertainment, but they don’t offer actors vast playing room. There’s no ambiguity, no mystery. Take
Company
’s Robert: he was based more or less on Anthony Perkins, a longtime bachelor who did in fact eventually marry and start a family. Yet Perkins was gay; “longtime bachelor” used to be one of the many available euphemisms. Robert isn’t gay, because gay men don’t take an overnight with a stewardess—another euphemism, the equivalent of what “actress” meant a hundred years earlier: a sleeparound. Perkins’ boy friend also married a woman after the two men broke up. Don’t all these Complications in the Plot reflect our continual bewilderment about the curious niches of human sexuality, and doesn’t that make
Company
eternally trendy?

Or simply consider the Beggar Woman in
Sweeney Todd
, a kind of nemesis figure, Mrs. Lovett’s personal fury. The Beggar Woman is tied into the plot as such only near the show’s end, but the first scene in fact establishes her as Todd’s “lost” wife—at that in a chance line that we are meant to miss. It adds to her presence as a figure almost of another world—and doesn’t she stalk Mrs. Lovett and her cuisine of horror out of a dim recollection of how envious the latter was of the Todd family? There are two drivelines in
Sweeney Todd
. One is Todd’s revenge plot. But the other is Mrs. Lovett’s passionate love of Todd, alluded to here and there but largely veiled—except to the Beggar Woman, who, when she was the happy young Mrs. Benjamin Barker, must have been aware of Mrs. Lovett’s attentions to her husband.

Few of the famous musicals carry so much “intelligent design” (to borrow a phrase from the enemy) within their scenarios, so much inner life. For the first fifty years of its history—from, say,
Evangeline
(1874), the first famous integrated American musical, to
No, No, Nanette
(1925) and the like, the musical was simply not a subtle form.

Well, it is now. Sondheim elaborated the musical just as Beethoven elaborated symphony and Wagner elaborated opera. And, as I’ve said, the intellectual and academic worlds paid little heed to the musical till Sondheim took hold of it; now the intelligentsia has raised the form into a discipline all its own. It is often said that Sondheim is
the
author of present-day musicals, but, in truth, he is
the
author of musicals, period. There were prominent, influential, and just plain marvelous composers and lyricists before him—and there was Oscar Hammerstein, who reformatted the libretto as a platform of narrative power. But no one on the musical end recreated the musical as thoroughly as Sondheim.

Or we could put it more simply and say that Steve finally fixed the second act of
Allegro
.

^*
This is the scene as it was played in
Wise Guys
. The poker game occurs in
Bounce
and
Road Show
as well; it works out differently each time, always ending up with Wilson blowing their fortune away.

Sondheim on Film

As if emphasizing a break between Sondheim’s First and Second Periods, he offered no new shows between
Do I Hear a Waltz?
(1965) and
Company
(1970), five years that began with his last lyrics-only job on a new work and ended with the first of the Sondheim-Prince titles that introduced his mature composing style. However, Sondheim did take part in the cycle of original television musicals at this time, inaugurated on the grand scale by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Cinderella
(1957) and Cole Porter’s
Aladdin
(1958).
^*
There were as well more modest efforts by less established names working in “smaller” music—fewer numbers and no commemorative LP.

Sondheim’s contribution was
Evening Primrose
(1966), to James Goldman’s script, from John Collier’s story. It’s a macabre piece in which two young people find love while hiding out from the world in Stern’s department store (a real location, by the way). It turns out that an entire sub-population resides there, whiling time away in offtrack niches and pretending to be mannequins when a night watchman passes. Anthony Perkins played the Boy, an unsuccessful poet who hates life. He’s a dropout, in sixties parlance, yet his establishing song, “If You Can Find Me, I’m Here,” is somewhat jubilant. The Girl, played by Charmian Carr, is used as a maid by a Mrs. Monday (Dorothy Stickney), the stern leader of this bizarre tribe; worse, Carr never wanted the hermit’s life: as a tot, “I just fell asleep in Women’s Hats.”

