March 18, 1965—The old Broadway musical met its future—and the results weren’t pretty. Composer Richard Rodgers, already a legend of the Great White Way for songwriting partnerships with Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II, teamed with lyricist Stephen Sondheim on Do I Hear a Waltz?, which opened on this date at the 46th Street Theater.
As Sondheimphiles like myself eagerly await the broadcast version of his 80th-birthday tribute from earlier this week, it’s worth recalling that the current Grand Old Man of musical theater almost didn’t make it to this point. Thirty-five years ago, audiences and critics certainly noticed in his collaboration with Rodgers—an adaptation of Arthur Laurents’ play The Time of the Cuckoo—a certain all-around smooth professionalism, but also a lack of heart and play-it-safe mentality at fundamental odds with the two men’s best work.
Running 220 performances, the show made back half of producer Rodgers’ investment, so it wasn’t a fabled megabomb on the order of the 1981 musical monster mash Frankenstein. But the backstage tension among the songwriters produced a dud not only signaling that Rodgers’ golden touch had fled, but convincing Sondheim that, come what may commercially, he needed in all future projects to work on both lyrics and music.
The musical was a classic example of how creative differences can expose underlying, even more significant problems arising from temperaments. Rodgers and Sondheim had known each other’s work for nearly two decades, and enough surface respect existed for what they had accomplished to date for them at least to be willing to work together.
But both men were, in a sense, paying a debt to a ghost: Hammerstein, whose death from cancer in1960 had deprived Sondheim of a tough but caring mentor and Rodgers of a cautious but dependable collaborator (a necessity for Rodgers’ sanity, given the course of his earlier partnership with the wildly inventive—but chronically drunk and tardy--Hart).
One of the most poignant scenes I know of related to the world of musical comedy actually never took place on a stage, but instead at the Plaza Oak Room in New York. As described in Rodgers' memoir Musical Stages, the dying Hammerstein, picking listlessly at his food, advised his partner to choose a younger man in any future songwriting partnership. (“You’re the most successful team on Broadway,” a star-struck man at a nearby table exclaimed obliviously to the two men. “Tell me, why do you look so sad?”)
Rodgers disregarded the advice at first when he made his next musical, No Strings, assuming lyricist as well as composer duties himself, but thought better of it with the passage of a few years. An obvious candidate for Hammerstein’s place was Sondheim. In certain ways, he resembled Rodgers himself—both precocious, from a well-off background—and had gained increasing regard in the theater community for his work on West Side Story, Gypsy, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
But Sondheim had his own ambitions: He wanted to write lyrics and compose music. He had chafed at his collaborations on West Side Story and Gypsy because his ambitions in this direction were temporarily stymied.
The problem was that he let himself be talked into a show that made no sense. Librettist Arthur Laurents and his friend Mary Rodgers—Richard’s daughter—persuaded him to set his ambitions aside. Working with a musical-comedy giant like Rodgers would also be “an honor,” he thought.
“Horror show” would have been more like it.
Outside factors would have made this a difficult creative period in any case: a miscast leading actress (Elizabeth Allen, hardly the aging heroine that audiences had previously expected and sympathized with), a British director (John Dexter) who cavalierly treated actresses and artistic partners.
But when you also have a senior partner who’s already done your job and thinks he’s pretty good at it himself; who, as producer, essentially has more creative control than you; who is a homophobe working with not merely one gay man (Hart) as he had done before, but two (Laurents and Sondheim); and who is a sophisticate whose charm is being increasingly eclipsed by alcoholism and depression--well, it's not going to be pleasant.
And the atmosphere became potentially combustible when Sondheim and Laurents allied to beat back Rodgers’ proposal to soften the contours of the female protagonist. And it had to have been positively toxic when, in front of the entire cast and crew, Rodgers declared Sondheim’s lyrics “Shit.”
Audiences merely ratified what its creators knew already: the show lacked cohesion. Its failure might have bruised Rodgers, but by this point the runaway success of the musical version of The Sound of Music (for which he contributed additional music) undoubtedly soothed him.
Sondheim was not so lucky: He would not make it back to Broadway until the 1970s, when a trilogy of shows with Hal Prince—Company, Follies, and a Little Night Music—cemented his status as the new king of the musical.
That acclaim also led to a Newsweek cover story in which the one time young-man-in-a-hurry—now accomplished middle-aged musical maestro—took a cold revenge of sorts on the man who had enraged him nearly a decade before. Hammerstein, he declared, was “a man of infinite soul and limited talent; Dick is a man of infinite talent and limited soul.”
