Some Women Writers from the Archives

FRESHWATER
by Virginia Woolf

Women’s Project, Julia Miles Theater

27 January 2009

On Thursday, 22 January [2009], my friend Diana and I went uptown to the Julia Miles Theater on 55th Street, just west of 9th Avenue, to see a curiosity of a theatrical/literary nature, the Women’s Project’s production of the only play Virginia Woolf ever wrote.  (It opened on 25 January, the “joyous” 127th anniversary of Woolf’s birth.  Isn’t that cute?)  A coproduction with Anne Bogart’s SITI Company (originally the Saratoga International Theatre Institute because of the location of its founding as a summer institution), the performance was directed by Bogart and featured members of her troupe.  

Freshwater is a slight bit of nonsense, written first in 1923 and then revised in 1935, which Woolf composed as a family entertainment, performed by her relatives for her friends in the Bloomsbury group.  It had one performance, but no professional staging, at least in the U.S.  (I don’t believe it’s ever been performed professionally in England, either; I don’t know that for certain, but the program asserts it hasn’t.  A French company, which included Eugene Ionesco and Alain Robbe-Grillet, apparently did a presentation at NYU in 1983.  The play has been published, however, in a volume containing both scripts.)  The Women’s Project production opened on 25 January [2009] after starting previews on 15 January; it closed on 15 February.

To be honest, though the performance itself is far from an embarrassment, the history and background of the play is far more interesting than the play itself, at least today and here in America.  (I’ll get to this in a bit, don’t worry.)  Freshwater is a large village on the Isle of Wight where many famous Britons had summer residences.  One of these was Dimbola Lodge, the home of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79), a photographer, and her husband, Charles Hay Cameron (1795-1880), a philosopher.  Julia Cameron was the great-aunt of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Dimbola was often filled with other artists. 

Among the guests (and the characters in Freshwater) were George Frederick Watts (1817-1904), a painter, and his very young wife and the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain. Ellen Terry (1847-1928), and the British Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson (1809-92), another Freshwater resident himself.  What Woolf was doing was writing a light entertainment spoofing one group of artists, portrayed as eccentric and dotty, for another group of artists a generation later.  (Only Terry was alive when Woolf first wrote her playlet; none survived when it was rewritten—from a one-act to a three-act—and enacted.)

The play, which in the Women’s Project’s staging is a combination of the two versions which lasts only 75 minutes, has no depth and depends for most of his humor on a familiarity with the characters and the times (there are many references to other artists, especially Tennyson’s rivals and predecessors such as Robert Browning and William Wordsworth).  As a result, Bogart adds (I assume—I doubt Woolf wrote this into her scripts) a lot of physical humor and sight gags.  What it resembles, in fact, is a Victorian-era Monty Python sketch, but without the Pythons’ universality and subversive social commentary.  Woolf’s audience, of course, not only knew her private brand of humor intimately, but had a much closer association with the subjects of her jibes and parodies than any of us would. 

For instance, Terry, who was 30 years her husband’s junior (they married in 1864, when Terry was 17), left her husband after less than a year of marriage.  In the play, she meets Royal Navy Lt. John Craig and, in the end of the play, runs away with him.  Now, my assumption was that John Craig would become the father of the renowned scenic designer and theatrical theorist Edward Gordon Craig, Terry’s son, but when I got home and checked the history, I found that no such person existed.  (Gordon Craig was born out of wedlock to Terry—she was actually still married to Watts—and William Edward Godwin, an architect.  “Craig” was a name he adopted in adulthood.) 

Now, I’m only guessing, but I bet most of the rest of the audience, if they made any connection between Terry and Gordon Craig at all, made the same mistake I did.  But Terry’s friends and family would have known all that because not only were they closer to Terry than we are, they probably all knew Craig—and possibly Terry as well.  The character, one of only two who are fictitious (the other is the maid, Mary Magdalen), was a joke the in-crowd would have gotten. 

The mocking references to Watts’s paintings and Tennyson’s verse, which are obscure to most of us (Tennyson perhaps less than Watts), wouldn’t have been for Woolf’s audience because the painter and the poet were not only both still around when Woolf and her friends were young, but they had been intimates from the older generation.  So all that’s left to amuse me is the physical comedy and the cartoon characterizations the actors, from whom the characters are no doubt as distant as Shakespeare’s or the Greeks’, create.  The “original” cast probably spoofed the real people like Saturday Night Live lampooning present-day celebrities and politicians, but with a lot of inside gags.  That doesn’t leave much to fill the stage, even for a scant 75 minutes. 

There is some amusing, if slight, verbal comedy.  While John Craig and Terry are out on some rocks in the sea, and Terry is describing her elderly husband, she makes reference to “Titian.  Titian.  Titian.”  “Sneezing?” asks Craig.  “I hope you haven’t caught cold.”  (This reminded me of a line in the ’80s TV series Moonlighting: Maddie—Cybill Shepherd—says, “The man is looking for a clue, a clue, a clue.”  David—Bruce Willis—responds, “Gesundheit.”)   

Watts, the painter of classic scenes (with Terry as his model), is wont to say, “The Utmost for the Highest,” a phrase he repeats frequently (and which is echoed once or twice by some other characters).  It’s an almost nonsense expression, but its pretentious emptiness reminded me of the utterance of a pompous holodeck figure in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation: “The higher, the fewer.”  But for the most part, the verbal jokes are so tied to the life and works of the Victorian-era artists Woolf was parodying that they don’t communicate very much to me. 

I have never been a fan of Bogart’s work.  I find her pretentious and self-indulgent.  (I tried to read her book, Viewpoints, which lays out her acting theory, but I couldn’t make head or tails out of it, and what I could follow sounded like complete crap to me!)  From what I have seen (and read, mostly in reviews), her company, which has at one time or another resided all over the globe, picking up, I gather, the tricks of many varied acting styles and techniques, is more devoted to physical work than verbal. 

