More Vintage Reviews from the Archive

 

[As I reported in “Some Vintage Reviews from the Archive” (15 March 2021), I wrote reviews for the New York Native, a biweekly gay newspaper published in New York City from 1980 until 1997, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.   

[The notices were relatively short because the paper ran reviews in pairs, so there were two plays covered in most columns.  (For most of the reviews republished here, the companion play has been omitted—though it may have been posted in another location on Rick On Theatre.)

[I covered mostly Off-Off-Broadway and occasionally Off-Broadway, and sometimes, the artists in the productions, including the dramatists, were prominent—or, at least familiar to theatergoers.  For “More Vintage Reviews from the Archive,” I’ve collected some of those notices.]

ARISTOCRATS

by Brian Friel

Manhattan Theatre Club

Theatre Four

15 May 1989 

[My review of Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Aristocrats was part of "Family Problems," which also included a review of The Rug of Identity (posted in “‘I’m So Confused . . . !’” on ROT on 4 July 2012) in the New York Native of 15 May 1989.

[Friel (1929-2015) was a popular short story-writer and dramatist who was considered by many as one of the best playwrights in the English-speaking world.  His plays produced on Broadway included Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1966; revived, 1994), The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), Lovers (two one-acts: Winners and Losers; 1968), The Mundy Scheme (1969), The Freedom of the City (1974), Faith Healer (1979; revived, 2006), Dancing at Lughnasa (1991; Tony for Best Play, 1992), Wonderful Tennessee (1993), Translations (1995; revived, 2007).

[Many of these plays were also presented Off-Broadway.  In addition to Aristocrats, which won a 1989 Drama Critics' Circle Award and a 1991 Lucille Lortel Award, Friel’s drama Molly Sweeney also received a Drama Critics' Circle and a Lucille Lortel Award for OB runs, both in 1996.]

Family and relationships play an important role in a serious vein in Aristocrats, the 1979 play by Brian Friel.  Compared by some to Chekhov’s plays, particularly The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, and bearing the mantle of Friel’s Irish predecessors William Butler Yeats and Sean O’Casey—both invoked here—Aristocrats, as staged by British director Robin Lefèvre, takes a very careful look at a disintegrating aristocratic Irish Catholic family.  With some wonderful performances, most notably from Dubliner Niall Buggy, on a John Lee Beatty set so evocatively real you can smell the must and mildew, Aristocrats tries to make the O’Donnell family of Ballybeg stand in for all of Ireland, their problems being analogies for those of a whole people.

Despite the richly textured work of cast, director, and designers, however, the cross-over never really happens.  As a study of an eccentric, all-but-decayed family desperately in need of new, peasant-stock blood, the details are often fascinating in themselves.  Son Casimir’s possibly imaginary family and his fuzzy-at-best memories of past O’Donnell glories are so charmingly evoked by Buggy I wanted them to be true.  The vitality and strength of Willie Diver (John Christopher Jones) is so refreshing and robust, I wanted him to come to the rescue of the family and its moribund manor. 

The minutiae—some fantasy, some real—of the O’Donnell history so lovingly laid out for the scrutiny of Tom Hoffnung (Peter Crombie), an American sociology grad student, give the play the impression of weightiness.  The script, unfortunately, never ties it all together into something that makes the family and its fate greater than the sum of the wonderful parts. 

The researcher-catalyst doesn’t ever seem more than a contrivance and a foil to point out the historical inaccuracies in family lore.  The impending wedding of daughter Claire (Haviland Morris) to a much older man and the alcoholism of daughter Alice (Margaret Colin) never provide the apotheosis I was led to expect. 

The enigmatic appearances of crazy Uncle George (Thomas Barbour) end up being little more than a brief joke.  In the end, the death of District Judge O’Donnell (Joseph Warren), supposedly marking the end of an era like the sale of the Ranevskys’ cherry trees, just puts a period at the end of a run-on sentence that was finished long ago.

[Aristocrats was first performed at the Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Ireland, in Dublin in 1979.  The Manhattan Theatre Club revival started previews Off-Broadway at Theatre Four (55th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues – no longer functioning) on 11 April 1989 and opened on 14 April; the production closed on 24 September.  There was a revival of Friel’s play in New York City by the Off-Broadway troupe Irish Repertory Theatre in 2009.

[The MTC presentation won several performance awards and two for Friel’s play: the 1989 Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play and the 1991 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play.]

*  *  *  *

“HELLO, BOB”

by Robert Patrick

La MaMa E.T.C.

First Floor Theater

29 October 1990 

[I’ve mentioned Robert Patrick’s “Hello, Bob” several times on ROT.  The review was part of the column "Broadway Revisited" (with the review of the musical Two By Two [see below] in the New York Native of 29 October 1990.

[Patrick (b. 1937) was the most prolific playwright of Off-Off-Broadway back in the early ’60s when that cultural venue was just emerging in Greenwich Village and the East Village (see my articles “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” 12 and 15 December 2011, and “Caffe Cino,” 11 and 14 September 2018).  A list of his plays is way too long to reproduce here, but his biggest success in terms of public attention was Kennedy’s Children, presented on Broadway from 3 November 1975 to 4 January 1976.  

[As you’ll read, “Hello, Bob” is about the repercussions of the mainstream success of Kennedy’s Children on playwright Patrick.  He particularly lambastes Shirley Knight, who received a 1976 Tony as Best Featured Actress In A Play, for her performance in the play.  I have quipped that Knight ought to consider suing for defamation of character for the things Patrick says about her in “Hello, Bob.”]

Robert Patrick’s current play has two connections to his 1974 piece, Kennedy’s Children.  First, like Kennedy’s Children, “Hello, Bob” is a series of monologues; second, all the monologues relate in some way to the success of Kennedy’s Children and the effect of that success on Patrick.  The links end here, however. 

The threads that keep Kennedy’s Children cohesive—the interwoven speeches as each character, however unconnected to the others, take and then relinquish focus; the omnibus setting of the bar to which the characters retreat out of the rain—are absent from “Hello, Bob.”  Here the twenty-one speeches, sometimes one side of elliptical conversations with an invisible Patrick, range in time from 1975 to 1981 and take place, in Act I, all over New York and, in Act II, around the country.  The only adhesives are an unseen and unheard Patrick and the frequent allusions to his unnamed Broadway play.

Further, whereas Kennedy’s Children considered “the death of the idea of heroes as guides for our lives,” according to Patrick’s note in the published text, “Hello, Bob” seems only to be concerned with praising Patrick—the man, the artist, the Samaritan, the lover.  There are many references to Patrick as a “great guy” and to his “great play.”  Over and over again, he is shown to be a tireless teacher, dauntless crusader for noble causes, and unwavering friend.  Everyone loves “Bob.”  In one bit, a cabby, declaring himself straight, offers to jump into the back seat for a little off-the-meter fun “just because I like you.”  In another scene, Bob’s lover, about to leave him, proclaims Bob a “wonderful lover” and offers a quickie before departing.  Everyone is ready to sacrifice something for this terrific man; even a New York Times reporter risks his job to inform Patrick that his interview will be edited to make him look foolish. 

