NOTHING to HIT BUT the HEIGHTS

Yesterday, Stephen Sondheim turned 80. I’m sure he would agree that this makes him an old feller. Nevertheless, as he belongs to a profession not noted for longevity, it’s a good age. Jerry Ross only lived to be 29, George Gershwin just 38, Lorenz Hart 48, Kurt Weill 50, Frank Loesser 59, Jerome Kern 60, Sondheim’s beloved mentor Oscar Hammerstein II 65, Johnny Mercer 66, Dorothy Fields 68, Leonard Bernstein 72, Noël Coward, Cole Porter and Alec Wilder 73, Cy Coleman 75 and Richard Rodgers and Andy Razaf 77. But Harold Arlen got to 81, Yip Harburg 84, Ira Gershwin 86, Harry Warren and Adolph Green 87, Jule Styne 88, Betty Comden 89, Eubie Blake 96 and the grand old man of all, Irving Berlin, to 101 (not to forget the phenomenal George Abbott who was said to be playing golf every day until just before his death at 107; I saw the incredibly sprightly 1985 revival he directed at 98 in London of Rodgers & Hart’s On Your Toes, for which he wrote the original book in 1936). So there’s still something to aim for.


Mature Sondheim

It’s a curious coincidence that Sondheim shares his birthday with Andrew Lloyd Webber, now 62. In another part of the forest, those Titans of cinematic horror, Vincent Price and Sir Christopher Lee were both born on May 27th, the day after Peter Cushing, though obviously all in different years. Sondheim and Lloyd Webber may both have written many musical plays but within that field that have little in common. They did, however, once and very unexpectedly collaborate. It was for the spectacular charity benefit in honour of Sir Cameron Mackintosh, Hey, Mr Producer!, given in London twelve years ago. In a dropped-in recorded sequence, the two men sat at the piano and performed a satirical pull-together of songs from their respective repertoires for which Sondheim had buffed the lyrics. I particularly enjoyed his reference to “the overwritten music of the night” which Lloyd Webber seemed to take with decent grace.

(Sondheim has a brilliant satirical gift for rewriting the lyrics of others. For Leonard Bernstein’s 70th birthday celebrations in 1988, he twitted his old friend with a version of the Ira Gershwin lyric, ‘The Saga of Jenny’, rewritten of course as ‘The Saga of Lenny’. Where Jenny “would make up her mind”, Sondheim’s Lenny wouldn’t, guying Bernstein’s notorious propensity to spread himself thin. What Sondheim kept in his listeners’ subconscious minds was Bernstein’s notorious sexual ambiguity, about which it would have been disobliging to be explicit, even had Lenny’s formidable nonagenarian mother not been present. Lauren Bacall performed the song with exactly the required insouciance, so that Bernstein was delighted even while deliciously embarrassed).


Sondheim by Hirschfeld

My regular readers will be aware that I have few words to bestow on Lord LW. But my admiration – love, even – for Sondheim’s work knows no bounds. I feel privileged that my life has overlapped with his so that I have been able to follow his development and witness so many of his works when they were new-minted and see again how they have matured. Sondheim’s contribution to American theatre and music is certainly the equal to that of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, David Mamet, August Wilson, Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson, Walter Piston, Duke Ellington, Elliott Carter and the giants of musical theatre I listed above. He is a great American artist.

Where to begin when urging him upon those who have yet to appreciate fully this extraordinary œuvre? I recall that when I was covering for Time Out the imminent arrival of A Chorus Line in London, the line I was getting from the creators of that epochal show (all, apart from composer Marvin Hamlisch, now dead) was that, great as Sondheim was, they wanted to do something really emotional, which Sondheim’s stuff somehow wasn’t. In particular, Michael Bennett, the incredibly charismatic director and choreographer, who had created the dance numbers for Sondheim’s Company and Follies, told me how passionate he was to tap into emotion. But this was profoundly to confuse emotion with sentiment. I cannot watch any production of middle-period Sondheim (Follies through Sunday in the Park), however humdrum that revival, save through a mist of tears.


