Stephen Sondheim. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM
It is possible to make the analogy between Babbitt’s allegedly “total” serialization and Sondheim’s allegedly “modernist” musicals, aided and abetted by extraordinarily thoughtful and creative choreographers, directors, scene designers, and orchestrators, which really expand upon, rather than discard, the traditions established by earlier acknowledged masterpieces. Like Babbitt, who only seemed to break with the past while really extending Schoenberg’s aesthetics as well as his methods, Sondheim expanded on the insights and achievement of Hammerstein and other predecessors in what had become, by the 1950s, a great American musical tradition. Following the example of his theatrical mentors, Hammerstein, Shevelove, and Laurents, the revolutionary traditionalist Sondheim would continue to probe into the nuances of his complex characters and the meaning of his dramatic subjects, achieving moments of moving emotional directness as well as dazzling verbal and artistic pyrotechnics.
The Prince Years (1970–1981): Sweeney Todd
While the so-called integrated musical remained very much alive after West Side Story, the next step in dramatic organicism, the so-called concept musical, where “all elements of the musical, thematic and presentational, are integrated to suggest a central theatrical image or idea,” began to receive notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s.27 Sondheim and his collaborators, especially Jerome Robbins, Michael Bennett, Harold Prince, Boris Aronson, who designed the first four Prince-Sondheim collaborations with striking originality, and several excellent librettists (George Furth, James Goldman, John Weidman, and Hugh Wheeler), were in the forefront of this development. Musicals based more on themes than on narrative action were no more new in the 1960s than the integrated musicals were in the 1940s. Nevertheless, earlier concept musicals, for example, the revue As Thousands Cheer in 1933 (arguably all revues are concept musicals), book musicals such as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro (1947), or Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life (1948)—like the precociously integrated Show Boat and Porgy and Bess explored in the present survey—deviate from what Max Weber or Carl Dahlhaus would call an “ideal type.”28 In any event, the pioneering concept musicals of the late 1940s, Allegro and Love Life, failed to inspire a flock of popularly successful followers. In the 1970s, Sondheim and his collaborators were clearly critically central Broadway figures, even though they garnered only relatively limited live audiences, while more popular artists such as Andrew Lloyd Webber or Stephen Schwartz were marginalized and criticized, probably unfairly, for their alleged aesthetic vacuities.
Perhaps more than any single individual, the inspiration in the move toward the concept musical ideal was Robbins, who early in his career had established thematic meaning through movement and dance as the choreographer of The King and I (1951) and as the director-choreographer for Sondheim’s first Broadway efforts, West Side Story and Gypsy. Robbins was notorious for relentlessly asking, “What is this show about?,” a question that led to the late (and uncredited) insertion of “Comedy Tonight” in Forum to inform audiences and prepare them for what they might expect in the course of the evening. Robbins’s insistence on getting an answer to this probing question soon led to the show-opener “Tradition” in Fiddler on the Roof (1964), a song that embodied an overriding idea (rather than an action) that could unify and conceptualize a show.
After Fiddler, the concept musical was principally championed by Prince (b. 1928–), who had co-produced two of the above-mentioned Robbins shows (West Side Story and Fiddler). Prince also directed and produced John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Cabaret, Zorbá, the considerably altered 1974 hit revival of Bernstein’s Candide, and produced the first four of the six Sondheim shows he directed from Company in 1970 to Merrily We Roll Along in 1981.29 While producing or co-producing such major hits as The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, West Side Story, Fiorello!, and, with Sondheim, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (with Sondheim), and Fiddler on the Roof between 1953 and 1964, Prince came into his own as a producer-director with Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s She Loves Me (1963). The use of a German cabaret as a metaphor for pre–World War II German decadence in Cabaret exemplifies Prince’s continuation of the concept idea developed by Robbins.
Arguably, the Sondheim-Prince standard of the concept musical—in the absence of a more meaningful term—throughout the 1970s, with the non-linear Company as its iconic exemplar, was in the end, like most of Sondheim’s work with other collaborators, less a revolution than a reinterpretation of the integrated musical.30 In line with high-modernist aestheticism, narrative structures became more avowedly experimental in the Robbins-Sondheim-Prince “concept” era, and ambitious attempts to expand the expressive scope of the musical were also in vogue. Open appeals to a broad audience Lloyd Webber-Schwartz style, perhaps borrowed from rock, were as critically suspect as a pop song by Babbitt might have been in the same era. Nevertheless, at least one influential director, Prince, managed to navigate through the treacherous shores of the Broadway aesthetic divide.
