On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (34 page)

True,
Night Music
already has a great deal of singing before the plot gets going (with the visit to the theatre), and the “Now/Later/Soon” trio takes up all the listening room the public can handle. “Silly People” could be reinserted in performance (and, rarely, has been), but “Two Fairy Tales” would elongate the exposition fatally. Then, too, it’s a delicate piece—Block calls it “talky and somewhat impersonal” because Anne and Henrik sing constantly interlocked lines about imaginary figures to describe themselves. It’s awfully oblique (though quite charming), and while “Indian Love Call” wouldn’t work well in that spot, it’s at least a direct statement of the kind audiences respond to. At any rate, “Two Fairy Tales” found a home in Craig Lucas’ Sondheim pastiche
Marry Me a Little
.

I’ve always been struck by Georges’s Mother in Act One of
Sunday in the Park With George
, because she reappears in Act Two as young George’s critic—a touch motherly, but in the long run not helpful. I thought it odd at the time that there appeared to be no other such parallels in the show’s double casting. But Olaf Jubin’s contribution to
Sondheim Studies
finds subtle correspondences for just about every
Sunday
player. For instance, we tend to see Jules, Seurat’s fellow artist in Act One, as Seurat’s frenemy, narrow and ungiving. Yet, as Jubin reminds us, Seurat calls him “a fine painter,” genuine praise from someone as explosively, fastidiously artistic as Seurat. So Jules must have something—and, in Act Two, that actor then turns into Bob Greenberg, head of the museum. He’s professional rather than creative yet someone who must comprehend the art in order to curate it. But does he? Jubin feels that his announcement that the refreshments await the guests is his key line: “Jules, the minor artist, has been reduced to the role of a domestic,” perhaps to tell us that Jules in fact isn’t a fine anything after all.

As for biography, there is only Meryle Secrest’s
Stephen Sondheim
(Knopf, 1998). Back in 1980 or so, I had a firm offer from Harper & Row for such a book, but only if Sondheim was willing to speak of his personal life. To change the wording, he would have to come out. He didn’t want to then, but he changed his mind later, and Secrest quotes him in a deceptively simple line: “I was never easy with being a homosexual, which complicated things.” It’s simple because of the legal problems of those days, but a lot resides in that
complicated
. Being gay adds mysterious content to one’s profile, because even tolerant straights don’t understand anything about gay life. Wouldn’t Gay Sondheim create a rival “text” overshadowing Sondheim the composer or Sondheim the arts revolutionary, or even just Sondheim the author of musicals with an interesting premise—shows that aren’t intended to be revolutionary at all (but turn out to be, because that’s what happens when you take Oscar Hammerstein’s reforms to the next level)? Sondheim was forthcoming in talks with Secrest, allowing her to give a very readable and complete picture of the man. No doubt there has been no other Sondheim biography because there is no need for one.

^*
Candide
’s four notes are easily heard at the start of the “Paris Waltz” and the Act One finale in the 1956 score; a variant launches the overture.
West Side
’s
ur
-theme, a tritone resolving a half-step up, gives the first notes of “Maria” and “Cool” but turns up in other places. While we’re pausing, on
Pacific Overtures
Joanne Gordon quotes
Opera News
’ critic, one Ned Brinker—your reporter himself, writing pseudonymously for reasons that now elude me.

A Selective Discography

With shows as rich as these, it may not be easy to isolate the most intensely haunted of
Follies
recordings or even place the Catalan
A Little Night Music
in the Sondheim canon. However, his first score, to
Saturday Night
, is a cinch. Preserving the 1997 world premiere, First Night’s disc is historic but superseded in every respect by Nonesuch’s taping of the 2000 New York staging. Nonesuch offers more music in a bigger orchestration (by Jonathan Tunick, souped up for the CD), taking in two numbers written for the Chicago production by the Pegasus Players, in 1999, “Montana Chem.” (on stock prices, the show’s maguffin: the characters care about it, but we don’t), and “Delighted, I’m Sure,” a throwaway bit that existed solely as a lyric when the show was written, in 1954. (Sondheim finally set it forty-five years later.) Then, too, Nonesuch offers a full set of notes and lyrics; First Night lacks even a synopsis. Its cast (all unknowns, even if Gavin Lee later punched out walking up, across, and down the proscenium in the stage
Mary Poppins
in London and New York) is respectable. Nonesuch’s gang is rather better, though I miss the playful eccentricity we would have heard from the cast had the show gone to Broadway with—just for instance—Carol Haney, Grover Dale, Sheila Bond, Jimmy Sisco, and Sidney Armus. Even in “So Many People,” a ballad that sounds very like the Sondheim of the Hal Prince era, David Campbell and Lauren Ward are affecting but never quite take over this romance of mingled yearning and contentment. Still, the show’s tunefulness comes through quite nicely.