Perkins’ hard sophistication and Carr’s soft innocence create a bond of opposites, and the pair wants to depart and face life together. But Stern’s is like Brigadoon. You
can’t
depart. Their impassioned love duet, “Take Me To the World,” offers a great example of Sondheim’s “playwrighting” music, because it isn’t just a romantic moment: the store’s sound system picks it up, and we see the others (even the night watchmen) listening in alarm. When the citizens of Stern’s personal Oz defy the Rules, the Dark Men are called, and, though Perkins and Carr make a run for it,
Evening Primrose
’s last shot gives us the pair in a show window, transformed into genuine mannequins. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

Good old Sondheim: offbeat even on television. It may seem odd that, for all his love of the narrative Hollywood soundtrack pioneered by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, and Bernard Herrmann, Sondheim never composed one himself in that style. But then, he has no interest in creating “functional” music—to accompany, for example, battles, ships sailing the Spanish Main, or the New York skyline. Sondheim’s music is social; he doesn’t write about “things.”

But he must have been flattered when Alain Resnais wanted Sondheim to “soundtrack” his 1974 film
Stavisky
, on the adventures of the Russian bond swindler who scandalized France in the 1930s, ever evading justice because of his links to the Third Republic’s one per cent. Resnais had seen and loved
Follies
, especially the moment when John McMartin went up on his lines in the top-hat-and-cane number. Resnais saw Stavisky (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) as comparable, hiding his fears behind a bon vivant’s façade. The period setting gave Sondheim a chance to play in the world of pastiche that he loves, but there was some “suspense” music as well, as when a sedan prowls a roadway to anxious woodwinds over a busy bassoon line. (Jonathan Tunick handled the orchestrations.) Mainly, however, Sondheim covered the film’s dressier aspect, as when Stavisky’s wife, Arlette (Anny Duperey), pulls up at a fashionable resort in a Hispano-Suiza and gets out to pose like a model, all in white, from her floppy hat to the straps of her heels. So Sondheim wasn’t writing about things: he was conjuring up the flamboyant chic of the age. The
Stavisky
music isn’t narrative or functional. Rather, it’s atmospheric, like a palm-court orchestra playing as you lunch. Further, Sondheim was able to give voice to three tunes dropped from
Follies
. (One of them, “The World’s Full of Girls,” has a tiny bit of vocal in the film, in French.)

Unfortunately,
Stavisky
is very dry in texture, deliberately made of short scenes without any sense of flow from one to the next. It’s romance without sensuality, glamor without joy. Many of the characters narrate in voice-over, distancing us, and there is an odd subplot involving the legal status of Leon Trotsky, on the run from Stalin. Resnais intended
Stavisky
to explore the xenophobia rampant in France in the 1930s, which many historians see as having sabotaged the democratic processes of the Third Republic and all but invited Hitler to invade. Near the film’s end, as Stavisky’s little empire of fraud and grand larceny disintegrates, one of his business partners suddenly tells him, “You know what we will say? We will say that the French are right to mistrust
métèques
[a derogation for resident aliens], refugees, and Jews.” Music would give too much flavor to a film that is less dramatic than polemical, so most of what Sondheim wrote, though recorded, was not included in the release print. But somebody was smart enough to issue everything on the soundtrack LP.

Sondheim wrote as well for Warren Beatty’s
Reds
(1981), though Dave Grusin scored the battles and sailing ships, so to say. Sondheim’s contribution was one of his most touching ballads, “Goodbye For Now.” As this was to be the love theme for John Reed (Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), who both end up in Russia near the start of the 1917 revolution, Sondheim used the first few notes of the “Internationale” to launch the melody. The
Reds
soundtrack LP included two different versions of the melody (without lyrics), but the film proper used a third reading, on piano alone, played by Sondheim himself. It occurs during the transition from New York to Provincetown, about forty minutes into the running time.