Not having read the text(s) of Freshwater, I can’t be sure of this, but it may be possible to translate Woolf’s featherweight witticisms for a contemporary American audience, but I don’t think Bogart even tries.  Essentially, she skips over it, and covers it all with mostly silly physical characterizations and sight gags that bear little relationship to the play.  Julia Cameron (Ellen Lauren) on her back with her boot-clad legs in the air and her hoop skirt over her head and torso may or may not be funny, but it doesn’t much depend on what’s happening on stage or in the text.  (And Carol Burnett did it better anyway!) 

When she drops into a chair at one point near the beginning of the play, while Tennyson is sitting on the floor, leaning against the chair (having just been “worshiping” Terry, his “muse”), she flounces her gown so it drops over Tennyson’s head, leaving only his legs visible beyond the skirt’s hem.  Maybe that’s funny, in a Benny Hill sort of way, but it isn’t related to what’s happening in the play: it’s just a set piece.  All the characters have such moments, some less elaborate and some more so, but their humor is independent of the play.  (Tom Nelis’s Charles Cameron does like to lose his trousers pretty often—but that’s suggested by lines in the script.  Considering the part was played in the writer’s home performance by Woolf’s husband, Leonard, I wonder if she intended it to be acted out literally, though.)

It’s not that the actors execute this stuff badly, or are technically incompetent.  They’re fine, but they aren’t really doing anything.  It’s a clown show (I’m no fan of clowns, I confess) interrupted by a lot of fast-paced dialogue that seems to be used as time-filler.  Some of the casting seems infelicitous: Ellen Terry, who was all of 17 when she left Watts after only ten months of marriage, is played by Kelly Maurer.  I don’t know how old Maurer is, but she’s hardly a teen; she started with SITI when it began in 1992—17 years ago, coincidentally—so unless she was born in a stage trunk, she’s probably in her thirties.  Maurer tries like hell to pull off Terry’s youth and enthusiasm for the new and exciting—”It’s all so usual,” she complains until she meets Craig—but she’s no “ingénue,” as Terry is identified in the program. 

On the opposite side of the scale, Tom Nelis, who is about 55, plays the octogenarian Charles Cameron (it’s hard to determine what year Woolf set the play—somewhere between 1864, the year Terry was married, and 1875, the year the Camerons returned to India and Ceylon as they do at the play’s end) by channeling Arte Johnson’s dirty old Walnetto man from Laugh-In.  (When his wife puts a blue conical hat with white stars on his white-maned head, he resembles a cross between Merlin and the Travelocity gnome.  He also appears as Queen Victoria at the end of the play, a tall, skinny version of the short, stout monarch.  We all had to stand for “God Save the Queen” when she appeared, which made me feel a little disloyal!)

Charles Isherwood, in the New York Times, appraised the play about the same as I have (though he was perhaps a little kinder regarding the notion to stage it at all), and he praised Gian Murray Gianino, who plays Craig, as the actor who gets into the spirit of the hi-jinks the best.  His performance is perhaps a little more stylized, more presentational, if you will, than the other actors, who, outside their clowning, seem to take it all somewhat earnestly.  (This may be a difference between British and American acting: the Brits are terrific at throw-away bits; Americans put a lot of weight into everything as a rule.) 

Gianino, however, treats his role a little like the lead actor in a certain ubiquitous late-night commercial for a “male-enhancement product”—as if he’s a bit of an android.  Something did bother me, though, even though it’s not Gianino’s fault really: when he talks (or sings, which is when I first noticed this), his mouth migrates to the right side of his face as if he had too much Botox on the left.  I first thought it might be a character tic, but it’s not—and it looks a tad peculiar.  (I’ve never actually seen that in real life—only in cartoons!)

Isherwood singled out the physical production for praise, and I suppose the set and costumes (both by James Schuette) are creditable, but I suspect Isherwood was latching on to one aspect of the production that stands on its own without explanation or excuse.  The main set is an almost-empty drawing room at Dimbola with white walls painted with great strokes of green as if to represent tall grass or seaside rushes.  (In the center scene, which is set on some rocks in the sea—The Needles—a pair of traps is opened in the center of the green-painted floor.  The inside of the trap is painted blue, and Craig and Terry sit with their feet dangling in the hole as if they are sitting by the edge of the water.  No other set changes are made, except to clear off the small props—Watts’s easel, a chair—from the first scene.) 

The costumes seems to be from the mid-19th century, circa 1860s (the time of Terry’s marriage), though the image of Victoria at the end is the one from near the end of her reign in the 1890s.  (I suspect this was due to Americans’ familiarity with that picture from Helen Hayes on the screen, whereas a British audience from Woolf’s day might be more familiar with earlier impressions—most of them having lived through the second half of Victoria’s reign.  Maybe not though, since the Queen does award Tennyson his peerage and Watts his Order of Merit, which honors occurred respectively in 1883 and 1902, after Victoria’s death.)

In the end, then, though, as I said, the production was far from an embarrassment for anyone, I wonder what made any of them want to produce this play.  Women’s Project publicity says that Julie Crosby, the artistic director, has wanted to produce Freshwater since she first discovered it in 1997.  Whatever for?  I have always said, when someone says they’ve found a lost, neglected, or overlooked play by someone famous, there usually turns out to be a very good reason that it was lost, neglected, and overlooked.  (Twain’s Is He Dead?, produced on Broadway last season [2007-08], is a good example.  It just isn’t very funny, so the director added a lot of physical humor to compensate.  Even in the 1890’s, when the very presence on stage of a man dressed as a woman—remember Charlie’s Aunt?—was automatically hilarious, no producer would undertake Twain’s play.  The modern production only lasted three months.) 

Crosby, however, asserts that the play has never been produced because of sexism, and cited the stats for plays by women writers that had been mounted on Broadway—the plays, not the directors—over the recent seasons.  In a New York Times blog article, she said, “There are some blinders on, and it becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy: Women don’t get produced because their plays don’t make money, so they don’t make money because they don’t get produced.” 

Believe me when I tell you that, at least in this case, Freshwater hasn’t been staged solely because it’s a waste of effort, funds, and commitment, irrespective of the author’s gender.  (There’s a limited supply of money in the theater, as well as a limit to available talent and even empty stages.  What else more valuable could all those people have devoted themselves and their budgets to?)

