On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (37 page)

Assassins
is a rare later Sondheim show
not
orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick. The original, off-Broadway cast sang to a mere three-person band but recorded (Victor) to Michael Starobin’s very sizable scoring, later used in the first Broadway airing (PS), in 2004. How to choose? The later disc offers interstitial music and dialogue, creating real theatre atmosphere (and includes the added “Something Just Broke”).
Passion
is somewhat comparable, though it starts on Broadway (Angel), then moves to the smaller venue (PS), with Rebecca Luker in for an ailing Melissa Errico. Most impressively, Angel added twenty-six extra strings to the Broadway pit, a possibly unprecedented expansion in the history of cast albums. Still, I think the 1996 London cast (First Night) is the best
Passion
of the three, very intensely portrayed by Michael Ball and Maria Friedman. A DVD (Image) preserves the Broadway premiere, and the commentary track gives us Sondheim, Lapine, and the three leads. That sounds historical, though in the event they don’t have all that much to say.

There’s a studio reading of
The Frogs
in its first, short version (Nonesuch), paired with the four
Evening Primrose
songs, but the 2004 Lincoln Center
Frogs
(PS) wipes it away. More than an extension of the original, the revision turns a play with incidental music into a full-fledged musical, and Aristophanes’ characters burst into life—the aggressively ebullient Herakles (Burke Moses); the saturnine Charon (John Byner), with all the charm of a Triffid; party boy Pluto (Peter Bartlett); and of course Dionysos (Nathan Lane) and Xanthias (Roger Bart), ham-and-egging their way through the underworld. Note, too, that the typical PS production’s notes, lyrics, and stage shots create virtual theatregoing, far beyond Nonesuch’s bare-bones display.

Wise Guys
was not recorded, but
Bounce
(Nonesuch) and
Road Show
(PS) give us a chance to watch Sondheim and John Weidman readjust the work’s values as they tighten it.
Bounce
is flouncier, starting with an old-fashioned overture—hurry music, then a bright up-tune (“The Game”), then a ballad (“The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened”), almost as if it were the 1950s and
Bounce
, not
Saturday Night
, were Sondheim’s first-to-be-written title. Interestingly, the overture concludes with a playoff between “Gold!” and “Boca Raton”—meme-ing on the only two enterprises that the two Mizners work on together. As the story unfolds, we hear great character resonance in the leads’ voices, Howard McGillin eagerly charming, destructive not because he wants to be but because it’s just something that’s in him, and Richard Kind soft as flannel: a matinée idol and a teddy bear. Michele Pawk, the Girl of all epochs, comes and goes almost like the characters in
Candide
, turning up wherever she needs to, and Gavin Creel, as Kind’s boy friend, offers a sweet sound to contrast with everyone else (except in a sudden twisty outburst at the end of “Talent,” too tasty to spoil here). Conductor David Caddick leads a big orchestra, though
Bounce
itself seems small in scale till the gradual buildup of a huge ensemble on “You.”

In Wagner’s
Ring
, which opposes two lords of the world in Wotan (king of the gods) and Alberich (king of the nihilistic Nibelungs), Wotan is spoken of as “light-Alberich.” So Alberich is “dark-Wotan”—and
Road Show
is “dark-
Bounce
.” There is no overture this time. The show just starts, the gleeful “Bounce” now deflatingly re-lyricked as “Waste.” Alexander Gemignani’s Addison is as gentle as Richard Kind’s, but Michael Cerveris proves a colder Wilson than Howard McGillin—and note that, in “Addison’s Trip,” the doom-laden messages that sabotage Addison’s projects are delivered by Cerveris, in sepulchral tones. But we do hear more from the Mizner family, and “That Was a Year” (“I Love This Town” in
Bounce
), setting forth just how destructive Wilson can be, gives more narrative specifics now. At the same time, the brothers seem almost symbolic figures in
Road Show
.
Bounce
uses them as foils in a comedy;
Road Show
places them in a semi-comic drama of archetypes—the gay man whose inventiveness enriches the culture and the straight who takes advantage of what’s already there.