Under the author’s direction, a four-actor ensemble performs the monologues, with Patrick’s “favorite actress,” Carol Nelson, subject of a recent Native profile, taking all ten female characters.  With a minimal setting of black metal folding chairs and a couple of cafe tables on a black-painted, two-level stage, the actors must evoke not only their characters, but the locales and, often, a mimed Patrick’s presence as well.  (This last seems most troublesome for the cast.  Patrick keeps changing height, from a very tall standing figure to a very short seated one.  In one piece, Nelson holds Patrick’s invisible hands as if they are as flat as paper.)  Except for their costumes and their words, few of the characters are clearly delineated or imaginatively portrayed.  Arnold, a working man on a bus, has a generalized southern accent to indicate an uneducated, red-neck bigot—and he’s from Maine; Wren, who spent some time in Ireland, produces a cartoon brogue. 

Characterization is not deeply grounded, either.  Wren, for instance, relates what ought to have been a horrific experience: being tied to a bed next to her IRA lover while he is executed.  She tells of being unable to free herself “from dawn till noon” while his blood soaks her gag and flies feed on his brains leaking out of the hole in his head.  Nelson pauses not a moment, catches her breath not once, gulps back not one gasp during the description.  The audience reacted more viscerally than does the actress.

Disjointed and undifferentiated as the moments are, one is amusing.  Edmond Ramage delivers an evocative telephone monologue as Tennessee Williams.  Ramage endows “Tennessee” with wry humor, a perception of the absurdity of the worlds of art and journalism, and a neat sense of revenge.  I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the portrayal, but as theater, this was, for me, the most interesting character and most intriguing scene of the evening.

[Robert Patrick is mentioned often in my early Rick On Theatre article “Is Waiting For Godot Trash?” (17 April 2009), on which the playwright also left several Comments.  He also figures in my two-part report “Caffe Cino” (11 and 14 September 2018).

[“Hello, Bob” was produced at Manhattan’s East Village La MaMa E.T.C. (Experimental Theatre Club) from 11 to 28 October 1990.  It was developed in several Off-Off-Broadway theaters before being presented at La MaMa.  A 1995 production of “Hello, Bob” was presented at Chicago’s Retro Theatre and a 1996 revival was mounted at L.A.’s Lionstar Theater.  (Patrick’s complete play is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ1K8wNcNmI.)

[Kennedy’s Children was produced at Playwrights Horizons from 30 May to 9 June 1973 before it transferred to Broadway’s John Golden Theatre.  Under the direction of Clive Donner, it began previews there on 30 October 1975 and opened on 3 November; it ran for 72 regular performances and five previews, closing on 4 January 1976.  Kennedy’s Children was nominated for the 1976 Outstanding New Play Drama Desk Award.]

*  *  *  *

TWO BY TWO

by Richard Rogers, Martin Charnin, and Peter Stone

Triangle Theatre Company

Church of the Holy Trinity

29 October 1990 

[The other half of "Broadway Revisited" (see above) is this notice for Two By Two, a 1970 Broadway musical with music by Richard Rodgers (1902-79), lyrics by Martin Charnin (1934-2019), and book by Peter Stone (1930-2003).  At the Imperial Theatre, the show ran from 10 November 1970 to 11 September 1971, for 351 performances.  Danny Kaye played Noah; also in the cast were Joan Copeland (Arthur Miller’s younger sister), Marilyn Cooper, and Madeline Kahn.

[The creative team, adapting The Flowering Peach, the play by Clifford Odets (1906-63), was led by the great stage composer Rodgers, former partner of Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) and Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), whose output includes classic American musicals such as The Girl Friend (1926), A Connecticut Yankee (1927), Jumbo (1935), On Your Toes (1936), Babes in Arms (1937), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Pal Joey (1940), Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), State Fair (film, 1945 and 1962; stage, 1996), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), Cinderella (TV, 1957; Broadway, 2013), Flower Drum Song (1958), and The Sound of Music (1959), among many others.

[Charnin wrote the lyrics for the musicals Mata Hari (1967), Annie (1977), Cafe Crown (1989), and Annie Warbucks (1993).  Stone wrote the book for Kean (1961), 1776 (1969), Sugar (1972), Woman of the Year (1981), My One And Only (1983), The Will Rogers Follies (1991), and Titanic (1997). (Stone also wrote the screenplay for my favorite thriller movie, 1963’s Charade.)]

The Triangle Theatre Company’s twentieth-anniversary revival of the Richard Rodgers-Martin Charnin-Peter Stone musical, Two By Two (1970), is a small, gentle pleasure.  The story of Noah and the flood, adapted from The Flowering Peach (1954) by Clifford Odets, is an old-fashioned musical, and perhaps not one of Rogers’s greatest scores, but it is fun and sweet, and excellently performed in the small space at the Church of the Holy Trinity.

On a tiny set designed by Bob Phillips, with a lopsided hut the size of an outhouse at its center (there is an outhouse, too—even smaller), painted purple and green and gray, the cast of eight portrays the family of Noah (Kip Niven) and Esther (Meredyth Rawlins) as a bickering, disrespectful, loving, prototypical Jewish family.  If Noah sounds a little like Billy Crystal’s old Jewish man, he is less caricatured and warmer of heart.  Niven’s love song to his dying Esther is a real two-hanky moment.

Most remarkable in this production are the voices.  While all the performers sing creditably, standouts are Tom Lloyd as Japheth, who has the strongest voice and the most character when he sings, and Mary Lee Marson as Rachel.  Also excellent singers are Bryan Batt as Ham, Wendy Baila as Leah and Lindsey Mitchell as Goldie.  Singling these out should not detract from the nice ensemble acting of the cast on the sometimes cramped set.

If Two By Two isn’t one of the all-time great American musicals, it is still nice occasionally to return to the old-time shows when you could sing the songs and for which the term “musical comedy” was coined.  The Triangle show is such a respite.

[Triangle’s revival of Two By Two ran at the Church of the Holy Trinity (East 88th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues) from 4 to 28 October 1990.  The show is a favorite in community theaters and church groups, and there’ve been a number of revivals over the years with stars such as Milton Berle (The Muny in St. Louis, 1971) and Shelley Berman (National Tour,1972-73).

[Odets’s Flowering Peach, the last original play by the playwright produced in his lifetime, ran at the Belasco Theatre in the Theatre District from 28 December 1954 to 23 April 1955, 135 performances.  Staged by the author, the play starred Menasha Skulnik, a Polish-born star of the Yiddish theater, as Noah.]

*  *  *  *

MAMBO MOUTH

by John Leguizamo

American Place Theatre

3 December 1990 

[My review of John Leguizamo’s Mambo Mouth was paired with my notice for Invitation to the Beginning of the End of the World (Invitation to the Beginning of the End of My Career) by Penny Arcade in a column entitled "Come To The Cabarets" (see “Penny Arcade: Two Performances,” 15 November 2013). The two reviews appeared in the New York Native on 2 December 1990.

