In the mid-1980s, as my alma mater endured 5½ seasons of unending failure on the gridiron, a peculiar rallying cry emerged at a crucial point in one game. The other team had pushed the football past the 50-yard line, threatening to go three touchdowns up—and, given our home team’s futility in scoring, effectively out of reach.
“Send the linebackers!” urged a fan of one form of the blitz.
“Send the ends!” recommended a fan with a different strategy.
“Send in the clowns!” yelled another.
“Don’t bother—they’re here!” concluded the friend sitting next to me, to general applause (except, perhaps, from players and coaches of our home team, unlucky enough to hear the exchange).
The composer-lyricist of “Send in the Clowns” has, one suspects, wondered more than once how this particular song, created for one unique voice and theatrical situation, acquired this kind of widespread recognition. But that’s not the only irony in a career that has seen a series of not-quite-successes or even outright failures turned into a final triumphant victory lap.
Quite a nice little past six months Stephen Sondheim has had for himself, hasn’t it? A Little Night Music (the show, of course, for which "Send in the Clowns" was created), with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury, finishes an acclaimed run at the Walter Kerr Theatre later this month. For the composer’s 80 birthday in March, a big gala was held at Studio 54, where his collaborators James Lapine and John Weidman made the surprise announcement that the Roundabout Theatre Co. was renaming its Henry Miller Theatre on West 43rd St. in honor of the musical-theater legend.
And now there’s Sondheim on Sondheim, at Studio 54. It’s hardly unprecedented as a revue of his work: Side by Side by Sondheim, Putting It Together, Marry Me a Little and You’re Going to Love Tomorrow have all harvested his rich work.
But the Roundabout’s offering, as its title indicates, possesses something unusual: Sondheim himself.
He is not, of course, onstage in real time. As the show’s director, Lapine, has conceived it, the composer hovers, between performers’ renditions of his songs, on giant video screens, expounding on the action below, sort of like Zeus. (In fact, the one new song in this production is “God”—a witty send-up taking its cue from a New York Magazine cover with the headline, “Is Stephen Sondheim God?”)
The short video snippets feature Sondheim being interviewed at various points over his 50-year-plus career, on the likes of 60 Minutes and The Mike Douglas Show, where he is especially funny on why he prefers neurotic characters. But with his intelligent, provocative and wry presence throughout, any sense of an autumnal summing-up has been pushed to the sidelines.
As interested as he might be in leafing through his musical equivalent of photo albums, Sondheim doesn’t want you to linger that long on his evolving moments. A song from an apprentice show, By George, written for a school production at age 16, ends abruptly—and humorously—after a few lines.
Moreover, only a single song is included from his 1965 misalliance with Richard Rodgers, Do I Hear a Waltz? (which I discussed in this prior post). Good friend Mary Rodgers, daughter of his curmudgeonly collaborator, termed such projects, Sondheim explained, “Why musicals,” as in “Why did I work on this?” Though a perfectly respectable show, Sondheim concluded, he regretted wasting 18 months of his life on Do I Hear a Waltz?
Let’s rephrase Ms. Rodgers’ question: Why is this show worth seeing? Or, put another way: What will audiences take away from it? Let’s look at the possibilities:
* Production values: They’re certainly professional (take a bow, Beowulf Boritt—love that name!—and video/projection designer Peter Flaherty). But this is hardly chandelier-swinging, barge-rowing, Phantom of the Opera stuff—and anyway, if you come out raving more about the simulated scenery than humming the tunes, something’s missing.
“Send the linebackers!” urged a fan of one form of the blitz.
“Send the ends!” recommended a fan with a different strategy.
“Send in the clowns!” yelled another.
“Don’t bother—they’re here!” concluded the friend sitting next to me, to general applause (except, perhaps, from players and coaches of our home team, unlucky enough to hear the exchange).
The composer-lyricist of “Send in the Clowns” has, one suspects, wondered more than once how this particular song, created for one unique voice and theatrical situation, acquired this kind of widespread recognition. But that’s not the only irony in a career that has seen a series of not-quite-successes or even outright failures turned into a final triumphant victory lap.
Quite a nice little past six months Stephen Sondheim has had for himself, hasn’t it? A Little Night Music (the show, of course, for which "Send in the Clowns" was created), with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury, finishes an acclaimed run at the Walter Kerr Theatre later this month. For the composer’s 80 birthday in March, a big gala was held at Studio 54, where his collaborators James Lapine and John Weidman made the surprise announcement that the Roundabout Theatre Co. was renaming its Henry Miller Theatre on West 43rd St. in honor of the musical-theater legend.
And now there’s Sondheim on Sondheim, at Studio 54. It’s hardly unprecedented as a revue of his work: Side by Side by Sondheim, Putting It Together, Marry Me a Little and You’re Going to Love Tomorrow have all harvested his rich work.
But the Roundabout’s offering, as its title indicates, possesses something unusual: Sondheim himself.
He is not, of course, onstage in real time. As the show’s director, Lapine, has conceived it, the composer hovers, between performers’ renditions of his songs, on giant video screens, expounding on the action below, sort of like Zeus. (In fact, the one new song in this production is “God”—a witty send-up taking its cue from a New York Magazine cover with the headline, “Is Stephen Sondheim God?”)
The short video snippets feature Sondheim being interviewed at various points over his 50-year-plus career, on the likes of 60 Minutes and The Mike Douglas Show, where he is especially funny on why he prefers neurotic characters. But with his intelligent, provocative and wry presence throughout, any sense of an autumnal summing-up has been pushed to the sidelines.