Sondheim’s acting gig in
June Moon
is available on Kultur, and his one full-length soundtrack score, for
Stavisky
, is, as I’ve said, paired with
Follies in Concert
.
Stavisky
the film is available only in Europe, though Region 1 DVDs used to be on sale in Canada (Maple), without English subtitles. Completists will want to view it, possibly following along with the screenplay in English translation (Ungar), but Resnais left out too much of Sondheim’s tracks. This is fine music all the way though, and the main-title theme, urged along by a haunting rhythmic pulse, is a wonder, so intense yet so oddly noncommital: romantic and biting, playful yet criminal, an enigmatic smile and a hands-in-the-pockets posture. It was destiny: Sondheim’s lifelong love of film noir led him to this moment, when he could in effect compose the theme song for an entire genre.

Ever since
Side By Side By Sondheim
(Victor), revues of his songs have proliferated, partly to explore his extensive trunk material. Some of these have storylines, for instance the two-character
Marry Me a Little
—the title a dropped
Company
number, of course—folding unused songs into a Boy Never Actually Meets Girl, though, in concept-show style, they move around in the same “space.” We have original (Victor) and revival (Ghostlight) casts, with a slightly different rotation of numbers, both with piano only. One of the revues,
Sondheim On Sondheim
(PS), features commentary by the composer himself, explaining how his art works. In anthology discs, Varèse Sarabande has the two best collections, both of arcane material.
Sondheim at the Movies
gives us the alternate version of “The Glamorous Life” written for the
Night Music
film (because the Liebeslieder Singers had been dropped and Elizabeth Taylor couldn’t manage the number alone). The sequence became a montage of Désirée’s adventures while Fredrica sang in voice-over. An arresting change: the “glamor” was finally substantiated, as the lyrics abandoned Désirée’s sarcasm in favor of her daughter’s idolatry, dreamy and lilting over an accompaniment of rushing triplets, the sound of delighted anticipation. Even as the screen revealed the dreary offstage of a life on the margin of the arts, the song told us of beauty and truth, captured in terms perfect for the girl’s age and the era in question. Note, for example, her use of “recite,” meaning “speak dialogue” and, more broadly, “act,” a usage that bears an outdated and European flavor.
^*
This new “Glamorous Life,” too lovely to lose, found its way to the stage. The 1995 National Theatre
Night Music
(Tring), built around Judi Dench, troubled to unite it with the old one, ingeniously intermingling sections of the two. They strengthen Désirée as not only actress and lover but mother, a wonderful one. The first thing she tells Fredrica on seeing her again is “Darling … you’re much prettier, you’re irresistible.” That’s a mother to remember.

Further auditioning
Sondheim at the Movies
: Gary Beach and Liz Callaway give us the
Evening Primrose
songs with more voice than we hear on the Nonesuch reading with
The Frogs
—and this is important music in that it gave us a first taste of the “tricky” Sondheim, anticipating
Company
and his second period. Varèse includes also four of the five
Dick Tracy
numbers, with Randy Skinner tapping his way across the screen through stereo-speaker bas-relief in a very rousing rendition of “Back in Business,” led by Alet Oury. Most interesting is “(Love is just) Sand,” an insinuatingly sexy piece from
Singing Out Loud,
a movie musical that was never made, done to a T by Christiane Noll. You’d never guess her day job is singing operetta till she glides into a high-soprano descant on the second chorus.

The other Varese CD is
Unsung Sondheim
, which gave us our first experience of
Saturday Night
, five years before the first staging. As well, there are dropped numbers from shows we know. Michael Rupert joins the ranks of Roberts lending their very timbre of voice to our attempt to catch up with this most elusive of characters; if
Company
were an opera by Richard Strauss, Robert might as well be Keikobad.
^*
Rupert’s solo is “Multitudes of Amys,” a precursor of “Being Alive,” fascinatingly outgoing for so repressed a figure.

