On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (31 page)

Sondheim would work with Beatty again, on
Dick Tracy
(1990), this time writing five songs. Amusingly, one of these was a piece for Madonna’s character, Breathless Mahoney, playfully characterizing the Material Girl herself—“More,” a catalogue number devoted to the theory that too much is never enough.
Dick Tracy
was further distinguished by its optics, faithful to the world of Chester Gould’s comic strip yet utilizing the expansive artistry of the comic
book
, which, unlike the daily strip, takes in vistas when necessary. Gould’s bizarre bad guys, named for how they look or act, were in place—Flattop, Mumbles, the pianist 88 Keyes (as Gould spelled it). But Breathless Mahoney, used in a storyline in 1945, was less a criminal than an unscrupulous opportunist who goes on the run with a fortune and ends up a killer. The film retained only Mahoney’s name and blond coloring, reinventing her as a club singer big with gangland bosses. She, too, ends up heavily involved in crime.

Gould’s strip was grim in tone, for all its boisterous grotesquerie, but the movie is a madcap, startled into delight by a comically over-the-top Al Pacino as mob boss Big Boy Caprice. Brutal yet elegant (albeit in strange, strange ways), Big Boy is Tracy’s nemesis. Or is that Madonna’s role? She does seem to want to steal Tracy from his eternal fiancée, Tess Trueheart. All this gives depth to a flat source, but even five Sondheim songs don’t turn
Dick Tracy
into a musical, because of the way they are used.

The five are Sondheim at his best, and while they are all floor numbers or soundtrack voice-overs, he cleverly bends them toward character or plot commentary. For example, “Live Alone and Like It,” heard almost in passing as a pop selection on a car radio, in fact questions why Tracy hasn’t married Tess when they’re so well matched. As we listen, we see a montage of Tracy and Tess caring for Kid, the waif they informally adopt.

So the song isn’t quite heard. It’s
seen
, not properly absorbed, and that’s true throughout the continuity. The shootemup action never falters, often intruding on the singing or, in the effervescent “Back in Business,” accompanying scenes of gangland mayhem that distract us from the music. Not till the closing credits is a number heard complete: Madonna finally gets through “More” from verse through chorus and “trio” (a middle section separate from the chorus) and back to a chorus. The songs are sewn into the screen like stitches on a dress suit, meant to disappear into the fabric. It creates a new kind of integration in which the numbers don’t suit the story: they suit the editing.
^*

Leaving music and lyrics aside, Sondheim co-wrote a movie (with Anthony Perkins),
The Last of Sheila
(1973), a murder mystery with an extremely confusing plot. Sondheim also co-wrote (with George Furth)
Getting Away With Murder
, another murder mystery and a two-week failure on Broadway, in 1996. Recalling the many scripts Sondheim wrote for television’s
Topper
, in the early 1950s, one wonders why he has never written his own librettos—though he does thrive on the alchemy of collaboration.

This is probably the right place to consider Sondheim’s sole appearance as a professional actor, on television, in George S. Kaufman and Ring Lardner’s spoof of the music-publishing business,
June Moon
, a hit on Broadway in 1929 and broadcast forty-five years later. Sondheim played Maxie, a song plugger cynical about the industry (Maxie on a fellow songwriter: “He’s using his ideas up too fast. ‘Montana Moon’—he uses a state and a moon in one song?”), but idealistic about love. In fact, Maxie is the deus ex machina who saves the show’s romance from a scheming bitch (Susan Sarandon). Jack Cassidy, Estelle Parsons, and Kevin McCarthy are also on hand, indicating and overplaying like a community-theatre director’s pets. Only Sondheim, albeit a bit stiffly, tries to keep the acting natural, underplaying his entire role. As he is often at the keyboard, both noodling and essaying some modifed “concerto style” (as they used to call it), the DVD (Kultur) offers a rare chance to see him as a pianist. He looks great, too, still in his earlier beardless period, though Maxie is the sort who never takes his derby off, even indoors.