*  *  *  *

LIFE X 3

by Yasmina Reza
Round House Theatre (Bethesda, Md.)

20 April 2005

I was in Washington, D.C., last week (my mother and I had taken a little trip together; we left from and returned to D.C.), and I stayed over this past weekend to go with Mom to a show on Saturday, 16 April [2006], to which she and a friend already had seats.  Perhaps you know a play, a French import, that did well in London (1996) and on Broadway (1998) a few seasons ago, Art by Yasmina Reza.  (It was about a man who had bought a minimalist painting for his apartment and all his friends criticized him for his selection, a white-on-white composition.  Despite the title, and the main plot element, the play wasn’t about the painting or even art in general.  It was about friendship and loyalty and betrayal.  It had a top-notch cast here, including Alfred Molina as the art purchaser and Alan Alda as one of his friends.) 

Well, one of D.C.’s local companies, the Round House Theatre in Bethesda (a close D.C. suburb in Maryland) staged a later play of Reza’s called Life X 3.  I believe it played in New York a while back [it did, in 2003], but I don’t remember what I read about it; I don’t know if it’s had a track record elsewhere, like London [yes, in 2000-01 and 2002].  (I presume it’s played in Paris, but I don’t know that for sure either [again, yes, in 2001.) 

The play, which is performed without an intermission (about 1½ hours’ running time), presents the same event, a failed dinner party, in three different scenarios.  This wasn’t like Alan Ayckbourn’s Norman Conquests—three perspectives on the same evening, as seen by three different participants—or Rashomon, where different witnesses recount their versions of the same event.  It’s more like the 1998 movie Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow—her life unfolds differently depending on whether she catches a particular London Underground or misses it and gets home later. 

In Life, there’s no particular triggering event that alters the plotlines of the evening’s events, but each time, things unfold differently—always ending in a conflict.  The problem is that none of the events, no matter how they’re changed, are important or interesting.  The events don’t change all that much, and since the evening fails each time—that never changes, because the main fact, that the guests have arrived on the wrong night (or the hosts forgot what night it was—it’s not really clear, but no matter), never changes, either.

More significantly, nothing any of the four people—two couples (plus an unseen, cranky, and spoiled 6-year-old who interrupts the evening several times from his room)—does or says is the least bit interesting.  The two men are astrophysicists, which limits the interest in what they talk about—and worry about—to other scientifically-inclined academics.  Most of it passed over my head.  And I had to listen to it three times!  Yikes!!

Even James Kronzer’s set design—which is the production’s fault, not the playwright’s, I guess—was peculiar.  It was extremely modern and almost Japanese.  The furniture looked like it might have been designed for a Star Trek episode, and there was some sort of lighted panel up center, apparently a work of art, I guess, that may have depicted the universe or a galaxy—the topic of the men’s research—in some allegorical way.  (It wasn’t part of the play—no one mentioned it or pointed it out—but it was up center and lit up, so it was visually prominent.)  I guess astrophysicists are all Futurists, too. 

In addition, the set, the apartment living room, was on a turntable—well, two turntables and they revolved for the start of each episode.  I guess the idea was that each telling was a “new” event in a “different” world, so the relationships among the objects was different, like a parallel universe or something.  (Star Trek again—those series did several episodes on this theme.)  The objects were all the same, of course, and they didn’t move independently, but as the outer and inner rings of the set revolved in opposite directions, their juxtaposition changed.  (In the third episode, the set continued to revolve slowly throughout the scene—for reasons I never figured out at all.)  It didn’t really do anything for the play.  I’m not sure anything could have.

The translation was by Christopher Hampton.  Given that he’s a playwright himself (and writes in English for the most part), the language of this play was stiff, awkward, and even unbelievable much of the time.  I could hear the original French behind Hampton’s translation—and there’s no reason I should.  (Yes, the play remains set in France—Paris, I presume, though that’s not certain—but the characters are all speaking English, so it should be conversational I’d have thought. 

By the way, being set in France, I somehow doubt the hosts would keep boxes of Cheezits in their pantry—if they’re even sold in France; or England, for that matter—even “white cheddar” ones.  I think this was a substitution for some similar French snack that the director or translator was afraid wouldn’t communicate to an American audience.  Nonetheless, it seemed out of place.)

*  *  *  *

BLUE HEAVEN (GOING TO IRAQ)

by Karen Malpede
Johnson Theater, Theater for the New City

September 1992

[In 1992, Drama Review editor Richard Schechner asked me to  write profile of Leonardo Shapiro’s Shaliko Company for the journal.  For the better part of a year, I shadowed Leo, including attending rehearsals for the productions he was directing, such as Shaliko’s main project during that time, the production at Theatre for the New City of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven.  I attended most of the rehearsals starting in August, and shortly before opening, Leo, Karen, and I decided to try to get a little early publicity by submitting an article to the Village Voice, and I set out to write it, a description of the work-in-progress.  The result, after much revision, was published as “As It Is in Heaven” on 22 September 1992 (and posted on Rick On Theater on  25 March 2011).  Below is an earlier , unpublished version of the final article, which is a little more straightforward than the version the Voice ran.]

If you haven’t had a chance to experience the new virtual reality around these days, the live equivalent, albeit lower-tech, may be the performances of Blue Heaven, Karen Malpede’s new play at Theater for the New City.  Director Leonardo Shapiro, whose Shaliko Company is co-producing with TNC, has turned the Johnson Theater into the Heaven Cafe, a run-down habitat for “a sturdy group of artists, eccentrics and visionaries” on the Lower East Side.  From 10 September to 11 October [1992], you can stroll in, have a drink or a nosh, and witness the lives of the denizens of Heaven unfold magically around you. 