The cut
Follies
number is “That Old Piano Roll,” in which Buddy tries to “restart” with Sally—and she seems to respond. That’s odd; hasn’t she felt “wrong” with him from the beginning? Perhaps the staging was supposed to show us how alienated she is from this loser. It’s Ben who has the daddy power. Or does Sally love Ben not because he has winner control but because she simply loves him? Harry Groener and Lynette Perry make the most of the number;
Follies
buffs will recognize the melody from the show’s overture (which is in fact the second number, played to mimed action after the curtain is up, though it is a medley of the type usually employed to start the evening).

From
Anyone Can Whistle
we get Kaye Ballard and Sally Mayes in for Angela Lansbury and Lee Remick in “There’s Always a Woman,” a challenge number in driving 3/4. The disc contains also a number Sondheim wrote for a proposed adaptation of Jules Feiffer’s
Passionella
, which of course was finally realized by Bock and Harnick as the last act of
The Apple Tree
. Judy Kaye amusingly shades her normally gleaming tone for a woebegone feeling (albeit with a gala climax) in “Truly Content,” an exact counterpart to
The Apple Tree
’s “Oh, To Be a Movie Star.” Sondheim sees the scene as a lilting waltz; Bock and Harnick make it a jaunty fox trot. Yet both Kaye and
The Apple Tree
’s Barbara Harris are playing the exact same character in almost exactly the same way. Another excerpt from the aforementioned
Singing Out Loud
is “Water Under the Bridge,” in which Debbie Shapiro Gravitte suggests Eydie Gormé singing Burt Bacharach in a Joni Mitchell mood. But the disc’s sweetest morsel is the final cut, “Goodbye For Now,” from
Reds
, which the other Varèse CD gives us in an instrumental. However, it’s one of Sondheim’s tenderest ballads, hungry for its vocal, sung here by Liz Callaway. Note the flute theme that punctuates the number; it’s a cool understatement of the turmoil hidden in this fragile music, on the love of John Reed and Louise Bryant, separated by history and, at length, his early death. Though Sondheim doesn’t orchestrate his music, he does write out all the arrangements himself, and “Goodbye For Now” would be incomplete without this quaintly regretful little descant.

Last of all the discs is Sondheim the performer, on private acetates and demos. PS Classics collected two separate units entitled
Sondheim Sings
. Volume One draws largely on
Forum
,
Whistle
,
Follies
, and
A Little Night Music
, but Volume Two backs up to catch young Steve’s earliest compositions. As a vocalist, he’s rough, especially at the top and bottom of his range. But he knows how the various types of songs are supposed to sound, whether sentimental or stentorian, and he gives each one all it needs. He is as well a much better pianist than many composers. Cole Porter—who made a few commercial cuts as well as demos, always accompanying himself—was a terrible pianist, with a hunt-and-peck right hand and a secret-message left one.

Of course, what interests us primarily is the material itself, almost entirely unavailable elsewhere—a birthday song for a friend, numbers from school shows, Steve’s own “Do I Hear a Waltz?,” three numbers for
The Last Resorts
. The songs created for story-and-character projects are more absorbing than the others, reminding us that Steve is less a songwriter than a playwright. They are also more tuneful. In a helping of
Saturday Night
, “In No Time At All” paired with “A Moment With You,” we hear A strains suggesting the syncopated vocal line and colloquial poetry of Irving Berlin, though the release recalls the Rodgers of the Hart years. It’s an archival cut, too, as “In No Time At All,” musically a near-twin of “A Moment With You,” bears different lyrics that seem to have vanished from
Saturday Night
as currently performed (and the words do not appear in
Finishing the Hat
with the rest of the show’s verses).

After the sophistication of the mature shows—
Company
’s ambiguities,
Sweeney Todd
’s
ur
-themes in restless development,
Passion
’s profane confessions—it makes for offbeat listening to encounter Steve at his start. As we listen, he slips back into his twenties, auditioning his
Last Resorts
songs for Jean Kerr and her homophobic-shithead critic of a husband, Walter. They didn’t like his work, and there would be others such. Did Steve know how tough it would be, at first, to find his way in the theatre? “Wish I knew my place” is a line from one of the apprentice shows he wrote for Oscar Hammerstein; surely he did know. “When a true genius appears in the world,” says Jonathan Swift, “you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”