[Mambo Mouth wasn’t a play, but a stand-up routine in the vein of popular monologuists of the time like Whoopi Goldberg (Broadway event, 1984-85) and Danitra Vance (see “Short Takes: Some Unique Performances,” 28 July 2018).  Born in Bogota, Colombia, Leguizamo (b. 1964) is an actor, writer, and stand-up comedian who drew on his youth in Queens, New York, for the characters he played in his monologues.

[Today, Leguizamo works mostly as an actor in film, television, and theater, but in the ’90s, he was a stand-up comic with a growing reputation.  He’d been creating his own material since the 1980s, trying it out at the performance art spaces on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in the East Village.  This eventually became Mambo Mouth which was his breakthrough as an autobiographical monologuist; the reviews launched that aspect of his budding career. 

[Leguizamo’s texts have been published, including Mambo Mouth (Bantam, 1993), which was also recorded for HBO and aired in 1991, giving the performer a national audience.  He performed all across the country to excellent reviews.  (His other published texts are Spic-o-rama [Bantam, 1994] and Freak [Riverhead Trade, 1998]; all three, plus Sexaholix, are collected in The Works of John Leguizamo [Ecco, 2008].)]

On the tiny stage of the American Place Theatre’s SubPlot, a cabaret in the theater’s basement that’s more a passageway than a room, John Leguizamo creates seven Latino characters during his hour-and-fifteen-minute Mambo Mouth.  Aside from costumes and a few props, he does this mostly with a superb physical sense of his characters.  Leguizamo is, according to his biography, an actor (rather than a writer or comic), and though I haven’t seen his film or stage performances, I’d bet he’s a terrific character actor.

[On the film website IMDb, Leguizamo is quoted as saying that he often plays supporting—that is, character—roles “[b]ecause you get to be free.”  He added, “There are more, better written supporting parts than there are leading parts.”  I don’t know the source of this quotation however.]

Directed by Peter Askin, Mambo Mouth is pretty straightforward.  One by one, Leguizamo presents his characters in brief scenes: Agamemnon, an oily Latin-lover type hosting “Naked Personalities,” “the most dangerous show on public access TV”; Angel, a street punk busted for knocking one of his many girlfriends around; a young teenager telling his friend that he just became a man at Nilda’s Bodega & Bordello; an illegal immigrant caught in an INS sting; a streetwalker consoling a friend; a stoned-out street vendor who calls himself an “Inca god” selling ointments and artifacts; and, in his cleverest persona, “The Cross-Over King,” a Latino who “became” Japanese selling the concept in a slide lecture.

There’s some Spanish in Leguizamo’s routine, and there were a number of Hispanics in the mixed audience, but his material is readily accessible to all of us—especially if you watch TV.  Leguizamo’s brief is to use Latin stereotypes to bust them open and his characters—except the last one—are recognizable from our pop culture. 

Along with his thorough and natural physical portrayals, Leguizamo’s lines are clever and pointed.  They are also often vulgar and belligerent.  Agamemnon, for instance, tells us his father dismisses him with “Out of a hundred thousand sperm, I can’t believe you were the quickest!”  The knife-wielding hooker regularly threatens to cut off the “peepee” of anyone who annoys her.  Sex, sexuality, and the genitals are the most common focus, as if they were the only forces in these people’s lives.  

Mambo Mouth is billed as “A Savage Comedy,” but it isn’t always really funny.  It’s clearly not meant to be.  Underlying the humor is a base of anger and bitterness, and, disturbingly, an apparent self-hatred which ultimately made me uncomfortable.

[In a 1991 interview with Glenn Collins of the New York Times, Leguizamo said, as if in response to my last comment above, that counselling sessions at Manhattan’s Youth Counseling League “helped me to get over my rage and my negativity toward myself."

[In another interview, he told the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Pacheco, “Writing this play was like an exorcism . . . from the self-loathing and all the ugly things that I feel I carry around in myself . . . .”

[Mambo Mouth began performances at the American Place Theatre (on 46th Street west of 6th Avenue) on 8 November 1990 and, after a short hiatus, transferred to the Orpheum Theatre in the old Yiddish theater district along 2nd Avenue (between 6th and 7th Streets in the East Village) on 4 June 1991.  Altogether, the show ran 187 performances, closing on 25 August.  It later played in LA.

[Directed by Peter Askin, the performance piece garnered the 1991 Obie Award for Leguizamo’s performance and the 1991 Outer Critics Circle’s John Gassner Award  for his writing.  Productions have been mounted all over the country, as well as abroad, Other actors have performed Leguizamo’s texts, such as Peter J. Mendez who did Mambo Mouth in Baltimore in 1997 and Riley Faison in 2015 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.]

*  *  *  *

LYNDON

by James Prideaux

John Houseman Theatre

28 January 1991 

[I reviewed James Prideaux’s Lyndon, a one-man bio-play about Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, as part of “Talking Heads,” combined with my review of Steeplechase by Eric Stephen Booth, in the New York Native of 28 January 1991.  (The playwright described Steeplechase as “a 21st century black gay love story.”)

[Prideaux (1927-2015) was principally a writer for film and television, but his best-known stage work was The Last of Mrs. Lincoln (1972), which won him a 1973 Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Playwright.  It also won Julie Harris a Tony for Best Actress In A Play for her performance in the title role.

[Several other of his plays were performed on the summer straw-hat circuit with stellar casts and his TV movie, Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry (1986). was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Drama/Comedy Special.  It starred Katherine Hepburn as the title character, for which performance she was also nominated for an Emmy.  Prideaux’s memoirs are entitled Knowing Hepburn and Other Curious Experiences (1996).]

Laurence Luckinbill’s performance in Lyndon is remarkable.  While he may not look or sound exactly like the real LBJ, he doesn’t look or sound like LL either.  With the aid of an incredible make-up job (designed by Kevin Haney and taking a 2½-hour session with costuming), he completely convinces you that you are watching someone real up on the stage.  His gestures, movements, and business, his inflections, phrasing, and rhythm are all natural and unforced. 

The experience was not unlike that of watching Pat Carroll as Gertrude Stein or Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain.  It’s mesmerizing to watch Luckinbill, especially when he dons Johnson’s signature Stetson, as he reminisces on the former president’s political career from the late ’20s through his announcement in 1968 that he would not run again for the presidency. 

There is some serendipitous juxtaposition of history with current events when Johnson discusses the Congress’s 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and the protests in Lafayette Park across from the White House.  [President George H. W. Bush had led the U.S. into the Gulf War against Iraq, August 1990-February 1991, on the strength of a U.N. resolution and weakly supported Congressional authorization.]  

In the end, however, I am left with the question of why this man’s life is worth dramatizing now.  Unquestionably, the mid-1960s were a dramatic and tumultuous era, but, despite some excellently mimed moments, Lyndon is essentially all talk as Luckinbill, directed by Richard Zavaglia, meanders around the simplified, gray-toned Oval Office set.  James Prideaux’s play, drawn from Merle Miller’s book, Lyndon: An Oral Biography (1980), is really a living history lesson, perhaps more moving for those of us who remember the events than for those born after Vietnam became little more than a bad dream. 