Not that Blue Heaven is merely a slice of urban life.  Malpede and Shapiro have concocted a highly theatrical event with live music, videos, film, masks, body art, and all manner of special effects.  It’s all designed to draw you into the world of Sada (Lee Nagrin) and Herbie (George Bartenieff), Aria (Rosalie Triana) and Sierra (Lailah Hanit Bragin), Dee (Sheila Dabney) and Jill (Christen Clifford), John (Nicki Pariaso), Daniel (Joseph Kellough), and Mary (Beverly Wideman), who all live, work or visit at the Heaven during the time in our lives when this country unleashed masses of high-tech weapons into the Arabian desert.  [The production took place right after Operation Desert Storm  in Kuwait and Iraq in 1991 and the play is set on 16 January 1991, the day before combat began.]

Malpede was working on the play, originally called Going to Iraq, during the build-up to the Persian Gulf war, and her response to that event compelled her to write about it.  She was, however, contemplating another occurrence which forms the base of the drama: the 1985 death of artist Ana Mendieta (1948-85) who fell or was thrown from the studio of her artist husband, Carl Andre. 

For Malpede, Mendieta’s fate is emblematic of the position of women artists in America, and she found herself struggling with this subject when war broke out in January 1991.  How does an artist respond to such a momentous happening, Malpede wondered?  What is her responsibility at such a time?  Having created the character of Aria, an artist of mixed Israeli-Palestinian heritage, Malpede uses Blue Heaven to explore the question.  “All of us experienced the war,” Malpede points out, “and most of us also experienced the death of Ana Mendieta.  These are two contemporary historical events that are part of our lives.”

Currently in mid-rehearsal [I wrote the article in August 1992], the show, by the author of Sappho and Aphrodite (1983), Us (1988), and Better People (1990), has a cast of nine that includes some of the leading figures in Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theatre.  Lee Nagrin, choreographer and Obie-winning performer, is Sada, owner of the Heaven Cafe; George Bartenieff, Obie-winning co-founder of TNC, appears as her partner, Herbie; Rosalie Triana, who appeared recently as Mendieta, is cast as Aria.  Other members of the ensemble are Bessie Award-winner Nicky Paraiso, Obie-winner Sheila Dabney, Lailah Bragin, Christen Clifford, Joseph Kellough and Beverly Wideman. 

Director Shapiro, whose recent work includes Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son (1985, 1990. 1992) and Collateral Damage: The Private Life of the New World Order (Mediations on the Wars) (1991), a war-protest collage featuring Vanessa Redgrave, is interweaving the present-moment reality espoused by Joe Chaikin with elements of broad theatricality influenced by his love of circus and magic. 

The director intends to pack the environment of TNC’s Johnson Theater with life so that spectators, seated at café tables amidst the action, will have to decide where to look and listen.  There is no seat in the audience which will not require the spectator to turn around at one time or another.  At this stage in rehearsal, no one can say whether Blue Heaven is going to work or not; even the playwright is holding her breath.

Though Malpede, whose plays are many-layered, is probing several serious contemporary themes in Blue Heaven—the artist in society, war, AIDS, homelessness, domestic violence, drugs—neither she nor Shapiro have neglected the humor.  Much of Blue Heaven is funny, from low-comedy clowning to sophisticated and subtle gags not everyone will catch.  As for spectacle, Shapiro plans smoke effects, strobe lights, amplified voices, film and tape sequences, and video broadcast live from the floor of the café.  Saxophonist Gretchen Langheld has composed a bluesy, urban jazz accompaniment for a three-piece combo—which includes cast-member Paraiso at the piano—that plays under, against, and through the action of the play.  At times, the dialogue Malpede wrote for her characters becomes a spoken oratorio.

Watching as the production takes shape, two things intrigue me most.  First is the prospect of being immersed in the action.  Not only being in the café, but the contact with the characters is exciting and engaging.  Shapiro uses his actors as actual presences, not just as fictional characters, and they speak to the audience of their own lives through the written dialogue.  [See my post “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013, for a discussion of this practice.]  In effect, we share in the examination of life with them and Shapiro has instructed the cast to “cross-document our lives with the characters’ lives, . . . our voices with theirs.”  

Second is Malpede’s poetic consideration of aspects of our world.  The specific events she evokes are part of who we are but, more immediately, the efforts her characters make to survive each day are totally familiar to us.  If you don’t actually know these people, you have encountered them over and over again at work, in your neighborhood, and in places like the Heaven Cafe. 

[For more reports on women playwrights, see “Women Playwrights of the ’80s,” 21 December 2019.]

“Interviewing Sondheim: A Conversation With Mark Horowitz”

by Brad Hathaway

[I’m an associate member of the American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA), the professional organization for theater reviewers in print, on line, and on electronic media.   Each week, ATCA sends out an e-mail to members called “The Update” with the latest news from the association.   One regular feature of “The Update” is entitled “This Just In,” a list of “select articles by ATCA members that popped-up in our newsfeed.”  On 25 June, one entry on the list caught my attention: “Interview: Sondheim on Music author Mark Horowitz.”  Upon reading Brad Hathaway’s interview with Library of Congress Senior Music Specialist Mark Horowitz, I was certain it belonged on Rick On Theater.  Hathaway’s interview of Horowitz was originally published on Everything Sondheim on 21 June 2019.

[Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930) is arguably the United States’ foremost musical theater composer and lyricist.  His works forma list of some of this country’s most esteemed theater scores: West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), A Little Night Music (1973) , Pacific Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd (1979), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and Into the Woods (1987).  In 2009, the Signature Theatre of Arlington, Virginia, established the Sondheim Award “as a tribute to America's most influential contemporary musical theatre composer” in his honor.  The first award went to Sondheim himself, followed by Angela Lansbury (2010), Bernadette Peters (2011), Patti LuPone (2012), Harold “Hal” Prince (2013), Jonathan Tunick (2014), James Lapine (2015), John Weidman (2016), Cameron Mackintosh (2017), and John Kander (2018).  The 2019 winner was Audra McDonald.]

In 1997, Stephen Sondheim sat down with Library of Congress Senior Music Specialist Mark Horowitz for three days, pouring over the manuscripts of many of his shows. He had agreed to bequeath his manuscripts to the library and Horowitz stood in for future researchers who might have questions about minute details revealed on those pages but wouldn’t then be able to ask them.

