On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (6 page)

Thus, at one point in Act Two, when Joe was in deepest despair about the way he was wasting his life, his father and others of his home town materialized upstage calling to him, though geographically they were many miles apart. This was, of course, a musical number. But instead of the soliloquy one expected from Joe himself, articulating through musical-play sophistication the abstractions in his mind, the song closed in on him from outside: his mother, who died in Act One, stole in from the shadows to sing “Come Home.”

Allegro
wasn’t a fantasy, but its staging was, as scenes tumbled into each other cinematically, one set of players leaving the stage as the next set entered, in a kind of dissolve; as back projections, black traveler curtains, and bits of furniture replaced the customary scenic package that no big musical dared go without; as Agnes de Mille’s ballets kept seizing control of the action; as that chorus analyzed events for us.

This was a revolution in format. Where other musicals narrate directly,
Allegro
was stylized. Its presentation was as much a part of its relationship with the audience as its content was, and it explained its story while it was unfolding. No musical had ever attempted anything like this before, and the result was, truly, shocking. Some were baffled, irritated. Others—especially theatre people—were enthralled. Then, too, the piece was inconsistent in tone, giddy at times (as its title suggests: “lively”) but sober or corny at others. As with Hammerstein’s great experiment with
Show Boat
, twenty years before, parts of it didn’t match.
^*

For example, too much of the score is distributed among minor characters (the heroine scarcely sings at all), possibly to emphasize Hammerstein’s notion that when someone becomes prominent, importunate forces make demands on him. Thus, over the thirty-odd years of his life that
Allegro
covers, Joe Taylor is defined for us almost entirely by others: as though his ability to express himself in song is being compromised, crowded off the stage.

Of course, this subversion of the formal etiquette—ripping open a show’s “cover” to reveal its insides in operation—is exactly why
Allegro
struck its admirers as a marvel. Young Steve, assisting on the production, was one of those inspired by its meta-theatricality. “Content dictates form” is a favorite Sondheim maxim, and
Allegro
’s whirlwind staging—with subtexts bubbling up from the unconscious amid a hubbub of ever-changing optics—was made necessary by
Allegro
’s subject matter, which can be summed up as It all goes by so fast. Too fast, really, for us to think things through and make the right decisions.

This notion haunts many of Sondheim’s own shows: should I marry?—because partnering is so hazardous. Or: should we Westernize or maintain our natural Asian culture? In Sondheim’s world, we define our lives by our choices: so make them carefully! Then, too,
Allegro
’s non-realistic staging
^*
influenced the way Sondheim’s mature works—from
Company
through
Roadshow
—behaved. However, in one way Sondheim’s musicals are very unlike
Allegro
. They are eminently stageable, as countless productions—large and small, with stars and penny plain—have proved. But
Allegro
is very, very difficult to bring off. It has emerged as a seminal title in the musical’s history, yet revivals are rare and seldom enthuse the public. As the famous joke goes, the English producer Cameron Mackintosh told Sondheim, “You’ve spent your life trying to fix the second act of
Allegro
.”

Simply bringing Steve into his first contact with the backstage of Broadway was mentoring in itself, but, as we know, Hammerstein then gave his unofficial ward the assignment to write his four practice musicals. The first of them, based on Kaufman and Connelly’s
Beggar on Horseback
with the title
All That Glitters
,
^†
was Sondheim’s first adventure with the notion that free will, not destiny, is the animating force in life. It is the direct opposite of the theme that dominates classical tragedy from the Greeks through Corneille to Eugene O’Neill, who all picture man as not the master but the subject of his identity. This inheres in his family, his class, his race, his social caste.
Beggar on Horseback
’s composer-protagonist, on the other hand, is in a quandary of his own making, one that would prove pertinent to Sondheim’s career: should he create, as an artist, what he is drawn to create, or what is likely to gain him a public?

Clearly, the hero of Sondheim’s first musical is very like the composer in
Hangover Square
. Better, he is like the doctor in
Allegro
: he can fulfill himself as a small-town healer—a nobody, although, paradoxically, one of greatness—yet he allows himself to be vacuumed up by the one per cent in the Big City.

One makes theatre out of how one feels about life, and Sondheim felt very differently than Hammerstein did. The Sondheim worldview is: free will is wasted on the young, nothing is easy, and everything is personal. Thus, while Sondheim learned from Hammerstein’s use of the musical’s structural elements, he borrowed nothing from his mentor’s philosophy of life.
Allegro
ends as its hero sets forth—at about the age of forty, remember—to reboot his purpose on earth. In one of Sondheim’s key works,
Follies
, turning forty marks one’s dissolution into a space enclosed by nostalgia, regret, despair, inaction: “not going left,” as a
Follies
lyric puts it, “not going right.”

And yet Sondheim inherited something very personal from Hammerstein: a sense of indebtedness to society that some public figures acquire. In an interview with me in 1990, Sondheim referenced
Allegro
’s theme of the Important Man who falls victim to social pressures that rob him of not only time but the concentration needed to bring an artistic idea to fruition. Hammerstein usually wrote about romantic subjects—exotic, tempestuous heroines like Rose-Marie, enchanted meme-arias like “Indian Love Call,” uniformed adventurers from French revolutionaries to Mounties. In
Allegro
, suddenly, Hammerstein was making theatre out of not how he felt about life but how he was actually living it—not least because he was, as Sondheim put it, a “one-worlder.”
^*
In the 1940s, his prominent name would ensure that Hammerstein would be beseeched to substantiate mastheads, committees, meetings. Which is more important, musical comedy or peace on earth?