Angela Lansbury, Catherine Zeta-Jones in Broadway's current Little Night Music revival

That is not because my heartstrings are being urgently pulled; far from it. The emotional charge comes in quite unexpected places. Take the bracingly spirited number given to Petra the maid, a previously unregarded character, right at the end of A Little Night Music, when the “smiles of a summer night” have all frozen on the faces of the grand figures. Petra has enjoyed a tumble in the grass with a visiting butler, now asleep, and she confides to the audience her lofty yet practical plans: ‘I Shall Marry the Miller’s Son’. She has no doubts about it: “Friday nights, for a bit of fun,/We’ll go dancing”. But that’s for later: “Meanwhile …/It’s a wink and a wiggle/And a giggle in the grass/And I’ll trip the light Fandango./A pinch and a diddle/In the middle of what passes by”. And why not? Because “It’s a very short road/From the pinch and the punch/To the paunch and the pouch and the pension”. So “a girl ought to celebrate what passes by”.

You now know she’s got her head screwed on. Then she lets herself dream: “I shall marry the businessman./Five fat babies and lots of security./Friday nights, if we think we can,/We’ll go dancing”. But still she’s anchored in the present and catching her fun where she may: “It’s not much of a stretch/To the cribs and the croup/And the bosoms that droop and go dry”. And then she starts blissfully to fantasise: “I shall marry the Prince of Wales –/Pearls and servants and dressing for festivals./Friday nights with him all in tails,/We’ll have dancing”. But she’s quickly back in the triumphant present: “There are mouths to be kissed/Before mouths to be fed,/And there’s many a tryst/And there’s many a bed./There’s a lot I’ll have missed/But I’ll not have been dead when I die!/And a person should celebrate everything/Passing by”. And she ends with what, at the song’s outset, seemed hubris and now is seen as a proper, doable ambition: “And I shall marry the miller’s son”.

It’s a marvel of a lyric, driven ahead by the busy three-four rhythm – all the show’s numbers are in waltz tempo – and subtly developing its ideas. I adore the modulation from Petra and her miller’s son going dancing “for a bit of fun” to her and a businessman more cautiously going dancing “if we think we can” to the smart perception that powerful people will “have dancing”. In the first London production, Diane Langton, then in her splendid prime before she became a barrage balloon, sang it with such lusty conviction that you just had to cheer, the tears streaming down your cheeks. I cannot read the lyric now, let alone hear it well sung, without filling up.


Japanese actor Mako in the premiere of Pacific Overtures

Another song that packs an unlooked-for punch comes in Sondheim’s musical about Japan. I was lucky enough to catch Hal Prince’s original production of it on Broadway in 1976 and if I ever see anything on the stage to equal its beauty and enchantment, I’ll eat my hat … indeed, to pick up an idea from another Sondheim show, I’ll finish the hat. Pacific Overtures depicts Japanese society before and after its opening up by the arrival in 1835 of Commodore Matthew Perry and the US fleet. It makes brilliant use of kabuki techniques and, having seen authentic kabuki in Tokyo, I can attest to the skill and respect with which this is done. Sondheim’s score, growing organically out of John Weidman’s book, is dazzling, penetrating, witty, moving and original in equal measure. In the number ‘Please, Hello’, it even contrives pastiches of four other (non-Japanese) composing styles of the period.

But the particularly moving number is ‘Someone in a Tree’, in which an old man remembers, as a boy, watching the signing of the treaty. His child self runs up a tree to recreate the scene – old and young self correct each other charmingly (“He was younger then” … “He was only ten”). The eye witness account is further edited by a guard who was stationed in the cellar of the treaty house and so was able to hear “everything … First I hear a creak and a thump./Now I hear a clink./Then they talk a bit”. These reports, while unreliable, have their own legitimacy: “I’m a fragment of the day./If I weren’t, who’s to say/Things would happen here the way/That they happened here?”

As none of the acres of newsprint expended on the subject got close to achieving, I find that this song from an American musical explicates the phenomenon of the public outpouring at the death of the Princess of Wales, the need for so many people to participate in the event of her death, at least through being part of the mourning: “It’s the fragment, not the day./It’s the pebble, not the stream./It’s the ripple, not the sea/That is happening./Not the building but the beam,/Not the garden but the stone,/Only cups of tea/And history/And someone in a tree!” Some may find Sondheim’s stuff cold but I cannot hear that lyric – or even type it out – without my eyes blurring.