As interested as he might be in leafing through his musical equivalent of photo albums, Sondheim doesn’t want you to linger that long on his evolving moments. A song from an apprentice show, By George, written for a school production at age 16, ends abruptly—and humorously—after a few lines.
Moreover, only a single song is included from his 1965 misalliance with Richard Rodgers, Do I Hear a Waltz? (which I discussed in this prior post). Good friend Mary Rodgers, daughter of his curmudgeonly collaborator, termed such projects, Sondheim explained, “Why musicals,” as in “Why did I work on this?” Though a perfectly respectable show, Sondheim concluded, he regretted wasting 18 months of his life on Do I Hear a Waltz?
Let’s rephrase Ms. Rodgers’ question: Why is this show worth seeing? Or, put another way: What will audiences take away from it? Let’s look at the possibilities:
* Production values: They’re certainly professional (take a bow, Beowulf Boritt—love that name!—and video/projection designer Peter Flaherty). But this is hardly chandelier-swinging, barge-rowing, Phantom of the Opera stuff—and anyway, if you come out raving more about the simulated scenery than humming the tunes, something’s missing.
* The performers: Yes, headliners Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams, and Tom Wopat are all in fine voice (especially Cook, in a beautiful rendition of the inevitable “Send in the Clowns”). So are the below-the-title singers (notably Euan Morton, as a lyricist having a nervous breakdown--and telling off his songwriting partner and friend right on the air--in “Franklin Shepard Inc.”). But none of these stop—or even carry—the show.
* The songs: Yes, they incorporate some of the greatest numbers in the history of American musical theater. But if you didn’t know that already, shame on you.
* Stephen Sondheim himself: Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. At long last, the famously cerebral musical creator not only reveals the thought processes underlying his shows, but also, surprisingly, the sometimes-anguished heart behind his life’s work.
Quickly but tellingly, Sondheim notes that one of his works was written during a period of confusion about his sexual orientation. But his most haunting recollections concern his childhood.
His mother—who comes off here as a harridan—used to tell him that it took her all night and well into the next morning for her to give birth to him—a wild exaggeration, he later learned. In his 40s, as his mother faced a serious operation, she wrote him a letter that made her disdain absolutely clear: “"The only regret I have in life," she informed her only child, "is giving you birth."
That’s the kind of remark that can make its recipient endure years of psychotherapy. Fortunately, the young Sondheim had a creative mentor—and, he notes, a kind of surrogate father—in Oscar Hammerstein II, a friend of his mother’s who took him under his wing, teaching him the ropes of how to write a musical.
Sondheim pays tribute to the great lyricist, recalling their last meeting before Hammerstein’s 1960 death from cancer (Hammerstein’s last inscription to Sondheim was to his “friend and teacher”) and describing how audience reaction to the obsessed female protagonist of Passion was transformed by writing a simple, direct, Hammerstein-like lyric, “Loving You” (included in this revue).
When I renewed my Roundabout subscription last year, the telephone agent mentioned a rumor that Merrily We Roll Along was under consideration for the company’s upcoming lineup. Perhaps the Roundabout management experienced cold feet in the middle of a recession, and decided not to revive a show whose book created notoriously difficult problems on its premiere in 1981 (including going backwards in time to follow disillusioned middle-aged successes to their idealistic teenage roots).
Perhaps Sondheim feels, as I do, that Merrily should hold a more prominent place in his body of work: the current Roundabout production, after all, features six songs from the musical whose failure derailed the longtime creative partnership between the composer and producer-director Harold Prince. Here’s hoping that the Roundabout figures out how to re-imagine and re-stage, as John Doyle did with Sweeney Todd and Company, this show that, I believe, has the best of all Sondheim scores.
The Roundabout has extended its run of Sondheim on Sondheim to June 27. It’s not for everybody, but the cult of Sondheim fanatics (to which, you might have noticed, this blogger belongs) will come out of Studio 54 not only mulling over his songs but the people, experiences, thoughts and emotions that gave rise to them.
Sondheim pays tribute to the great lyricist, recalling their last meeting before Hammerstein’s 1960 death from cancer (Hammerstein’s last inscription to Sondheim was to his “friend and teacher”) and describing how audience reaction to the obsessed female protagonist of Passion was transformed by writing a simple, direct, Hammerstein-like lyric, “Loving You” (included in this revue).
When I renewed my Roundabout subscription last year, the telephone agent mentioned a rumor that Merrily We Roll Along was under consideration for the company’s upcoming lineup. Perhaps the Roundabout management experienced cold feet in the middle of a recession, and decided not to revive a show whose book created notoriously difficult problems on its premiere in 1981 (including going backwards in time to follow disillusioned middle-aged successes to their idealistic teenage roots).
Perhaps Sondheim feels, as I do, that Merrily should hold a more prominent place in his body of work: the current Roundabout production, after all, features six songs from the musical whose failure derailed the longtime creative partnership between the composer and producer-director Harold Prince. Here’s hoping that the Roundabout figures out how to re-imagine and re-stage, as John Doyle did with Sweeney Todd and Company, this show that, I believe, has the best of all Sondheim scores.
The Roundabout has extended its run of Sondheim on Sondheim to June 27. It’s not for everybody, but the cult of Sondheim fanatics (to which, you might have noticed, this blogger belongs) will come out of Studio 54 not only mulling over his songs but the people, experiences, thoughts and emotions that gave rise to them.
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