I also can’t shake the feeling that Prideaux and Luckinbill have sanitized the LBJ image, making him a more endearing, grandfatherly figure than he really was.  Though the reminiscences contain several admissions by Johnson that he made some deals and occasionally voted against his own beliefs on issues like civil rights and desegregation, the timbre of the performance is one of calm, thoughtful deliberation and righteous governance for the benefit of all Americans. 

That’s not the LBJ I remember, nor the man whose reputation for back-room infighting, self-interested wheeler-dealing, and even downright vindictiveness was reportedly well deserved.  President Johnson was not one of the nicest men to occupy the White House, though, by God, he got things accomplished.  Such is not the figure embodied by Luckinbill on the stage of the John Houseman Theatre.  Still, the fiction presented is an extraordinary performance for its own sake.

[James Prideaux’s Lyndon opened at the John Houseman Theatre (demolished in 2005) on Theatre Row on 10 January 1991 and closed on 3 May.  Luckinbill was seen in an earlier version, called Lyndon Johnson, on the Public Broadcasting Service on 8 April 1987.  (Jack Klugman portrayed LBJ in an earlier version of Prideaux’s play in 1984 at the Eisenhower Theater in Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.)

[My reference above to Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain was to the actor’s one-man portrayal of the writer in Mark Twain Tonight!, seen on Broadway originally in 1966.  I saw it on CBS TV in 1967.  Holbrook won both a Tony and a Vernon Rice Award (now the Drama Desk Award) for his Broadway performance; he was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Single Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Drama for the TV version. 

[(Dick Smith, a special make-up effects artist, won the Emmy for Individual Achievements in Art Direction and Allied Crafts – Makeup for Holbrook’s transformation from the 41-year-old actor to the 70-year-old humorist—a four-hour long application.)

[The mention of Pat Carroll as Gertrude Stein was a reference to the actress’s one-woman, Off-Broadway play, Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1980 for which the actress won two 1980 acting honors: the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Performance.

[While I was watching the performance, I kept saying to myself, ‘Gee, Stein’s a really interesting person.  I’m so glad I got to meet her’!  When I realized what I was thinking—that that was actually Gertrude Stein in front of me—I was mighty glad I didn’t say that out loud so my companion and others near me could hear how deeply I’d fallen under Carroll’s spell.

[I don’t write fan letters, but I sat down and wrote one to Carroll and said that if she ever took on students, I was ready to sign up!]

*  *  *  *

ROAD TO NIRVANA

by Arthur Kopit

Circle Repertory Company

18 March 1991 

[Reviewed alongside Vivian Gornick’s A Fierce Attachment (adapted by Edward M. Cohen), Arthur Kopit’s Road to Nirvana was part of the column I called “Creating the Self—and Other Fictions” in the New York Native of 18 March 1991.  (Attachment explores the relationship between a liberated, intellectual journalist and her mother, a working-class Jewish socialist—with Tovah Feldshuh playing both parts.)

[Kopit (1937-2021; the dramatist died on 2 April at 83, while I was preparing this post) came to the theater world’s attention in 1962 with Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (as much for the length of its title as for the content of the absurdist drama)—which won the Vernon Rice Award (now known as the Drama Desk Award).  He was nominated for another Drama Desk Award in 1979 for Wings (see my report on a later production on 26 November 2010).

[Kopit was a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist—for Indians (1969) and Wings—and a three-time Tony Award nominee: Best Play, Indians (1970); Best Play, Wings (1979); and Best Book of a Musical, Nine (1982).  He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2017.]

Arthur Kopit’s Road to Nirvana was first produced as Bone-the-Fish (1989, Actors Theatre of Louisville), a title reminiscent of Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow (1988) to which Kopit’s play is a reaction.  In fact, Kopit has said that the inspiration for Road to Nirvana was the casting of Madonna in Speed-the-Plow: “I became interested in the phenomenon of Madonna, partly because she was cast in this play and couldn’t have been cast in a high school play.  I wondered what it was like to be that powerful as a pop star, that untalented as an actor and yet mysteriously talented.”  The Nirvana of his play’s title is Kopit’s take on Madonna, with a little Shirley MacLaine thrown in.

But Nirvana doesn’t show up until the second act.  Until then, the play is about Hollywood deal-making at its most venal.  Not filmmaking; deal-making.  Have you ever heard anyone say, “I’d cut my wrists to get that . . . “? or “I’d eat shit for that . . .”?  Well, in Road to Nirvana, they mean it literally.  Jerry (Peter Riegert) is so desperate to get back into making feature films, he agrees to everything his old partner, Al (Jon Polito) demands to get in on the deal of a lifetime—a film, called Moby Dick, that is the life story of rock phenom Nirvana (Amy Aquino). 

Nirvana, it seems, has been a) strung out for so long, and b) reincarnated so many times, that she can’t remember her real life, so she wrote Moby Dick, changing Ahab’s name to hers and the whale to a giant cock.  Al and Lou (Saundra Santiago), his new partner and lover, want to make this flick so badly they’ll do anything to get the deal.  Eventually, so does Jerry, but he has to sway Nirvana.  He does this finally by agreeing to one last humiliation.  I’ll give you a hint: Have you ever heard anyone say, “I’d give my left nut . . . “?

The cast, under Jim Simpson’s sure direction, performs these absurdities with complete conviction, handling Kopit’s occasionally Stoppardesque dialogue stylishly and firmly.  They toss around obscenities, one in particular, until they are meaningless and make you believe completely in even the most meaningless phrases.  (James Puig’s performance as a confused and abused servant should be noted.  Never saying more than two words, Puig communicates volumes with a single look.)  

Trouble begins at the second act when the play splits into two.  Act one is fast, funny and absurd, but act two slows considerably, covering much of the same territory.  The character of Nirvana isn’t as ditzy or flaky as we are led to believe she would be.  She’s just a manipulative and paranoid control freak.  

If the second-act set, designed by Andrew Jackness, weren’t so exotic—a Roman bath-cum-Mayan temple—there would be little of interest save the not-so-surprise climax.  The act doesn’t so much end as stop—but, then, anything following a surgical castration would be (ahem) anticlimactic.

[Arthur Kopit’s Road to Nirvana opened at the Circle Rep’s theater in the West Village on 13 February 1991; it ran for 54 performances, closing on 31 March.  The play had been commissioned by the Actors Theatre of Louisville and premièred there (as Bone-the-Fish) in 1989. 

Between the ATL début and CRC production, Road to Nirvana was presented at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, in 1990.  Subsequent productions were mounted in L.A. (1991); Chicago (1993, 1997); Burbank (1993); Herndon, Virginia (1994); and Venice, Florida (2015).

[Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow’s première was produced by Lincoln Center Theater at Broadway’s Royale Theatre (now the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre) in 1988.  Directed by Gregory Mosher, the artistic director of LCT, the cast included Madonna, Joe Mantegna, and Ron Silver.  It ran 23 previews and 279 regular performances and won the Tony Award for Best Actor In A Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor In A Play, both for Silver.

[Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times: “Madonna serves Mr. Mamet's play much as she did the Susan Seidelman film ‘Desperately Seeking Susan,’ with intelligent, scrupulously disciplined comic acting.  She delivers the shocking transitions essential to the action and needs only more confidence to relax a bit and fully command her speaking voice.”

[Frederick M. Winship of United Press International deemed, however, “The role of Karen, a young woman with no past that we know of, is an impossible one and Madonna has too little talent or theatrical imagination to make something of it, even with Mosher’s expert help.

[He continued, “She is rigid, almost as though she is terrified to be on stage.  Her voice has a one-note quality that becomes boring and her characterization is limited to superficialities that only establish Karen as an overly intent, patently naive young woman who is all too ready to admit she has done ‘bad’ things to establish rapport with a man all too ready to seduce her.”

Stephen Sondheim On Writing Lyrics

 by Kirk Woodward

[First, let me say that I really enjoyed reading "Stephen Sondheim On Writing Lyrics."  Kirk’s done his customary bang-up job on a topic about which I could never be competent, and he does so with clarity and perspicacity.  I even learned some things about Sondheim and his music/shows from Kirk’s article. 

[An instance in point: his comparison of Sondheim and Tennessee Williams as fellow experimental dramatists, which is a very interesting idea.  Williams thought of himself as an experimentalist; he wrote a letter of which I went in search some years ago (and eventually found; see my Rick On Theatre article “A Tennessee Williams Treasure Hunt,” 11 April 2009) in which he blamed critics for not letting him do anything different from what he’d succeeded at before. 

[As for Sondheim, I taught a theater appreciation class at a college in Connecticut and one of the attendees (who was a faculty member) asked one evening if I thought Sondheim was an experimental playwright.  I told him I didn’t because he was too well established and his plays were too well accepted by the mainstream audiences and press. 

[Based on Kirk’s examination, however, I’m prepared to say that perhaps in his heart (if you will), Sondheim was more experimental than he allowed himself to show in his public work.  In that respect, he may be more like Williams than I realized.

[See what you find in “Sondheim On Lyrics.”]

Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930), the acclaimed Broadway composer and lyricist, has written two books that contain most of the lyrics he has written, with comments, stories, opinions, descriptions, principles, guidelines, and verdicts that he delivers as he goes along.

The two books are Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes (2010) and Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany (2011).  Both are published by Knopf. (“Finishing the Hat” is title of a song from Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park with George.)

To review, in the early part of his career Sondheim wrote lyrics to other people’s music for West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959). Then he wrote both music and lyrics for, among other musicals, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), The Frogs (1974), Pacific Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Sunday In the Park with George (1984), Into the Woods (1987), Assassins (1990), Passion (1994), and Road Show (2008) – an extraordinary body of work.

It is an extraordinary body of work, for which he has won eight Tony Awards (including a Special Tony Award in 2008 for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre), eight Grammy Awards, an Academy Award (Best Original Song for “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)” from 1990’s Dick Tracy), and the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Sunday in the Park with George (shared with librettist James Lapine). 

Sondheim was also nominated for or won many more, including Drama Desk Awards, Off-Broadway’s OBIE and Lucille Lortel Awards, and London’s Laurence Olivier Award (special award in 2011 for his contribution to London theater). In 1993, he became a Kennedy Center Honoree. The composer-lyricist was elected to the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2014 and in November 2015, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. 

As the books’ expansive subtitles make clear, Sondheim, with a lifetime of experience to write about, doesn’t skimp. He includes lyrics that didn’t make it into shows, as well as those that did, or, occasionally, were written for other purposes, and he talks about why they belonged in their shows or not. He tells stories; he provides contexts; he discusses other lyricists; he exhorts, complains, clarifies, laughs and rages.

Sondheim is revered in today’s theater, and he won his position through hard work, focused on one activity, musical theater songwriting. I have several friends who have spent time talking with him, and they have found him cordial and helpful. (I myself have spoken with him exactly once, after the opening performance of Sweeney Todd in 1979. I said “Congratulations,” and he said, “Thank you.”)

On the other hand he can also come across as prickly, for example in his response to the Sound of Music medley performed by Lady Gaga (b. 1986) at the 2015 Oscar Awards. "She was a travesty," he said. "It was ridiculous, as it would be from any singer who treats that music in semi-operatic style. She had no relationship to what she was singing. What people liked was her versatility."

He appears to be one of the few people who would feel that “travesty” was an appropriate word for that (to me) thrilling performance. All the more reason, then, that he comes across in these two books as  charming. Sondheim’s books are inspirational, stimulating, and often funny and often warm-hearted, with a great deal of the humor directed at himself. Not known for sentiment, he criticizes the work of others (the dead, however, almost never the living) but criticizes himself at least as much.

He comes across as intelligent, restless, focused, critical (as much about his own lyrics as about anyone else’s), and demanding. His enthusiasm for his line of work is irresistible. Writing a lyric is much like devising and then solving a puzzle, and he notoriously loves puzzles.

As befits a lyricist, he is precise with language. He makes a distinction I endorse between a reviewer and a critic: a reviewer gives an immediate response to a show, while a critic takes a longer view in a broader context. And he distinguishes between a “song” and a “number:”

I use the word “number” as opposed to “song” carefully. It may seem to be a trivial matter, but it’s an important distinction. A song concentrates on one idea, one story, one emotion – it is a distillation. A number is an extension of ideas and/or stories and/or points of view; it involves development.

Sondheim, of course, is a master at writing “numbers,” for example, the fifteen minute long opening of Into the Woods, the “crowd” number “The Best Pies in London” from Sweeney Todd, and many more.

His work ethic is formidable. “There are not many [pleasures] to be found in lyric writing,” he writes. It’s work, and we see the evidence that he does the work – one brilliant lyric after another. I can’t imagine how anyone can read these books and not finish them with a determination to do better at whatever they do in life.

Sondheim provides a deep dive into a writer’s process. He has, of course, an advantage over writers in other genres in telling his story. How does one know, for example, if a novel is a “success?” Reviews? They take a while to come out, and are hardly conclusive. Book sales? Except in spectacular cases, who knows?

But for a writer in the theater, like Sondheim, each show is an adventure with a clear climax, when the show either opens and succeeds, or it doesn’t. His story, in other words, is dramatic. Of course it is! But the drama of drama intensifies the excitement of the narrative, making his books very nearly “page turners.” The saga of The Frogs, for example, is a masterpiece of suspense.

Sondheim provides numerous insights into the creative life. For example, there’s the difference between “bad” songs, which just fail, and “wrong” songs, which may be well written but don’t belong in a particular show:

I have a pretty good internal censor which prevents bad songs from either being finished or escaping from my study, but wrong songs are another matter. Wrong songs take just as much time to write as right songs, and are frequently good ones, but they are often impossible to spot as wrong until you see them in performance. And what a disappointment they are, especially when they’re good.

