Something momentous

Stephen Sondheim, the Boy Wonder of Broadway, turns 90 today, so I’m hell-bent on saying some positive things about him that other people might not say. And those who’ve read my comments over the years know that I have a somewhat idiosyncratic view of the man so many take to be a God. I think he’s written a handful of excellent shows, maintains a very high level of craft, but doesn’t nearly live up to all the adulation heaped upon him. I’ve known many otherwise perspicacious folks who claim they only like Sondheim musicals. And I’m appalled at those who believe he’s never done anything bad. I’m sure he’s just as appalled, because nobody could possibly think as highly of themselves as most Sondheim fanatics – I like to call them Steve-adores – think of him.

His first effort, Saturday Night, failed to raise enough money to get produced. I musical directed a school production and it’s charitably described as an interesting failure. One can see the positive influence of Frank Loesser, and there are a few nice moments: The verse to the main ballad, So Many People, goes up and down the thirds of a single chord in a haunting way. There’s a little chorale about Brooklyn that’s certainly droll. And there’s a fine up-tempo late in the show, What More Do I Need, which I prefer to the Berlin ballad it’s stolen from. 

But then came West Side Story, the first of two for which the 20-something only did lyrics. This is a classic, a huge leap forward. While Saturday Night never managed to build up enough feeling for its characters, audiences are totally invested in Tony, Maria, Riff, Anita et al. I’d say it’s one of the most moving musicals ever written. When Maria warbles “It’s alarming how charming I feel” she is Everygirl In Love, effusing in her native language.

Next, his Gypsy lyrics do more of the narrative lifting, and he hits an entertaining balance of humor, colloquialisms and cleverness. The proficiency of West Side Story and Gypsy, which both have fine books by Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins staging, would land him in the first tier of Broadway lyricists had he written nothing else.

The Sixties, though, were a bit of a let-down. The success of the first Broadway show to feature Sondheim’s music, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, was due to its riotous libretto, not the songs themselves, which failed to garner a Tony Nomination. Not-funny-enough comedy songs also litter Do I Hear a Waltz and Anyone Can Whistle.

Then, 1970’s Company ushered in a truly brilliant period. Here was a show not quite like anything that had been attempted before: The songs, at long last, featured great gobs of actable subtext. A languorous ode to ambiguity, Barcelona, finds humor in a real and previously unsung situation. There’s also a patter song that’s a prestissimo ode to ambiguity, a ballad about ambiguity, and a quirky little jazz number about, you guessed it, ambiguity. If you can abide a whole score of that sort of thing… I’ll drink to you.

The following year, Sondheim demonstrated a real knack for pastiche with Follies. He used the type of songs we were familiar with from the age of Gershwin 

and added inner emotional layers.

As I was writing this not-quite-successful attempt at positivity, a friend asked what my favorite cut Sondheim song is, and I knew right away it’s Follies‘ Who Could Be Blue?/Little White House. So unlike anything else he’s ever written because it’s naive, simple, pretty, and a wholly positive expression of love. Not a color he paints with very often.

In his next show, A Little Night Music, a waltz called Soon begins and you think it’s going to be this loving expression but then he cuts the sweet with the sardonic and makes fun of the character. I want to say “I get it, Steve: You think love is awful.” It’s the color he paints with most often and anti-romantic cynics eat it up.

Still, the quality and craft exhibited in Company, Follies and A Little Night Music have no precedent; that is, I can’t think of anyone else who wrote three better shows in a row. What followed was Pacific Overtures, a wildly experimental entertainment with no human protagonist, and I admire its ambition if not its execution.

But then came Sweeney Todd, a brilliant synthesis of Grand Guignol melodrama and techniques taken from opera. It sounds overwrought but Sondheim filled every moment with enough majestic scoring to make it riveting.

After the debacle known as Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim stopped working with director Hal Prince, who’d helmed all his shows since Company. He sought something truly new and experimental off-Broadway, and cast quite a spell with Sunday in the Park With George, a score filled with leitmotifs, its staccato riffs standing in for the pointillist techniques of artist Georges Seurat. I found this one very moving and relatable, and I’m one of the very few who prefers the second act to the first. It gives meaning to a whole bunch of things that, at intermission, seemed meaningless.

His most-performed show, Into the Woods, has a blithe vaudevillian duet for the baker and his wife that charms me, but I find it exhausting to sit through the rest. It means to be profound – always a bad sign – and means to be funny, which it isn’t – and I’ve very little emotional connection to Cinderella and what seems like a dozen familiar fairy tale characters. What it does have, in spades, is intricacy, and one comes away impressed with the mind that thought up all those tricky numbers.