Many people relate to
West Side Story
through the 1961 film, but the original Broadway cast (Columbia) is unbeatable. Among Jerome Robbins’ many infuriating qualities was indecisiveness, especially in casting, but when he chose his players at last they truly fulfilled a vision of who the characters were, and one hears it in every note. A letter from Sondheim to Bernstein in the latter’s published correspondence (Yale) tells us that Columbia’s Goddard Lieberson increased
West Side
’s pit for the disc to thirty-seven (from twenty-eight, according to Steven Suskin in
The Sound of Broadway Music
), and the conductor, Max Goberman, drafted from classical precincts, shapes the music as well as anyone, including Bernstein himself with a crossover cast (DG). The latter—José Carreras, Kiri Te Kanawa, Tatiana Troyanos, and Marilyn Horne (for “Somewhere”)—do rather suffer from terminal opera kaboom, but, paradoxically, DG’s
The Making of West Side Story
, the DVD on the sessions, is worth a detour. After “America,” Bernstein says, “That may be my favorite song in the show,” so now we know. Sondheim doesn’t appear, but we do get Te Kanawa’s “Somewhere,” just for the fun of it, not included on the LPs or CD.

West Side
’s 1958 London cast is a curiosity, because it came out in segments. The sweethearts, Don McKay and Marlys Watters, got an EP (HMV) of four numbers conducted by Lawrence Leonard, who led the pit at Her Majesty’s Theatre. You have to scramble to get the other leads. The Riff, George Chakiris, is on a
West Side
Society LP. David Holliday, who played Gladhand, then a Jet, then Tony, can be
seen
on the Society cover photo of the Prologue, but sneak over to two Music For Pleasure
West Side
s to hear his Tony, with Diane Todd and then Jill Martin. (The Todd disc features Tony Adams, a replacement Riff.) These London studio casts of Broadway and West End titles vary greatly in expertise, though such major names as June Bronhill, Shirley Bassey, Patricia Routledge, and Adam Faith took part. Buffs love them for their endearingly clueless habit of leaving out important numbers—one LP drops “America,” another “Somewhere.” The only complete
West Side
is on Jay’s double-CD set, with the sole reading of the overture. And note that the movie’s fiddling with the score—bringing the boys into “America”
^*
or tacking a coda with a
plano
high G onto “Something’s Coming”—has been creeping into revivals. In 2009 on Broadway (Sony), Matt Cavenaugh sang the coda with an extra phrase, then rose to a good strong high A.

Gypsy
is unusual in claiming no fewer than five Broadway cast albums, from Ethel Merman (Columbia) through Angela Lansbury (Victor), Tyne Daly (Electra), and Bernadette Peters (Angel) to Patti LuPone (Time/Life). They’re all good, and the later ones give the fuller readings. But Rose was made on Merman from top to toe, and, whether she knew it or not, she
was
Rose, especially in the ruthless self-belief under the appealing façade. LuPone’s CD is noteworthy in including cut numbers made by the cast in Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations, so this is the fullest reading of all. One of these extras is “Smile, Girls,” written because Merman didn’t have enough to sing in Act Two— as I’ve already said, just her third of “Together Wherever We Go,” a tiny reprise-bit of “Small World,” and “Rose’s Turn.” “Smile, Girls” isn’t a great number, but it’s great
Gypsy
, showing us what Rose is like as a theatrical coach—remember, at the show’s end, it’s what Louise wants her to do with the rest of her life.

The above are the famous
Gypsy
s. Let’s pay a visit to secret
Gypsy
: the Kay Medford reading (Music for Pleasure). It’s another of those English studio casts; Medford was then in London as Mrs. Brice in
Funny Girl
, and someone must have thought it equiponderant to record Medford as a second stage mother. But she was really a dramatic actress who took non-singing roles (as in
Paint Your Wagon
, a City Center
Carousel
, and
Bye Bye Birdie
) or finagled her way through vocals (as in replacing Pat Marshall in
Mr. Wonderful
). Medford wasn’t a singer per se, and Rose is the musical’s Brünnhilde.