The sessions were both filmed and transcribed. The resulting interviews became the book Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions, which was first published in hardback in 2003, but a third edition with additional material has just been issued in paperback by Roman and Littlefield (ISBN #9781538125502 – $24).

Everything Sondheim wanted to learn more about how this entire project came to be. Mark Horowitz agreed to an extended interview with Brad Hathaway. Since the project really stems from Mr. Sondheim’s decision to bequeath his manuscripts to the Library of Congress, Hathaway asked first how that came about.

Mark Horowitz: When I saw he was coming to DC to receive a Helen Hayes lifetime achievement award I wrote him a letter telling him I was at the Library and inviting him for a show and tell. I spent weeks preparing and pulled out all the stops.

I think he’d been approached by someone before, but I think the presentation is what cemented the relationship. We certainly had things related to him in existing collections, particularly Leonard Bernstein and Richard Rodgers, but I’m not sure that was that meaningful to him. I think the fact that we had Gershwin and Rachmaninoff excited him more.

Brad Hathaway: How long did he stay at the Library for your presentation?

MH: My guess is the show and tell lasted for about two hours. Somewhere I have a list of everything I pulled. I spent a lot of time reading through everything I could think of that would give hints of his favorite other composers and specific works.

BH:  On a personal note, one of my strongest memories of all my visits to your treasure trove on Capitol Hill in Washington is the afternoon I held George Gershwin’s manuscript of Porgy and Bess in my own hands. I simply sat there feeling its presence for, I don’t know, ten minutes? – before starting a detailed examination. Was there something like that for him – a connection with his heroes or the history of the art form he practices?

MH: The Porgy was definitely the one that seemed to most move him. As I recall, it actually moved him to tears…at least a welling-up. But I think he was amazed at how many things we had that few people ever suspect – Brahms, Liszt, Ravel, Bartok, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, the list goes on.

Afterward, he’d asked me to arrange for tickets so he could see the Barnes’ exhibit that was then at the National Gallery. I got tickets for both of us and we spent a couple of hours there after the Library.

BH: Have you done a similar demonstration for other potential donors?

MH: I often learn that people whose collection I think we might be interested in are coming to DC and I’m usually able to get contact information to invite them to the Library for a show and tell, promising to “knock their socks off.” Over the years I’ve developed a lot of contacts and, I think, a bit of a reputation, so it’s usually not too hard. Among the more memorable ones was one I gave for Angela Lansbury – particularly when she began singing for me.

I try not to hard sell, but at least plant in people’s minds the importance of saving their material. Many hadn’t thought of it before. Sometimes I’m contacted because I’ve been recommended by someone else. On a few occasions I’ve simply written cold letters. For instance, when Jonathan Larson died so suddenly, I was concerned that things might get thrown away, so I wrote a letter to his parents

BH: How did they respond to your letter?

MH: They were lovely. They came to the Library along with their daughter, to talk and to see our facilities and examples from the other collections. They weren’t ready to let go immediately, but they asked for the name of an archivist in New York who could go through everything up there first. I gave them one – which ultimately made our job much easier – and the collection came to us a few years later.

BH: Back to Sondheim, you were already acquainted with him, weren’t you?

MH: I sent Sondheim a letter when I was in college and he agreed to meet with me for an hour in January 1980. He doesn’t remember.

Basically, I was asking his advice – specifically whether the BMI musical theater workshop was worthwhile – but also asking if I could meet with him. The primary thing was what should I do in order to write musicals (I wanted to be him…I was writing music and lyrics in those days).

Actually, the meeting turned out to be a horrible experience. I so idolized him and had built up the idea of meeting him as a life’s dream, but I really hadn’t thought anything through. Somehow, I thought meeting him would be life-changing on its own.

After I left, I remember walking around the streets of New York until 2:00 a.m. and going into a great funk. My life hadn’t changed. I didn’t really have a goal to take its place. I guess in a way my life did change, in that I slowly began to realize that I had to take greater charge of my life and be better prepared – know what you want and do what needs to be done to get there. I still don’t think of myself as a complete adult…but I am better.

I did ask Sondheim for feedback on my songs. He said he’d be willing to listen, but only after he was done writing the show he was currently working on (Merrily). I sent him a tape. Several months later I got a letter. The one thing I recall is he said not to try and imitate him – although he put it more nicely. I think it was vaguely encouraging, but made clear that there are no shortcuts – to learn how to write one has to write.

Then, when I worked at Arena Stage in Washington DC, I worked on their production of Merrily, and that’s where it got to the point where he knew who I was – he even borrowed my rhyming dictionary. When he handed it back to me he let me know he’d written some missing words into the dictionary. (He was re-working “That Frank.”)

I also remember getting off the fax the new intro he wrote for the act II opening, where Gussie’s singing “Good Thing Going” a’la Liza and Kander & Ebb – “He’s only a boy, why do I think he loves me…”

And during what may have been the final dress I was at the back of the house where Steve and George Furth [who wrote the book for Merrily] were standing, and after Marin Mazzie sang “Not a Day Goes By,” Steve turned to George and said words to the effect that “if anybody was ever born to sing a particular song, she was born to sing that one.”

By the way, George was there through the entire rehearsal process and he and I became quite close. And it was at the opening night party when I introduced him to my now wife, Loie, that the first thing he said was “You two have to get married” – something we’d never discussed. That started the ball rolling. He offered us the use of his house in California as a wedding present.

BH: Did you take him up on the offer?

MH: Alas, no. He died before we were able to.

BH: Did Sondheim attend either Candide or Merrily at Arena?

MH: I don’t believe Steve had any involvement with that Candide, and his relationship to Merrily was very minimal. He was there for the first read-thru in New York and then came down for the last few days before opening. Other than lyric changes to the opening, faxing us the new intro, I think the only thing he did was give notes and make some suggestions. I do remember him working with the actress playing Mary on the song “Like It Was.” They were in the green room; he had her sit across the table from him, take his hands, and actually sing it to him. It became an acting exercise.