The movie versions of Sondheim’s shows are more or less faithful in their fashion, but the singing is scanted. On
West Side Story
(1961), they dubbed everybody but the ushers, though retaining the original choreography marked something of a breakaway at the time. There had been precedents—
Oklahoma!
and
The King and I
, for instance. However,
West Side
’s dancing hoodlums were a flighty theatrical conceit; Hollywood might easily have thought the whole thing too arty for real city streets on screen. The film also marked the first exposure of Sondheim lyrics to a mass audience.
^*

There was dubbing as well in
Gypsy
(1962), which gave an outstanding singing part to Rosalind Russell, a semi-vocalist who did in fact carry a stage musical,
Wonderful Town
(1953). However, that show’s score was tailored (by Leonard Bernstein and Betty Comden and Adolph Green) to Russell’s “Yes, I can’t” singing voice: she knew how the music was supposed to sound, and somehow made it work. Apparently, she laid down
Gypsy
’s soundtrack vocals unaware that Lisa Kirk was going to be technologied in wherever more tone was needed. If you listen to Russell’s “Rose’s Turn,” after the “Momma” hiccups, at “I had a dream,” you will hear Kirk smoothly moving in on the track.

Disdained at first, the
Gypsy
movie has been gaining admirers. Certainly, no stage Rose has brought together her charm and command better than Russell, an extremely ingratiating performer who was uncompromising when playing difficult or even wholly unsympathetic figures (such as her Rosemary in
Picnic
). True, as far as Sondheim is concerned, this is more or less the Lisa Kirk
Gypsy
, which doesn’t quite work. Kirk’s style is dark velvet, while Rose is rough. Bette Midler, in the very, very faithful 1993 telecast (Lionsgate)—overture, dance music (by John Kander, by the way), Broadway orchestrations, and all—gives a cluttered performance overrun with gestures. It’s
Charades Gypsy
. But she sounds great in the songs, biting into the words; the great Roses sing not just the Styne of the score but the Sondheim as well. Even Ethel Merman, no one’s idea of a
diseuse
, nevertheless uses a word here or here to reach the character, letting all her rage loose on a single syllable—“rot”—in “Some People.” Note, in Midler’s
Gypsy
, a few star cameos—Andrea Martin as Mr. Grantziger’s secretary, and Edward Asner to utter the immortal line “You ain’t gettin’ eighty-eight [
recte
: just “eight” in the published text] cents from me, Rose!” Sondheim himself delivered it on the original-cast disc, lovably accenting not
cents
but
me
, as if implying that she might get eighty-eight cents from someone else, perhaps Adele Dazeem.

A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Forum
(1966, on MGM Video) was directed by Richard Lester, who was trending at the time for the zesty pacing and quasi-surrealistic atmosphere of the first two Beatles films,
A Hard Day’s Night
and
Help!
. Lester must have seemed the ideal match for
Forum
’s avid bedlam, but he cut the action up in jumpy editing; the storyline is already jumpy enough. A forerunner of the rock video and the whirling-dervish camerawork of
Moulin Rouge
and
Chicago
, Lester’s
Forum
has been excoriated as a movie about not a slave seeking manumission but a director showing off. Then, too,
Forum
’s original playing style was pure burlesque, an above all theatrical communication. Even while using stage veterans Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford, Phil Silvers, and Alfie Bass (the first replacement Tevye in London’s
Fiddler on the Roof
  ), Lester made his
Forum
so
movie
that the comedy comes off as alien in its own neighborhood. And look how much Sondheim is missing: “Love, I Hear,” “Free,” “Pretty Little Picture,” “I’m Calm,” “Impossible,” “That Dirty Old Man,” and “That’ll Show Him,” all cut.

As for Tim Burton’s
Sweeney Todd
(2007, on Warner Video), it does rather fail as a musical, though it’s brilliant as sheer filmmaking. Extremely atmospheric, it boasts the very look of a dressy society—the men in waistcoats, scarf ties, and top hats—erected above throwaway unfortunates sinking into comatose despair in every alleyway or condemned to death for nothing at the age of ten. Yes, we actually see the latter happening. Interestingly, Mrs. Lovett’s establishment, which we imagine as an unseemly hut, is a neat little corner house, nicely kept up with half-curtained windows, though the interior is squalid.