Even so, this
Gypsy
is no fly-by-night affair. The smallish band plays an adaptation of the original orchestrations, and there is a valid supporting cast. There’s even a Pop, for his one spoken line. But there’s no Rose in any real sense, because Medford tries to act her way through the score, singing its Sondheim but not its Styne. She resorts to bizarre field expedients, such as lengthening the sound of the last syllable in a phrase (e.g., “I had a dreeeeeemmm-uh”), to suggest theatre excitement. It’s not laughable or a disaster. It just isn’t correct. Rose isn’t one of those “mother” roles, like the one in
Funny Girl
, where personality rules. Rose is the greatest singing challenge in the classics sweepstakes, because there’s so much Styne, so much Sondheim. Rose-Marie is just music. Roxie Hart is just lyrics. Rose is a chemistry of the two. As for the important number that, as British custom demands, the LP left out: it’s “Little Lamb.”

The most recent of the prominent Roses comes to us also on an English recording: Imelda Staunton, at Chichester in 2014 and then in the West End (First Night). Her portrayal was a sensation, and she produced a surprising amount of voice in the numbers, as she hadn’t in such earlier Sondheim roles as the Baker’s Wife and Mrs. Lovett. The disc is personable in general, the two girls joking around merrily in “If Momma Was Married.” But something is missing: vocal tone. It is not enough to be able to sing this score with command, as Staunton does. Rose must produce an attractive sound, and Staunton’s timbre lacks appeal. This is why one always returns to Merman-as-Rose. These songs were written specifically for that singer’s incomparable instrument.

I want to speed through to Sondheim’s second period, but let’s dally with one of the outstanding Sondheim non-original-cast albums, that of the 2001 Pasadena Playhouse revival of
Do I Hear a Waltz?
(Fynsworth Alley), led by Alyson Reed and Anthony Crivello.
West Side
’s Carol Lawrence plays the jaded pensione proprietor, and there is a splendid orchestra of twenty-one (cut down from the 1965 pit) under Steve Orich, who effects a wonderful rallentando in the overture at the first full-out statement of “Someone Like You.” The Broadway troupe (Columbia) is very well sung, but this cast is more characterful. Crivello, without Sergio Franchi’s exhibitionistic blitz, nevertheless makes “Take the Moment” seductive, then passionate, with a stunning climax rising to a high A flat, and, in the title number, Reed really sounds like a lifelong wallflower suddenly asked to lead the cotillion.

As I’ve said, that title song was originally staged with the ensemble, though only Leona sang. But it’s a gateway number, leading to a “new, improved” Leona, and ancient rules of musical comedy demand that the chorus sing along, for a swelling of the show’s emotional arc.
^*
The Pasadena
Waltz
reset the action entirely at the pensione and, anyway, had no ensemble to join in on anything. Yet there were revisions. “Bargaining” was cut, and the now-famous cynical version of “We’re Gonna Be All Right,” dropped (as I’ve said) at the insistence of Richard Rodgers’ wife, who felt she had been lyric-shamed, was reinstated along with song’s verse, not heard on Broadway. Note that the Pasadena CD includes the 1965 overture (albeit shortened), which did not make it onto the original album.

Most important, Pasadena reprogrammed “Everybody Loves Leona,” a sorrowful “coming to terms with myself” solo, dropped in 1965 because Sondheim felt it telegrammed character intel instead of dramatizing it. We know what Sondheim means. In
Brigadoon
, Tommy doesn’t sing to us of how he misses that Scots village; instead, we see him haunted by it, in others’ reprises of the first act’s songs. Still, “Everybody Loves Leona” is an arresting way to connect us with the heroine’s failure to hear more than a chorus or two of her waltz. It’s also one of the best lyrics in the show. And before we leave the 1960s, let’s note an amusing mishap on the original cast of
Anyone Can Whistle
(Columbia): at 1:39 of the CD cut of “I’ve Got You To Lean On,” Angela Lansbury accidentally jumps in too soon. (Just by the way, there’s great stereo separation on this particular cut, too.)