Sometimes an excellent song fails for a fundamental reason, as with the number “The Plan” in Into the Woods:”

Stopping to sing a song, no matter how relevant, impeded the pace of the story. The situation was better presented in dialogue which was briefer and more immediate. The song was cut.

Similarly he distinguishes between “bettering” a moment in a show and “fixing” it, so that in Merrily We Roll Along

we fell victim to the age-old illusion that blinds all rewriters: by the time opening night arrived, we thought we’d fixed the show. What we had done was bettered it, not fixed it, and the critics and theatrical “community” . . . were merciless.

One fascinating aspect of these books is that they demonstrate what many writers have claimed: that people’s ideas of why writers wrote particular things are generally wrong, or at least wide of the mark.

An example is the song “The Little Things You Do Together” from Company, which I have always felt illustrated Sondheim’s attitude toward marriage, and in particular straight marriages.

In fact, Sondheim tells us that, having no experience with marriage himself, he had no idea how to write the song, so he asked his friend Mary Rodgers (1931-2014), the daughter of the composer Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), what she knew about marriage, and used her ideas for the song.

Sondheim makes no secret of how difficult it is to write song lyrics. It has to be remembered that any aspect of writing a musical is a truly difficult thing to do. Sondheim frequently writes about the need for concision in musical lyrics; one of his three guiding principles is “Less Is More.” (The other two are “Content Dictates Form” and “God Is in the Details.”) Sondheim writes that concision

is unavoidable, if for no other reason than that the presence of music can not only supply what’s written but resonate beyond it. Still, it’s a precept hard to follow, since it takes so much of the fun out of writing by putting the brakes on flamboyant cleverness, ostentatious imagery, decorative elaboration, overly insistent emphasis and rhythmically repetitive lists like this one.

Any musical is a carefully balanced combination of components, any one of which can upset the balance and send the whole thing crashing. It’s by no means as simple a matter as taking a story, adding songs, and there you are. Sondheim makes this clear, and illustrates it repeatedly.

An example of the difficulty is the matter of how a chorus in a musical is presented:

One of the most unconvincing things about [a chorus] is that as a crowd, whether of peasants, soldiers, convicts, reporters, cocktail party attendees or any other general congregations, they all sing the same lyric; that is to say, they apparently all have exactly the same thought at the same time. Most people in most audiences accept this convention . . . but . . . this one irritates me.

Writing for a chorus becomes more difficult with the conviction that it ought to represent different points of view. Sondheim frequently takes on this task, for example in “God, That’s Good!” from Sweeney Todd.

Another problem a lyricist faces is how much or how little information to give the audience:

[There is] a subtle trap in the show, and indeed in any show based on fact: the lure of authentic, interesting and irrelevant information . . . the tendency to utilize incidents simply because they really occurred and characters simply because they really existed.

Sondheim’s two books are full of insights of this sort. So why do I have reservations about Sondheim’s brilliant work at all? He summarizes the answer better than I could, in describing the attitude toward his shows of the reviewer John Lahr (b. 1941):

The most egregious example of critical resentment was probably that of John Lahr, who panned [Sweeney Todd] in Harper’s Magazine.  It was part of an essay propounding the thesis that I represented the death of the American musical, having taken all the joy and spontaneity out of this beloved, exuberant American art form and infused it with an impotent sourness.

I am afraid that I sometimes feel that Lahr’s view is correct, for reasons which naturally may represent my own background and limitations. On the one hand, although Sondheim was doing celebrated work before I reached my formative years, the musicals I grew up with were not his.

I began by listening to the albums (on 78 rpm records) of Kiss Me, Kate (1948) and Oklahoma! (1943). Then I fell deeply in love with My Fair Lady (1956), and subsequently discovered Guys and Dolls (1950). These are musicals, one might say, on the “up” side – although Oklahoma! certainly begins to peer at the darker elements of life.

On the other hand, Sondheim doesn’t attempt to disprove Lahr’s thesis. I can’t help thinking there’s something to it. (“I seem to have a penchant for nervous breakdowns” by characters, Sondheim notes.)

A friend felt I was too severe in a monolog I wrote that demonstrated my ambivalence toward Sondheim. I agree with him; however, I can affirm that the sketch does show how some of Sondheim’s music strikes me in my worse moments:

My name is Stephen Sondheim, and today I’m going to show you how I go about writing a musical. Now here I have a story I’m thinking about. It’s the story of a small Iowa town, and into it comes a traveling salesman. I’m thinking of turning this story into a musical. How this salesman left a woman degraded and pregnant, that one corrupted some babe with a bribe, this one was the favorite of twenty hearts and left them all broken. The rhythm will be a train rhythm –

 

            (Plays a jagged, angular rhythm)

 

Like a train rolling over broken glass. And the chorus will be something about marriage, about why marry when you can have a lot of women, one in every town. Then the most corrupt, cynical one turns his suitcase around and we see that he’s the main character of the story – we’ll call him – Harold Hell! What an opening!

 

Now we move to, let’s say, the town square, where we see the citizens of the town. They’re doing what all small-town Americans do – bribing each other, stealing when no one’s looking, and poaching deer. Typical Americana. Ruling over the town – maybe we’ll put him on a tower, with a bullhorn and a searchlight – is the Mayor. Let’s see – his name is – Mayor Sin! And he’s got a wife, of course, they all do, a horrible, overbearing woman who’s the social dictator of the town – it’s a marriage of convenience, like all marriages. And there’ll be an urban rhythm under it, like the sound of glass breaking when a rock is thrown through a window – like this –

 

(Plays another jagged, angular rhythm)

 

Into the town comes the salesman, Harold Hell – tricky, manipulative, devious. He sizes up the crowd and cynically speculates on what they all want, something he can pretend to get for them by crooked means. Since this is a musical we’ll say he decides what they need is music. And the musical instrument he supplies will be – let’s see, a trumpet? No, that could be a reference to the last trumpet, too much encouragement for religion. A drum! Martial, stirring, and perfect for the rhythm of the town!

 

            (He beats out a jagged, angular rhythm)

 

No, that’s not it, not a drum, either. We need something that offers melody and harmony. I know – the devil’s own instrument – the trombone! We’ll have a number called “Six Trombones”, played by an onstage sextet, and it’ll have a mocking, angry sound, like –

 

(He plays, no surprise, another jagged angular rhythm. Sings on one note:)

 

“Six trombones in the market place…”

 

The marketplace, you know, where people are bought and sold in marriage. Oh, I’m starting to love this. I’ll call it . . . “The Music Demon.” See you later . . . I may write this one faster than I usually do . . . This material is a natural . . .

So I admit to a sometimes hands-off attitude toward Stephen Sondheim’s work. Not by any means always - I have directed both Company and Into the Woods with pleasure – but what seems to me his constant pessimism is not generally my cup of tea. I always wished that he and Woody Allen, another entertaining but basically gloomy mind, would write a musical together. That would be something to see.