As Sondheimphiles like myself eagerly await the broadcast version of his 80th-birthday tribute from earlier this week, it’s worth recalling that the current Grand Old Man of musical theater almost didn’t make it to this point. Thirty-five years ago, audiences and critics certainly noticed in his collaboration with Rodgers—an adaptation of Arthur Laurents’ play The Time of the Cuckoo—a certain all-around smooth professionalism, but also a lack of heart and play-it-safe mentality at fundamental odds with the two men’s best work.
Running 220 performances, the show made back half of producer Rodgers’ investment, so it wasn’t a fabled megabomb on the order of the 1981 musical monster mash Frankenstein. But the backstage tension among the songwriters produced a dud not only signaling that Rodgers’ golden touch had fled, but convincing Sondheim that, come what may commercially, he needed in all future projects to work on both lyrics and music.
The musical was a classic example of how creative differences can expose underlying, even more significant problems arising from temperaments. Rodgers and Sondheim had known each other’s work for nearly two decades, and enough surface respect existed for what they had accomplished to date for them at least to be willing to work together.
But both men were, in a sense, paying a debt to a ghost: Hammerstein, whose death from cancer in1960 had deprived Sondheim of a tough but caring mentor and Rodgers of a cautious but dependable collaborator (a necessity for Rodgers’ sanity, given the course of his earlier partnership with the wildly inventive—but chronically drunk and tardy--Hart).
One of the most poignant scenes I know of related to the world of musical comedy actually never took place on a stage, but instead at the Plaza Oak Room in New York. As described in Rodgers' memoir Musical Stages, the dying Hammerstein, picking listlessly at his food, advised his partner to choose a younger man in any future songwriting partnership. (“You’re the most successful team on Broadway,” a star-struck man at a nearby table exclaimed obliviously to the two men. “Tell me, why do you look so sad?”)
Rodgers disregarded the advice at first when he made his next musical, No Strings, assuming lyricist as well as composer duties himself, but thought better of it with the passage of a few years. An obvious candidate for Hammerstein’s place was Sondheim. In certain ways, he resembled Rodgers himself—both precocious, from a well-off background—and had gained increasing regard in the theater community for his work on West Side Story, Gypsy, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
But Sondheim had his own ambitions: He wanted to write lyrics and compose music. He had chafed at his collaborations on West Side Story and Gypsy because his ambitions in this direction were temporarily stymied.
The problem was that he let himself be talked into a show that made no sense. Librettist Arthur Laurents and his friend Mary Rodgers—Richard’s daughter—persuaded him to set his ambitions aside. Working with a musical-comedy giant like Rodgers would also be “an honor,” he thought.
“Horror show” would have been more like it.
Outside factors would have made this a difficult creative period in any case: a miscast leading actress (Elizabeth Allen, hardly the aging heroine that audiences had previously expected and sympathized with), a British director (John Dexter) who cavalierly treated actresses and artistic partners.
But when you also have a senior partner who’s already done your job and thinks he’s pretty good at it himself; who, as producer, essentially has more creative control than you; who is a homophobe working with not merely one gay man (Hart) as he had done before, but two (Laurents and Sondheim); and who is a sophisticate whose charm is being increasingly eclipsed by alcoholism and depression--well, it's not going to be pleasant.
And the atmosphere became potentially combustible when Sondheim and Laurents allied to beat back Rodgers’ proposal to soften the contours of the female protagonist. And it had to have been positively toxic when, in front of the entire cast and crew, Rodgers declared Sondheim’s lyrics “Shit.”
Audiences merely ratified what its creators knew already: the show lacked cohesion. Its failure might have bruised Rodgers, but by this point the runaway success of the musical version of The Sound of Music (for which he contributed additional music) undoubtedly soothed him.
Sondheim was not so lucky: He would not make it back to Broadway until the 1970s, when a trilogy of shows with Hal Prince—Company, Follies, and a Little Night Music—cemented his status as the new king of the musical.
That acclaim also led to a Newsweek cover story in which the one time young-man-in-a-hurry—now accomplished middle-aged musical maestro—took a cold revenge of sorts on the man who had enraged him nearly a decade before. Hammerstein, he declared, was “a man of infinite soul and limited talent; Dick is a man of infinite talent and limited soul.”
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