An ancient Buster Keaton in the Funny Thing Happened movie

Another canard about Sondheim is that he’s a nifty lyricist but he can’t write a tune you’ll remember, a notion Sondheim himself guys niftily in the cruelly underrated Merrily We Roll Along when the show producer Joe sings: “That’s great. That’s swell./The other stuff as well./It isn’t every day/I hear a score this strong/But fellas, if I may./There’s only one thing wrong:/There’s not a tune you can hum./There’s not a tune you go bum-bum-bum-di-dum” and he leaves humming a minor key version of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s ‘Some Enchanted Evening’.

Unlike R & H, Sondheim can’t look to a certain movie future to reinforce the familiarity of the songs. Musicals are too expensive for Hollywood these days unless it’s a sure-fire proposition: even Chicago had to be revived on Broadway and sustain a much longer second run before film funding could be found, 27 years after it first opened. The 1950s hit stage shows, West Side Story and Gypsy, for which others wrote the music to Sondheim lyrics, were successfully filmed, especially West Side, which, few remember now, only really became a legendary musical on the back of the movie’s success. Sondheim’s music-and-lyrics show A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was made into a lively but not greatly profitable movie by the then trendy Dick Lester, who had the good sense to cast from the rich comic tradition of burlesque and stage comedy as well as silent movies. More recently, Tim Burton’s visually splendid version of Sweeney Todd missed the comedy but caught the grand guignol and preserved a generous proportion of the score. But Hal Prince’s movie of A Little Night Music is largely a dud.


Angela Lansbury, George Hearn in the premiere production of Sweeney Todd

And think on this: Sondheim’s organic scores don’t generate numbers that lift out for pre-opening promotion. They’re of a piece. When you sit down to see the show, you’re usually hearing all the music for the first time. It’s unfamiliar. It’s also relatively demanding. He studied composition with Milton Babbitt – Irving Berlin couldn’t even read music – and his composing is in a clear line of American classical work, through Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein yet also informed by a hugely eclectic taste in cultural input. But serious American music has always been cross-fertilised by popular as well as academic forms and the process is two-way. I always tell people that Ned Rorem’s angular art-songs are not at all difficult to grasp if you listen for the relationship to Sondheim numbers and, by association, the Broadway tradition.

Sondheim’s scores richly repay study. He may not write quite as many “tunes you can hum” right off the bat as, say, Jerry Herman but then Herman is apt to write three or four songs over and over again so that they seem familiar at the first hearing. But I could sing Sondheim songs all day, without repetition or consulting a printed score or a recording. His tunes are insidiously attractive, often using the old Noël Coward gambit of bitter-sweetness (a darkling notion set to a charming tune). And the Sondheim songbook is now as well-thumbed as any by the old Broadway masters.


The best performers love to sing his work

I was lucky enough to interview Sondheim 35 years ago when the fifth show for which he had written music as well as lyrics, A Little Night Music, opened in London. Needless to say, I found him charming and fascinating. He gave me a huge part of his afternoon, rehearsing history that I would have already known if I had done my research and making it vivid and vital. It is no surprise to learn how widely he is adored for his generosity and kindness and also for being a riveting teacher.

London played a crucial role in underwriting Sondheim’s claim to be taken seriously. A year after A Little Night Music opened at the Adelphi, David Kernan and Ned Sherrin put together the revue of Sondheim songs that became Side by Side by Sondheim, produced by Cameron Mackintosh. Joined by the great Millicent Martin and by long-time aficionado Julia McKenzie (whom Scott Meek described as having been born to sing Sondheim), they had a big hit that transferred, replete with original cast, to Broadway and has been revived and toured repeatedly ever since. The combination of small overheads and top-drawer material makes it a handy vehicle.


The young master at work

Sondheim’s place in Valhalla is now assured though it took longer than it should have done. His shows were never monster hits like Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Phantom of the Opera or Les Miserables but performers and directors love to revive them and the fan base is big enough to make such revivals viable if not honey pots.

His youngest show, known variously as Wise Guys, Gold, Bounce and Road Show has been briefly seen in various manifestations in New York, Chicago and Washington over eleven years and its evolution is beginning to rival that of Bernstein’s Candide (to which Sondheim has made his own contribution as sometime lyricist). Like Assassins and Passion, the show’s appeal is more specialised and limited than that of, say, Into the Woods or A Funny Thing Happened. But perhaps like Follies, The Frogs and Sunday in the Park with George it will be more and more valued as it settles into the general consciousness and if it enjoys sympathetic revivals. I hope there will be more Sondheim shows yet. Happy birthday, Maestro!