When Sondheim tries to overcome his pessimism, the result, to my mind, is irritating. In the musical Into the Woods the capstone song is “No One Is Alone.” The sentiment of this song is broad enough to appeal to anyone from atheists to fundamentalists, but what exactly does it say? Why is no one alone? Are we talking about God here, or about social interactions, or about the plot of the play? Fundamentally the song, it seems to me, is a cheat.

I have always felt that Sondheim in particular attacks heterosexual marriage, epitomized in his song “Every Day a Little Death” from A Little Night Music, where the title says it all. His mother, in particular, was apparently one of the most difficult people who ever lived, especially for him. This would not brighten one’s idea of straight marriage. (Of course none of his musicals are specifically about his mother.)

So my first reservation concerns the tone of Sondheim’s work. My second has to do with his complaints about other songwriters, which are both general and specific. On the general side, he writes:

Prior to the late 1930s lyrics tended [italics mine] to be generalized and gooey (“You Are Love” – Hammerstein), arch and gooey (“I’ll Follow My Secret Heart” – Coward), strenuously effortful . . . or at best unadorned and repetitive . . . all of them perfectly satisfactory for theater songs of the time . . . . [Songwriters of earlier eras] were too comfortable with traditional musical comedy to think in terms of creating songs to fit characters because there were no characters in musical comedy, only personalities . . . .

Sondheim acknowledges that we may be disappointed with what followed:

Even today, a lot of people (including critics) deplore the loss of what they see as the lighthearted silliness of the old musicals. For songwriters and playwrights, however, involving an audience in a story with singing characters who are more than skin deep is much more interesting work. . . . Most of the lyrics [he has written] belong to the mouths of particular characters in particular situations, characters who are only partly knowable without the context of the dialogue and actions in their stories.

“Lighthearted silliness” is a bit of a special pleading. It hardly summarizes the qualities of a score such as, for example, The Boys From Syracuse (1938, book by George Abbott, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart), or for that matter Pal Joey (1940, by Rodgers and Hart, with a book by John O’Hara, with one suspects a substantial assist from George Abbott). I imagine Sondheim would object if I referred to his songs as “music about people with furrowed brows” – another broad generalization.

In any case, Sondheim’s use of the word “tended” gives away a good bit of his case. He is overgeneralizing to beat the band (so to speak). Songwriting is, and has always been, much more complex than one would gather from his summary.

For example, in 1897 George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), in a weekly theater review, wrote of a production that “the music shews [sic] the modern tendency to integrate into a continuous score, and avoid set numbers,” and Shaw points out that Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and Charles-François Gounod (1818-1893) had both worked on the same thing. The “modern” tendency!

It is certainly true that up to the middle of the Twentieth Century, individual characterization in songs was not as much a matter of the speaker of the song as it was of the personality of the songwriter. This is not to say, for example, that Cole Porter’s “Ten Cents a Dance” doesn’t personalize a “dancehall girl;” but it could characterize any dancehall girl. Songs closely linked to a character – for example, Frank Loesser’s “Adelaide’s Lament” (from Guys and Dolls, 1950), could be sung by any character wanting to get married.

However, I would claim that even in pre-Rodgers and Hammerstein days, even the most self-contained, plot-independent song from a “silly” musical was likely to be stronger in structure than its non-musical theater counterpart.

The fact that in theater everything progresses from a beginning to an end must have influenced the most egregious hack composer to at least subconsciously think in terms of structure, and I claim it frequently did.

Moving from the general to the specific, Sondheim has particular scorn for aspects of the work of Noël Coward (1899-1973), Lorenz Hart (1895-1943), and Ira Gershwin (1896-1983).

Coward:

Most of Coward’s lyrics come in two flavors: brittle and sentimental. The brittle ones are condescending, either implicitly or explicitly . . . . The sentimental ones are florid, sometimes extending into unintentional camp. . . . Most of his list songs . . . state the same idea over and over.

Hart:

The laziest of the preeminent lyricists, and one of the most disconcerting . . . . Hart’s pervasive laziness manifests itself in three areas: mis-stressed syllables, convoluted syntax and the sacrifice of meaning for rhyme.    

Gershwin:

He makes you feel the sweat. . . . He is often undone by his passion for rhyming, for which he sacrifices both ease and syntax . . . . You can almost always feel the straining for lapidary brilliance, especially when he crams the rhymes together . . . .

As I mentioned, he makes no unfavorable comments about writers who were living when he wrote his books, which means there is only a passing reference to Jerry Herman (1931-2019), who was often thought of as the anti-Sondheim during the period they were both writing. By the way, he also doesn’t like Gilbert and Sullivan much either.

I am not saying he sees no merit in the writers he criticizes, but he feels strongly about their flaws. Of course he is writing as a craftsperson in a specific field, and, as the saying goes, “To a hammer everything is a nail.” He sees the pitfalls he himself intends to avoid as a lyric writer. But where does that leave those of us who love these lyricists?

I would say that he oversimplifies, and of course my objections may be simply a matter of emphasis. Sondheim acknowledges numerous flaws (as he thinks of them) in his own lyrics. As he knows and points out, these can arise from many causes, among them the pressure to write a new song right now because it has to be tried out in the next rehearsal.

But suppose that haste is not a primary reason for the flaws (as he calls them) in the songs of the writers he criticizes. What would have been the result if all the songwriters he criticizes had listened to him, corrected themselves, and written the way he wanted them to? Would their work have been “better?” My guess is no, because in that case they wouldn’t have been themselves.

Do we want all writers of musical scores to sound like Stephen Sondheim? I don’t see why they should. To take one writer Mr. Sondheim severely criticizes, when I listen to Noël Coward’s songs, what attracts me to them is that they’re vigorously and unmistakably Noël Coward’s songs.

Sondheim speaks of “the sense of exhausted repetitiousness that marks so many of [Coward’s] patter songs.” This has not been my experience. I remember seeing a friend in an extremely uninspired Music Hall kind of program, when all of a sudden a song came along that had me sitting up in my seat. It had brains, it had structure, it had a point. When I was able to find a program, I learned that it was a Noël Coward song.

I like the songs of the writers Sondheim criticizes because they sound like themselves – that is, they have their own styles. Sondheim has his too – someone recently played for me a few bars of a recording of a Sondheim song I had never heard before, and I immediately knew without being told that he had written it.

Sondheim is aware that he has his own style. He frets about this, particularly now that he is older:

I find myself using the same chords and the same tropes over and over, and I fight against it; but when I lose the battle, I rationalize it as being a matter of style, my style, a style I’ve developed over the years, an identity as unchanging as my signature. And to a certain extent it is – but not as much as I tell myself.

I suspect that more than one artist has run into limitations, found that they could not avoid them, and declared that their limitations were a style, perhaps one that should become a rule for others.

Sondheim’s style evolved in part from the music that interested him most in his childhood, which was, of all things, background music in movies. Sondheim tells how he put the idea of movie scoring to use in composing Sweeney Todd, but it seems to me that film music also must have helped shape the idea of show songs as related to character – because I contend background music in movies must be related to character.