When
Allegro
was new, in 1947, this was subject matter too intellectual for a musical. As Sondheim put it, “I remember thinking at the time, ‘Gee, that’s an awfully special problem’ … and guess what? The same thing has happened to me. Because you suddenly feel a reponsibility to give something back [to society].” Thus, Sondheim became the president of the Dramatists Guild—not a figurehead position, but a time-consuming job in which one who has Arrived tries to make it easier for others to Get There as well.

Sondheim had other mentors, though they all appeared once he was grown up and less emotionally vulnerable. Hammerstein entered Sondheim’s life when he was cut off from his father, whom he loved, and living with his mother, whom he disliked, so he was more than a teacher: a friend. A tricky one, too, for—as I’ve said already—though outwardly jovial and generous, Hammerstein could be insensitive and sarcastic with intimates, and he hid from the world a fierce competitive streak. Still, he was very, very smart, and so was Sondheim; very, very smart people tend to want to know each other. It makes life interesting, even if some of them are enraged beasts like Lillian Hellman or sneaky-Pete troublemakers like Gore Vidal. Besides, it is generally only smart people who can maintain relationships based on mutual understanding. Most of our friends, however loyal, will not understand us in the deepest sense, and, without an understanding, sympathetically comprehending friend or two, no one will know who we are. We become isolated—which, ironically, is the condition of more than a few of Sondheim’s major characters.

It is worth noting that, while Sondheim is fiercely loyal to Hammerstein on the personal level, he thinks that Hammerstein’s artistry was “limited,” and that, after his first phenomenally influential titles with Richard Rodgers, from
Oklahoma!
to
The King and I
, Hammerstein’s voice lost its urgency in his last five Rodgers shows. (In an interview with me, the word Sondheim uses is “dead,” though this is presumably a colloquial exaggeration.)

Unlike Hammerstein, with whom Sondheim never wrote a show, his later mentors were all collaborators. First was Leonard Bernstein—composer, conductor, author, television eminence on
Omnibus
and the Young People’s Concerts, New York cultural personality, and international workaholic gadabout. One definition of a genius is the person who sees the world differently than everyone else does and persuades you that he’s right and everyone else is wrong. It’s also called “thinking outside the box,” but it really means “living on the strength of an intense and productive imagination”—and that was Bernstein. Though he was no more than twelve years Sondheim’s senior when they wrote
West Side Story
’s score, Bernstein was already very rich in theatrical and musical experience, with hit Broadway shows, symphonic works, and a reputation as one of the world’s greatest and most melodramatic conductors, emoting and stamping and gesturing on the podium as though he was as much a part of the program as Beethoven or Stravinsky.

In short, Bernstein was show biz with a classical background. So was Sondheim, and he would take command of Broadway as Bernstein never quite did. Still, at the time it was very much the relationship of the kid and his Dutch uncle; in a letter to fellow composer David Diamond, Bernstein called Sondheim “a charming gifted boy.” As I’ve said, Bernstein’s one-upmanship could be maddening, but he and Sondheim remained close on the personal (but not professional) level, and Bernstein would play guru when Sondheim needed to talk to someone who understood musical composition and theatrical expedience, a rare combination.

West Side Story
was also the show on which Sondheim first worked with Hal Prince, at that time a producer but later the producer-director of Sondheim’s seventies shows, from
Company
and
Follies
through
A Little Night Music
to
Pacific Overtures
and
Sweeney Todd
. If Oscar Hammerstein taught Sondheim the basics of construction in the musical, it was Prince who with Sondheim worked out the deconstruction of the musical, liquidating realism for a presentational style in which the audience is always to remember that it is in the theatre, that the action is not “real” but an assembly of performers who discuss the story while enacting it.

This is the famous “concept musical,” a term that has been used so differently by so many that today it has no meaning. In the 1970s, however—and because of the Sondheim-Prince shows—the words invoked the format introduced in
Allegro
and developed in Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s
Love Life
(1948) and John Kander and Fred Ebb’s
Cabaret
(1966). In the usual musical, such as
The Music Man
, a story is told straightforwardly and the characters come and go as if in life. In the concept musical, however—as I said about
Allegro
—characters can “step out of the show” to comment to the audience, or slip into a scene in which they are not actually “present,” or even reappear after death. If
The Music Man
were a concept musical, some of the Iowa chorus people would infiltrate scenes with the principals or occupy the audience during set changes, gossiping in snatches of song from their unique take on things, Iowa Confidential; and the father whose early death has traumatized young Winthrop would physically haunt the story, his survivors sensing his presence without actually communicating with him. Perhaps he’d have a number essentializing the show’s theme, “Listen To the Music,” or something of the like.

So let us drop in on one of Sondheim’s concept musicals,
A Little Night Music
. There is no chorus per se, but, along with its principals, the show uses an ensemble of five operatic vocalists, always referred to as “Liebeslieder [Love Songs] Singers,” after the quartet that Brahms used in his two
Liebeslieder-Walzer
song cycles.
^*
Sondheim’s two sopranos, one mezzo, tenor, and baritone have no roles in the plot, yet they take part in its unfolding, to share with the audience what the benighted characters in the actual storyline cannot articulate themselves. Thus, a lawyer and his lovely young bride attend the theatre, she unaware that he once had an affair with the actress starring in the play that very night. Shall we make it interesting? The lawyer is twice his wife’s age, and they have never had sex. What, we wonder, holds them together?

Meanwhile, the play begins, and two of the Liebeslieder women appear in courtier costumes in what is obviously a period
comédie érotique
in the manner of Marivaux, creating a ramp-up for the actress’ entrance with salacious tidbits about her proficiency in the sensual arts. Then the actress cascades onto the stage in flashy prima donna style, curtseys to accept her applause, and, “old pro that she is,” the stage directions tell us, “she cases the house.”