My favorite story had to do with, during a break, while they had done the run-thru with orchestra, he was talking to the production head and one of the musicians came up, waiting patiently to the side. The producer turned to him and asked, “What do you want?” The musician said, “I was wondering if there was going to be another run-thru without orchestra before the show opens so I’d have a chance to see it.” The producer was dismissive and mumbled something like “I don’t know.” Sondheim was furious and really lit into him, saying something like: “How dare you. Here you’ve got someone who cares and wants to understand what it is they’re accompanying. You should count yourself lucky and appreciate his interest.” …or words to that effect. Now this producer was a pretty intimidating. No one ever spoke to him this way. It was delicious.

BH: Were there changes to Merrily for that production?

MH: 99.9% of the changes were to the script, and this was changing daily. As I mentioned, George Furth was there through it all and was constantly re-writing. Frankly, I don’t remember any of the details of what he did or didn’t change, and I don’t know that any of it made that much difference. But boy did they come fast and furious.

BH: How much contact between you and Sondheim was involved in establishing the Sondheim papers?

MH: To be clear, we don’t have the Sondheim papers, they’re promised as a bequest. I have always been his primary contact with the Library. I co-produced our 70^th birthday concert (came up with the notion and I would get regular emails from him as songs occurred to him for the “Songs I Wish I’d Written” list.) I visited the collection to give him input on ultimately what would be appropriate to come to the Library.

BH: What do you mean “visited the collection?” Are his papers in his home or an off-site office?

MH: Actually, what I’ve seen isn’t that large a collection, at least compared to some I’ve seen. When I first visited, he kept all of his music and lyric manuscripts and sketches on three sides of a walk-in closet, floor to ceiling. As I recall, there was an average of about three boxes per project – approx.. 12” x 14” x 5”. After the fire [In 1995 Sondheim’s home in Manhattan was seriously damaged by fire] a cinderblock vault was built in the basement.

In addition to this material, the collection is to include his scrapbooks. As far as I can tell, Sondheim has never kept much personal correspondence or business correspondence. After the fire he gave us his record collection – somewhere between 11,000 and 15,000 LPs as I recall. But it’s the music and lyric manuscripts more than anything that are what I think of as priceless.

I’m hoping there will be all the various drafts of the librettos. And there may be a question about his reference library. We typically don’t take people’s book collections, but at least portions of Sondheim’s reference library might be appropriate – particularly if he’s marked/annotated some volumes and if we know they were used as primary research sources for particular shows.

I have a vague memory that he may have had discussions with the Smithsonian or other institutions about his extraordinary collection of games, but that’s not something that we’ve discussed.

BH: In the introduction to Sondheim on Music you describe the problem for musical scholars in deciphering composers’ manuscripts. You say they debate “what does this piece of marginalia mean? How should that symbol be interpreted? How was that chord supposed to function?” and that “Rarely do we have the composer’s direct commentary on how he approached his work and what his notes – both musical and textual – literally mean.” Is this the essence of the pitch you made to Sondheim when you proposed the interviews which became the book?

MH: I don’t recall making a pitch with any specifics. I don’t even think it was as much as what I put in the introduction. But I do remember having looked at his manuscripts before this grant came up and seeing things that I wondered what they meant. The project was supported by a Krasnoff Grant that paid for me to go to New York twice — first for three days to examine the manuscripts and then the three days of the filming, and it paid for the videographer and associated people to actually film and record the interviews.

BH: Tell us about the three days of interviews and how the filming was conducted. How many people were present and how long did they go on?

MH: As I recall there were three other people – camera, lights, sound – and there was a woman working on a potential Sondheim documentary and Sondheim asked if she could sit in. I said sure. I don’t remember her name and I don’t think anything came of her plans.

I would get there early, pull the boxes and folders I knew I wanted to discuss, lay things out on the table with markers and notes. Each reel lasted half-an-hour, so there would be anywhere from 5 to 15 minute breaks between. Sometimes I’d use that time to put away and set up the next batch of material I wanted to talk about.

The only really interesting thing I recall from the breaks was a story Sondheim told everyone about the time [his neighbor] Katharine Hepburn came banging on his window in the middle of the night, complaining that he was too noisy as he was composing Company.

For the original interviews, I believe we began somewhere between 10 and 11. I think I got there about an hour before to set-up and the crew probably about a half-hour before. The first day we did two-and-a-half hours of interviews, the second and third day two hours. Again, each reel of film was 30 minutes, and I’d guess an average of a 5-10 minute break between reels.

BH: Did you and Sondheim lunch together during a break? (Or, dine afterwords, for that matter.) 

MH: Alas, No. We didn’t take lunch breaks. I have had dinner with him a few other times. Once with him, Marsha Norman, and Alfred Uhry. Pulitzer Prize winners all. I like to say I was the only person at the table I’d never heard of. I think they were in town representing the Dramatists Guild, testifying before Congress. 

BH: For the second edition of the book, you conducted additional interviews. How did they go?

MH: The Bounce interview was done in an afternoon in his hotel room near the Kennedy Center – just me and a tape recorder. The “Encores” interview was done just with me and a sound guy (no video) – in an afternoon. I like to think they went well. I’ll let the readers of those chapters decide.

BH:  The interviews were originally intended simply for Library use. How did you come up with the idea of publishing them in book form?

MH: I had no idea that it might be a book — I thought it would be too rarified. But when I decided to transcribe it (at home, just for myself) the idea started to percolate when I began to realize how much actually might be accessible and of interest to a more general audience.

BH: How did Sondheim respond to your suggestion that the interviews be published in book form?

MH:  He was surprisingly amenable. I think it helped that he trusted me, and I made clear that I would run everything by him – which I did. Oh, and I did send him a sample transcript first. As I recall, I did both a word for word transcript, and then a version that tried to make it a bit more coherent, eliminating false starts, ums, repeated words, etc. He was a wonderful editor too.

BH: When he edited the transcripts did he take the opportunity to add details or stories that he’d not mentioned during the filming, or did he confine himself to cleaning up what was there?

MH: No stories were added, but he did add a few sentences to make what he was discussing clearer – usually very specific musical things. The most specific change I remember was during the interviews he couldn’t remember the “name” of the step Jerome Robbins had come up with to describe the bit where the Jets spread their arms to show they own the territory. For the transcript he remembered it was the “sailing” step. As I recall, he fixed my grammar a lot.