The less said about The Frogs, Passion and the one I didn’t see, Road Show (f.k.a. Bounce), the better; so I won’t. Instead, I’ll take a complaint I’ve made about Sondheim – that he wrote so little beyond the age of 57 – and make it a compliment. I truly wish you had taken your words to heart: “Give us more to see.” The work is so good, so fascinating, I wish there were more of it.

Being your slave

“Look, the lighting designer’s not arguing with me. The costumer designer’s on board. Only you, Noel: Only you are giving me trouble. As this is my doctoral thesis, I have complete responsibility for the work…Let’s face it: We’re not collaborating here. You’re working for me. Now, if you don’t like it, resign from this now, while I have time to get a different composer. Take the weekend to think it over.”

Many years ago, I created a structure for improvisation, a sort of a rap that always began with the line “You know what I hate?” So, with your indulgence, I’m going to rant a bit about the bane of my musical theatre writing existence, the hierarchical (non-)collaboration.

And now it seems like I’ve made up an overly fancy term. So, to simplify, I’ll recall the introduction Rodgers and Hammerstein put at the front of their Songbook. “To collaborate is to work together.” Now, that seems a bit too simple. But we ignore Rodgers and Hammerstein at our own peril. They were equal partners and this fact is an element of their success. You could drop a marble between them and it would roll to neither side. After Hammerstein’s death, Rodgers collaborated with three lyricists – Stephen Sondheim, Martin Charnin and Sheldon Harnick and none of them considered themselves Rodgers’ equal. Who could? As a result, perhaps, each turned out their worst work and those shows – Do I Hear a Waltz, Two By Two, Rex and I Remember Mama – are never done today.

I’ve had the severe misfortune to be caught in what I initially thought were collaborations only to discover I was a subordinate. There was one show in which a relative of one of the people I was writing with provided the entire financial backing. Naturally, this skewed things. I didn’t have an equal say because I’d brought no money to the table.

I’ve been through the opposite situation, too, though. I’ve worked with some wonderful people who produced our shows and yet never once bossed me around. In reminiscing about troublesome situations, I appreciate the good ones all the more.

So, now, I’m in a more positive frame-of-mind. Good collaborators have a certain amount of awareness of what you go through in your craft. As a lyricist, I can spend days or weeks trying to come up with the best possible expression, figuring out exactly how the character would put it. And one of the issues I’m often thinking about is frequency of rhymes, as coming up with matching sounds every few syllables is usually the sign of a clever mind at work. (Don’t get me started on Petra and The Miller’s Son.) So, there was this time I had a fairly inarticulate character sing “Something momentous has begun/You and I have begun.” But a superior had this changed to “Something momentous has begun/You and I are now one.” The rationale for this added rhyme had something to do with the concept of becoming one being used in certain marriage vow traditions, which, I must admit, I hadn’t heard of.” This irked me some, as it weakened the lyric and made the character seemed far smarter than how he was being played. It’s a safe bet the martinet ordering the alteration hadn’t thought about this.

Such experiences have led to some hypersensitivity. Watch out for any sentence that begins “As the Director of this Company…” because the essential level playing field has shattered. We creative people do not thrive in situations where somebody defines themself as overlord.

Enough years go by, though, and you can sometimes see something amusing about some self-proclaimed autocrat’s edicts. In writing an Industrial show, I knew that the corporation that pays the piper calls the tune. From some fancy office across the country, a man in a suit balled me out for writing a reference to a corporate structure. “The people who see this are going to be very offended if you say that some are at the top, some are at the bottom.” O.K., then, I said to the fellow who’d just placed himself in a higher position than me.

And sometimes, the orders-from-oh-high are so ridiculous, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I wrote a funny song about romantic gestures, and came up with a speech leading into it referencing Valentine’s Day. Well, this could not stand: You see, several of the big money donors were religious Jews who’d take great offense if our show referenced a Catholic holiday! Huh? Really? I think you misspelled “pagan.” The speech and song were instantly cut.

It’s possible, though, that what I’d written wasn’t good and that the person-in-charge didn’t have the heart to tell me that. So, an intermediary was told that rationale and reported it to me. We were similarly stunned. But hey, I’ve a limited understanding of religion. For all I know, Valentine is a real serious saint and Jews rail against yet another Christian holiday smack dab in the middle of February. I’d appreciation information about this, perhaps after Lent is over.