At the same time, movie music has its own characteristics. Listened to out of the context of specific films, it is frequently musically more aggressive, more radical, than conventional song – good examples are the scores for films like Alexander Nevsky (1938) composed by Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), or, closer to Sondheim’s interests, the scores of Bernard Hermann (1911-1975), particularly for a film called Hangover Square (1945) which Sondheim greatly admired.

A stylistic question, then, is how much Sondheim’s love of film music influenced the way he wrote his scores, including lyrics, for musicals. The answer seems to be “a great deal,” and certainly there are other stylistic influences on his work as well. My point is that the same is true for other lyricists – different influences, different styles.

One might object that Sondheim doesn’t write the books of his shows but composes songs to fit the books of others, but in fact he has suggested many of the ideas for musicals that others then helped carry out (for example, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and Road Show). And he became involved practically at the beginning of a number of other musicals, for example Follies and Passion.

Looking at those shows, one has to notice that many are, at a minimum, novel ideas for musicals. Why not? Why shouldn’t the range of the musical be expanded? Sondheim was unwilling to leave the form the way he found it. But there are risks, beyond the obvious one that audiences might not find the results entertaining.

Specifically, how clear are the intentions of the shows, and how dramatically strong are the plots? These questions dominate the story of Road Show, which took over a decade to take a shape its creators considered “final.” Similarly the book of Follies is famously weak in comparison to its score.

More than once Sondheim mentions what we might call “an idea behind the idea.” For example, he wanted Pacific Overtures to sound like “historical narrative as written by a Japanese who’s seen a lot of American musicals.” He wanted the characters of Merrily We Roll Along to be “expressing themselves through stultified song forms.” He wanted Road Show, initially, to be staged like a vaudeville.

The results are mixed, and the question should be asked: are such ideas dramatic, or are they not, rather, concepts, images, pictures, “bright ideas?” They are supposed to support the story – but suppose they don’t? Sondheim is aware of the dangers of “imagination and cleverness which too often, instead of enriching each other, draw attention themselves.”

[Kirk has discussed and defined the concept of the “Bright Idea” in past posts on Rick On Theatre. It was in the context of directing, rather than play- or song-writing, but the sense is the same: “an idea utterly unsupported by the script, and an idea that offers no worthwhile results.” Kirk mentions the Bright Idea in “A Note About Hamilton,” posted on 6 December 2016, and again briefly in “Falsettos,” 5 January 2017.

[His fullest discussion of the concept, which Kirk attributes to drama critic Eric Bentley, is in “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With,” (25 June 2019; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2019/06/directors-youd-rather-not-work-with.html). I, myself, discussed the notion and quoted the Bentley passage in the afterword to my report on a production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (8 April 2017; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-glass-menagerie.html).  ~Rick]

Surely Aristotle (384-322 BC) is correct – plot is the soul of tragedy, and in fact of all drama. If the story isn’t solid, everything else will be problematic. Far too many musicals are based on weak ideas or clever notions, and few of those succeed. Writers must be certain they, so to speak, have their stories straight.

Sondheim claims that “under ordinary circumstances, articulating [what a show is about] isn’t necessary. In fact, if you do, you run the risk of becoming preachy . . . .” Point taken, but if the authors of a musical aren’t clear what a show is about, disaster looms. In his great book about Broadway The Season, William Goldman quotes the noted choreographer and director Bob Fosse (1927-1987):

I was doing a show once; we had opened out of town, and the reviews were terrible – terrible – and we were sitting around, and I was talking and the book writer was talking and the composer was talking, and it turned out we all saw three different shows. In our heads. We were all working on three completely different musical comedies. Now why didn’t we find that out sooner? We just didn’t – don’t ask me why.

Similarly, according to Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, a biography (2006) by Amanda Vallie about another outstanding choreographer and director, Robbins said that there were “only two things you need to know about a show: what is it about, and what’s the story?”

Sondheim acknowledges that he ran smack into this problem with Road Show, which went through four major versions over about eleven years while its creators tried to figure out what it was about and exactly what its story was. Art isn’t easy.

One of the principles that Sondheim frequently cites is “Less is more.” He also notes that “unless you can avoid the traps of banality and vagueness, Less Is Less.” But he also cites the principle that “Content Determines Form,” and if it doesn’t, well,

Thematic “relevance,” a favorite word of producers, directors, actors and especially publicists, in describing a show, is an outgrowth of character or it is nothing.

This may be a trap into which sometimes Sondheim has fallen.

Am I saying then that Sondheim should not have written the shows he did, or in the way he did? Hardly! The fact may be that in many ways, although he tells us he thinks of himself as a Broadway guy, he is really an off-Broadway composer in spirit – and, in fact, off-Broadway, regional theaters, and workshops have played an increasing role in the history of his plays as the years have gone on.

There are resemblances perhaps in the career of the playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), whose early Broadway successes convinced him that Broadway was his natural environment. He became frustrated as his plays became less and less successful on the Great White Way; but today it seems clear that he was basically an avant-garde playwright from the start. Perhaps Sondheim is one as well.

Or perhaps that thought tells us nothing about Sondheim. Styles change and so do popular enthusiasms. When Sondheim wrote his two books, he was aware that Hamilton (2015) was on the way, although no one then knew what a success it would be, and to his great credit Sondheim found its prospects exciting. Hamilton has expanded the possibilities of the musical. So, enormously, has Sondheim.

[I don’t have the ambivalence about Sondheim’s work that Kirk does—probably because I’m not as knowledgeable about music and musicology as he is.  When it comes to music, including musical theater, I just like something or I don’t and I probably could never tell you why.  Besides, I still just love musicals, a heritage from my childhood (see “A Broadway Baby,” posted on Rick On Theatre on 22 September 2010), and I find it hard to criticize them cogently.

[After I saw Evita, I decided I just didn’t like Andrew Lloyd Webber and wouldn’t pay money to see any more of his shows.  (I broke my vow to see Sunset Boulevard four years ago, much to my regret; see my report on 8 May 2017.)  Sondheim was the opposite—I loved everything of his I’d seen, from Funny Thing on.  (Pacific Overtures knocked me out—as my review, posted on ROT on 15 May 2014, clearly shows.)

[When I took singing lessons for a while, I worked on some of Sondheim’s pieces—particularly “Pretty Women” from Sweeney Todd.  One of the things I discovered, which made me appreciate him even more, is that both the lyrics and music are always surprising.  I expected Sondheim to go one way, and he went another.  It made learning the songs harder, but it made the compositions better—less ordinary.

[Incidentally, Kirk makes a statement above that raised a question for me.  He said that Sondheim was aware that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was in the offing when Sondheim was writing his books.  Since the books were published four and five years before Hamilton hit the boards, I wondered how this might have occurred.  Kirk told me that Sondheim never explains in the books.

[It turns out to be pretty straightforward.  Miranda was hired to do the Spanish translations for the 2009 Broadway revival if West Side Story that Arthur Laurents (the original book-writer) was directing.  Sondheim consulted with Miranda at that time and they remained in contact.  When Miranda started working on Hamilton, he consulted Sondheim on some of the songs as he was composing them.]