BH: By “your grammar” you mean your transcription of what he said, not that he corrected what you had said?

MH: I literally mean grammar – where commas, periods, semi-colons, dashes, ellipses, etc. should go. Also encouraging me to make things a bit cleaner by cutting more of the false starts and extraneous words. There was nothing about “correcting” anything that either of us actually said.

BH: Had Sondheim’s plans for what turned out to be Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat been firm in his head at the time you approached him about this project, and how did that impact the story?

MH: No. His lyric books came much later. Actually, he was just starting to work on them when I went back to do the “Encore” interview for the 2^nd edition. 

The “Encore” was my opportunity to ask questions about shows we’d never really had time to get to – Forum, Company, Follies and Night Music. And to get clarity on things I hadn’t really understood the first time.

Anyway, I think the “Encores” is a pretty good chapter. It’s slightly different than the others in that it wasn’t so much just looking at music manuscripts as my coming in with a list of pretty specific questions.

I actually became one of his reviewers [on Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat]. He would send me chapters as he completed them for me to look at. The thing I’m proudest of is I reminded him of some lyrics he’d left out and forgotten he’d written. 

BH: Can you give me details?

MH: The biggest example I can remember is he’d forgotten he’d written new lyrics for segments on “A Weekend in the Country” and “Every Day a Little Death” for the film. In fact, at first he thought I was wrong and confused, but I sent him to links on YouTube and he was shame-faced about it and rather apologetic. There were also some things he’d added to a production of Candide (this is a production after the Prince/Chelsea one [Harold Prince directed Candide in the Chelsea Theatre Center of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1973]). I also vaguely remember some cut/early versions of lyrics from a few shows – Sunday and Whistle in particular, I recall. I also brought up things like typos.

Frankly, other than the missing lyrics, I don’t think I was really giving him what he was hoping for – which was more about if he was being clear, repetitive, etc. about things. But it’s very hard for me to have the nerve to question any actual content by Sondheim.

There were a couple of places where I wasn’t sure of what he was saying, and I told him it would be helpful if he went into more detail. But, all in all it was pretty breathtakingly perfect – a fantasy of a book(s).

The one big surprise was when the first book actually came out I had had no idea there were going to be the pieces about other lyricists.

This doesn’t have to do with your question, but one added benefit that’s happened. Because he sent me each chapter as attachments in an email, I in essence have an electronic version, which means I can do word searches through his lyrics which has been enormously helpful. I’ve also had some fun, for instance, searching all the times he uses certain words.

BH: In between the time you filmed the interviews and you published the book you produced the Library of Congress’ legendary 70th Birthday Concert. The concert included the condensed version of Sondheim and Burt Shevelove’s The Frogs, with glorious new orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick, as well as an all-star presentation of songs Sondheim said he wished he’d written (at least in part) and others he said he was glad he did write. Can you tell us how that came about?

MH: That concert took over my life for a few months. There are so many things about the experience it’s hard to know where to begin. I was responsible for every aspect of planning for the concert – what songs would be sung, who would sing them, who would be the director, musical director, what would be newly orchestrated, how would the show be organized, what would be done with NPR.

I was thrilled when I got the notion of contacting all the songwriters of The Songs I Wish I’d Written list to get them to write things for the program. In general, it was a great excuse to contact all these people I was a fan of…and in some cases to begin a dialogue with. I remember being nervous about how the Library would take to including a female impersonator, Steven Brinberg [he performed Cy Coleman/Carolyn Leigh’s “When in Rome” in the persona of Barbra Streisand] … it turned out not to be a problem.

I basically wrote a “script” for the concert – having no idea what I was doing – and one of the staggering things was watching how brilliantly Nathan Lane extemporized around it – funny, clever, engaging. There were just some electric moments that are singed in my memory – “The Riddle Song,” [from the Adam Guettel/Tina Landau Floyd Collins performed by Rich Affannato and Will Gartshore from the 2000 Signature Theatre production in Arlington, Virginia] and Audra McDonald singing “My Man’s Gone Now.”

But as thrilling as the concert was, I’m prouder of all the ripples that grew out of it – The New York Times asked for a copy of The Songs I Wish I’d Written list and published it; then Barbara Cook created a show around it; “The Frogs” was recorded for the first time (and I was there). And then Nathan Lane convinced Sondheim to expand it into a new Broadway show.

BH: What was Sondheim’s reaction to your book when it finally came out?

MH: I think he’s been pleased. Certainly congratulatory. He’s recommended it to some people, and he’s asked me for extra copies with each edition.

BH: Did it come as a surprise to discover that Sondheim is so incredibly quotable? For example: “I’m someone who believes that the heart of music is harmony, as opposed to melody,” “The ear hears things that the mind does not know,” “Sometimes, you make a choice, because all the other choices seem less good,” “‘Simple’ is really hard to do,” “…without craft, I think art is nonsense” and “…teaching, which, I have said innumerable times, is the noblest profession on earth.”

MH: Until you said it, I never thought of it that way – as aphorisms – I just knew that he was a natural teacher – clear, intelligent, thoughtful, knowledgeable. I guess, if anything, I was surprised at how fulsome he would become. But if there’s one thing I credit myself for it’s the encouraging look. As much as possible, when he was on a roll, I tried not to interrupt, but just look at him, nodding and giving encouraging looks so he’d keep on going.

BH: Are the films of the interviews available for viewing at the Library or anyplace else? Or is there the possibility of them going online later?

MH: They are available for viewing at the Library. The benefit there is hearing him sing. But with the book you can actually see the music examples. They both have their pluses. At the moment there are no plans for them to go online. I hope they will someday.

BH: So do I! Has anyone done a similar project (whether or not it ended up in book form) with other artists who have deposited their papers with the Library?

MH: The Library has certainly done many videotaped interviews with people and, I myself, have done interviews with other songwriters – Randy Newman, Burt Bacharach, Jason Robert Brown – but nothing like the Sondheim. The closest I’ve come was six hours (over three days) of interviews with Jonathan Tunick, but it wasn’t with his manuscripts at hand.