Heaven is here

My friend Tom, as everyone who knows him will admit, is crazy. But there’s such thing as crazy-in-a-good-way, and, exactly twenty years ago, the combination of crazy-good and good friendship led to a musical that created a lot of joy.

Many readers of this blog wonder when and how they’re ever going to get a show on the boards. Sometimes, it’s a matter of luck, being in the right place at the right time. In the mid-nineties, I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new kind of improv group. A fiery redhead named Karen Herr had a vision about doing something that had never been done in New York before, the Harold. A Harold is a specific type of improvised play, long-form, and, as our story begins, it had only been done in Chicago. Karen was still on very good terms with an ex-boyfriend, Ian Roberts, who lived there. He and three like-minded improvisors, Matt Walsh, Matt Besser and Amy Poehler, had studied with the legendary Del Close.They’d formed a troupe called Upright Citizens Brigade and regaled audiences with Harolds and other forms. Karen felt her effort to get something similar started in New York needed much guidance from UCB, and also needed me, on stage, not doing music, not improvising songs; just acting.

When I met Tom Carrozza, he thought I was like him, an improvising actor. We ran into each other at some show, and he sheepishly admitted that he loved old-fashioned comedy songs, was working on a send-up of cabaret acts, but wasn’t quite clicking with his musical director. Did I know of anyone? Did I know of anyone? I was one. And so I outed myself as a musical comedy aficionado who’s really most comfortable behind the piano. Before long, we put up a hysterical show in the Stella Adler school cafeteria as part of a festival called Moonwork. It contained some comedy songs I wrote for Tom, one I translated (from German, but I made it funny) for Tom, some I found for Tom and one I wrote with Tom. The audience howled: a very successful adaptation of Tom’s craziness into something so-called “normal” people could eat up.

How to follow such a profound success? Tom had a notion. We were both headed towards a big birthday and Tom felt he was reaching an age by which he should have written a musical. This is, of course, crazy: nobody needs to write a musical. But it’s the good sort of crazy.

He showed me a sketch about a creature from outer space who has a headache. Humans bring him an aspirin and the alien get perturbed. “Aren’t you going to bring me water? Who takes an aspirin without water?” He then drinks the water and rubs the pill into the side of his head.

There are times you ask yourself, “Should I be doing this?” Tom hadn’t written a musical before. What was I getting myself into? This was crazy. Could it ever be good? The alien was acting so human; that was very appealing to me. I’m not a fan of science fiction, but our show wasn’t going to be serious science fiction, quite the opposite. Making fun of the hysteria surrounding visitors from outer space seemed a worthy shared goal.

Tom rented us a room with a piano to write the show in on 18th Srreet, near Bed Bath and Beyond. As I walked past, I felt I was leaving the quotidian drudge of beds and baths and entering The World of Beyond. Because writing with Tom was an adventure. Sometimes, he just wanted to gossip about people we knew in the improv world. But the more he focussed on things that could happen in our show, the more I found myself coming up with wild ideas for numbers.

You know my favorite musical is How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, partly because I’m so impressed that each of Frank Loesser’s songs manages to get the audience to laugh. So, I made that my goal: No serious moments, no explorations of human feelings, cris-de-coeur, or sober anthems. Keep it wacky – these were our watchwords.

Who would produce? Tom. Who would star? Tom. Who would direct? Not Tom. I put my foot down. We needed someone with experience directing humorous musicals and eventually settled upon Gary Slavin, a dynamo of good ideas. To my surprise and delight,  there was no denying a significant overlap in their senses of humor. In a full-length, all-humorous entertainment, you have to appreciate someone who can get your more laughs. Gary got us there in spades, and we were also buoyed by the lunacy of musical directorJono Manelli.

The cast included some mainstays of the New York improv scene, as well as four Broadway performers: Kathi Gillmore, who now works with my wife, Gregory Jones, Jay Aubrey Jones (no relation), and the very young Mamie Parris, in her New York debut. Mamie’s played a whole bunch of leading roles on Broadway, including Mother in the revival of Ragtime, a show Kathi had done the First National of many years earlier. Interesting show, Ragtime, but that’s a different essay.

It’s safe to say Area 51 – did I forget to mention the name? – is the silliest thing anyone associated with it has ever done. Its success had a lot to do with all of us accepting Tom’s craziness, being confident that his madcap ideas would be embraced by an audience. Following his lead, we all came up with outré contributions. There were even singing alien puppets in glass tanks. And, in the end, we were chased out of the place by a lava-like explosion of marshmallow fluff.

You had to be there.