The score is mostly intact, though numbers are truncated. And there are deviations from the Broadway scenario, as when Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) invites young Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower) into his house only to terrorize him, or when the visit to Fogg’s asylum ends up very differently than in the show. Further, Tobias (Edward Sanders) is not a short grown-up doing “young” but a little boy (as in the non-musical
Sweeney Todd
films, discussed in the discography). He can sing well enough, as can the Anthony and Johanna (Jayne Wisener), who even gets “Green Finch and Linnet Bird,” the sort of number—a lesser character’s “get to know me” solo—that movies always used to cut when adapting shows. But then, Burton uses it as a plot piece situating Johanna, Anthony, and Turpin in the action.

However, Burton wouldn’t let his Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter, Burton’s partner) oppose the geeky gravity of Johnny Depp’s Todd with her role’s traditional music-hall jesting. This loses the McMillinesque disjunction of tragedian and goofaround that makes this material so vitally lopsided. Burton’s film is too consistent for Sondheim’s art, where irony and paradox reign, as in life. One built-in problem in the American musical generally is its adherence to the ideal of integration even as truly realistic musicals have pulled away from the Rodgers and Hammersteinian unities of Community, Soliloquy, and Dream Ballet. Life isn’t integrated; why should art be different?

Then, too, most of Burton’s principals are non-singers, and
Sweeney Todd
is not a score one can act one’s way through. Depp in particular has no weight in his tone, though his role is the Madam Rose of leading men, the utmost divo role. Todd’s salute to his razors and his mad scene after his unsuccessful first assault on the judge lack the character’s Dostoyefskyan intensity just when it is most apropos, and while “A Little Priest” works better, Depp’s higher lines are cut or spoken.

I for one thought surely Burton would use the camera’s intimacy to isolate the moment when, in Todd’s first scene with Lovett, she recognizes him. This is a story loaded with recognitions—Pirelli’s of Todd leads to the first murder and seals the criminal pact of Lovett and Todd. Toby’s spotting Pirelli’s purse leads to the unraveling of the pact. Todd’s realizing just who the Beggar Woman really is leads to his moment of the ancient Greek anagnorisis: when the protagonist knows all, inspiring the traditional pity and terror as his story ends. So the moment when Mrs. Lovett—who has been like Rapunzel, lo these fifteen years, waiting for Todd’s return—realizes that he has just walked into her shop is epic, the narrative’s launching pad. And Burton must be aware of all this, for by the time of “There Was a Barber and His Wife,” she knows. You see it in her eyes.

Into the Woods
(2014) is far more successful as both Sondheim and as a film, partly because cinema can show us all the magic that stage cannot. We see the castle, the beanstalk, the giantess—at least, we see just enough of her to know what she appears to be, a very Sondheim way of seeing. Think of Hapgood in
Anyone Can Whistle
, Robert in
Company
, Ben in
Follies
. We see them, yes—but how well? How well do we know any of the interesting people in our lives? It recalls Ibsen’s scathing denunciation of his fellow Norwegians in
Peer Gynt
, when the Troll King observes that, among men, they say, “To thyself be true.” But among trolls—meaning among the hypocrites Ibsen saw all about him in Norwegian society—they say, “To thyself be true …
enough
.”

Into the Woods’
magic centers on the Witch, and director Rob Marshall gives Meryl Streep the works. She doesn’t enter a house: she blows the door in. She doesn’t exit: she gazungles into a twirly mist and then evaporates. Though not known as a singer, Streep throws out a tremendous reading of “The Last Midnight,” so balefully glorious that we realize that you can’t simply sing or simply act your way through a Sondheim part. These roles are dramatic
and
musical.

The casting is offbeat. Little Red is less argumentative than usual, rather prim and sensible. The original, Danielle Ferland, delivered “You can talk to birds?” with a mixture of suspicion and belligerence; Marshall’s Little Red just asks for information. Jack isn’t a musical-comedy guy but, like Tim Burton’s Tobias, a real little kid. The two princes are absurdly handsome but very human—though, again, we see them but not
quite
. It’s challenging, as Sondheim generally is, because, as this is a movie, everyone “is” his or her role. The original Broadway cast struck me as too theatrical even for theatre, in an “Upper West Side of Manhattan culturati” way. The whole show could have taken place in Zabar’s.