BH: Is the transcript of the sessions with Tunick available online or does one have to come to the Library for that?

MH: He hasn’t given permission for the transcript to be released yet. Tunick was the hardest interview I’ve ever done. He’s extraordinarily careful and measured with his words and it sometimes seemed painfully slow to me. But, I think, the transcripts read like a dream. One would have no idea that there are long pauses.

BH: How many questions had you prepared in advance and how many came as a result of the discussion? When I was reading the book, I made a note after your question about the wrong note in bar 6 of John Hinckley playing the guitar as he made up the vamp for “Unworthy of Your Love” in Assassins. Sondheim intentionally used a “wrong” note instead of the proper F-sharp in the chord to indicate that Hinckley’s character was supposed to be musically naive. You asked, “Would this be a rare example of, if somebody does do a pop recording of the song, you would actually prefer the F-sharp be used?” My note was “An example of how good the questions are.” Was that question a result of your really listening to what he was saying and thinking about it, or did you have that one up your sleeve?

MH: I always wanted to come in with a script of questions. I would have been too nervous to wing it. And especially when it came to having selected and pulled things from the manuscripts in advance. That said, once we started, I did my best not to control too much and to let him do as much leading as possible. And if he said something I didn’t understand or wanted more information about I’d certainly ask – so sometimes it really is more of a conversation.

But in your specific example, that was definitely a question I’d come in with. And that was one I hadn’t thought of myself but had come from one of the people from whom I’d solicited questions. It might not have come to me as a question itself, but something someone mentioned to me that I hadn’t noticed. It may have been someone who had actually played the show.

BH: Where did the title/subtitle Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions come from?

MH: Sondheim on Music just seemed pretty obvious. But I think it was my brother who said something that made me think of adding Minor Details and Major Decisions. It’s funny, when it came time for this third edition, someone from the publisher’s wanted to change it to Major Details and Minor Decisions – just to make it feel new, I think. I was, of course, horrified and made clear that it missed the point entirely. Just in case, you know that that comes from his lyric from “Putting It Together” –

“Every minor detail
Is a major decision.
Have to keep things in scale,
Have to hold to your vision.”

BH: Sondheim is known as a great teacher and the book includes a host of lessons on a wide range of topics relating to the musical theater and music in general. Take his discussion of the difference between the songwriting approach of Hammerstein (“song being little scenes and necessary to telling the story”) and the Shevelove approach for Forum for a song to “savor the moment.” At another point in a discussion of opening numbers he teaches that, “The whole point of an opening number is to not only lay out the ground rules for the audience, but to tell them where they are. Just like Oklahoma! did …”

There are also lessons from his own studies in preparation for shows, such as the detail he goes into on the dabs versus dots of Seurat’s technique that was so important for Sunday in the Park with George.

There’s so much more here than music … there’s a wealth of material on work habits and procedures. For instance, composing a score from start to end chronologically, or how he uses out of town tryouts – he says, “you sit with the audience. If you’re real smart, you pay no attention to applause, you pay no attention to coughing. You pay attention to concentration.”

MH: You’re touching on what was my pleasantest surprise. I really thought in advance that these interviews were probably going to be very technical and truly just of interest (or even accessible) to musicians. I was thrilled when it was over to realize the wide variety of materials that it also covered.

BH: Are there questions that have occurred to you after the fact that you wish you had asked?

MH: Yes and no. I’ve had various follow-up interviews where I’ve been able to ask him questions. I sometimes email him with questions that come to me – not for the book, just curiosity.

Doing the “Biography of a Song” articles [Horowitz wrote ten articles examining the development of individual Sondheim songs for Show Music magazine between 2005 and 2008] I got a lot of wonderful unexpected stuff. But most of the things that occur are very, very specific and aren’t, I think, really something that would have been important for the book.

I’ve always felt tension in how the word “too” is used in “Good Thing Going” – in the lyric “And if I wanted too much, was that such a mistake…”. What exactly is the “too” modifying – is it that the wanting itself was too intense, or that too much was wanted? That’s an example of some of the specific kinds of questions that occur to me. But I don’t think the book is any the less for not including things like that.

BH: Have others approached you with questions you wish you had asked?

MH: Probably. But remember Steve’s mantra – “less is more.”

BH: Is that why you subtitled the new paperback version of the book “The Less is More Edition?”

MH: Since we cut the song listing and discography (which was out of date anyway) we wanted to make sure people would know up-front that there was less in this edition — though not something truly substantive. In a way it’s “more” because it’s cheaper and easier to handle…plus it does have an additional chapter.

BH: Tell us about your current project.

MH: I’m transcribing Oscar Hammerstein’s correspondence. What I think/hope will happen now is that there will first be a book of very highly selected correspondence, and then later the Library will do a website that will include everything I transcribe.

To date I’ve done over 2,200 pages of transcription.

What I can tell you is that I have fallen head over heels in love with Oscar – for many reasons – and feel I may now know him more fully than just about anyone else does (not that there’s a contest).

I’m beginning to feel that, in some ways, this project may be the most important thing I do in my career…it will certainly be close to the Sondheim.

[Brad Hathaway covered theater throughout the Washington, D.C., area for over a decade.  He’s best known in the National Capital area for his work as the editor and reviewer for Potomac Stages from 2001 to 2010.  Among the publications that have featured his writing are the Hill Rag, the Connection Newspapers of Northern Virginia, Show Music Magazine, the Sondheim Review, and American Theatre.  As a member of the American Theater Critics Association, he hosted their 2008 annual conference in Washington and currently serves on that association’s executive committee and as its treasurer.  Hathaway received a League of Washington Theatres’ Offstage Honors Award for contributions to the Washington theater community.

[Launched in 2016 as an offshoot of the Sondheim Review, Everything Sondheim was conceived as quarterly on-line magazine and website providing information about the works and career of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.  In January 2018, Everything Sondheim was acquired by the Signature Theatre.  (Arlington’s Signature Theatre, which specializes in musical theater, is not associated with New York City’s Signature Theatre Company.)]