During the Sondheim years Prince also collaborated with the man this volume has singled out in its Epilogue as the other major Broadway composer who flourished from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, Lloyd Webber (see chapter 16). In a dazzling display of Prince’s versatility, the Lloyd Webber-Prince collaboration, Evita, appeared only a few months after Sweeney. In addition to his work with Sondheim, Bernstein, Kander and Ebb, and Lloyd Webber, Prince during these years managed to direct On the Twentieth Century with yet another composer, Cy Coleman (with the legendary librettist-lyricists Comden and Green). Coleman was another distinguished composer with a long career that flourished during the Sondheim-Lloyd Webber era in musicals from Wildcat and Sweet Charity in the 1960s to City of Angels, Will Rogers Follies, and The Life in the late 1980s and 1990s. By the later 1990s, Prince had received more Tony Awards, twenty-one, than anyone since the awards were established in the later 1940s. Of these, no less than eight were bestowed in his capacity as director: Cabaret, Company, Follies (shared with Michael Bennett), the Candide revival of 1974, Sweeney Todd, Evita, Phantom of the Opera, and the Show Boat revival of 1994. The quantity and range of Prince’s achievement is nothing short of staggering. This chapter will focus on selected moments in the historic collaboration between Prince and Sondheim.
Although Prince and Sondheim had been friends since 1949—according to Prince’s recollection they met on the opening night of South Pacific—and Prince had co-produced West Side Story and produced Forum, Company was the first of the six Sondheim productions he either directed, or in the case of Follies, co-directed (with Bennett). These six shows, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily We Roll Along, form a remarkable group. We have already noted the historical and artistic significance assigned to Company and an example of subtext in Follies.
Each musical in the first trilogy of Sondheim-Prince shows, Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music, earned Sondheim Tony and Drama Critics Circle Awards for best score. This was a major critical achievement, if not always a financial one. Company and Night Music earned some profit despite relatively modest runs, 706 and 601 performances and profits of $56,000 and $97,500 respectively, while the more lavish Follies lost $665,000 of its $700,000 investment during its 522 performance run.31 As a tie-in with the “nostalgia” revival along with the more successful revival of Vincent Youmans’s No, No, Nanette (1925) in 1971, Follies even appeared on the cover of Time magazine.32 Only Night Music, however, was spared the criticism that Sondheim was destined to share with another early twentieth-century modernist, Igor Stravinsky, who was also, unfairly, accused of cynicism, coldness, and “bloodlessness.” In the waning days of high modernism, Sondheim was neither high nor low, but somewhere in between. Thus he suffered from some critics’ binary high/low expectations. Like Stravinsky in his early Ballet Russe pe
riod (Firebird, Petrushka, Rite of Spring), Sondheim was delightfully novel for some in the audience, and yet still not too cerebral and difficult (at least some of the time) for the mass of musical theatergoers with more traditional expectations of a diverting night out with a happy ending.
The career of Sondheim marks, perhaps for the first time, not only the consistent failure of a composer of the most highly regarded musicals of his generation to produce blockbusters on Broadway, but even major song hits (Night Music’s “Send in the Clowns” is the exception that proves the rule).33Pacific Overtures, competing in the same season as A Chorus Line and Chicago, lost its entire investment as well as most of the Tonys. Sweeney Todd, which lost about half of its million dollar investment, received more than half of the major Tony awards, including those for best actor (Len Cariou), actress (Angela Lansbury), director (Prince), scenic design (Eugene Lee), costume design (Franne Lee), book (Wheeler), best score (Sondheim), and best show.
Sweeney Todd as Melodrama and as Opera
Within a short time Sweeney Todd also earned classic status among critics and cognoscenti as perhaps Sondheim and Prince’s finest effort. Even those who prefer other Sondheim shows regard this score as one of the composer’s richest. In 2007, Sweeney Todd gained hordes of new converts via its acclaimed and reasonably popular (by Hollywood standards) transfer to film by director Tim Burton starring Johnny Depp. While many regard the work as one of the great musicals of the post–Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, others consider it to be one of the greatest operas composed by an American. It will be helpful to try to understand what genre Sweeney Todd represents and what is at stake in the formulation.
With the exception of national comic opera traditions, which alternate between spoken dialogue and songs (the latter known in operas as arias)—the Singspiel in Germany and Austria (The Magic Flute), the opéra comique in France (Carmen in its original form), the ballad opera in England (The Beggar’s Opera)—opera in the European classical tradition tends to be through-sung (i.e., sung throughout without spoken dialogue). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, composers presented a strong contrast between arias and sung speech (recitative). Although less so for Verdi and Puccini than for Wagner and Strauss, as the nineteenth century progressed and moved into the twentieth, recitative often became more like arias and the arias more like recitative. For the most part—we have already looked at two such exceptions, Porgy and Bess and The Most Happy Fella—Broadway musicals adopted the national comic traditions that go back to Beggar’s Opera in the eighteenth century and Gilbert and Sullivan in the nineteenth: spoken dialogue interrupted by song, or vice versa, depending on your point of view.
In distinguishing between operas and musicals, what is arguably more important than measuring amounts of song and speech is asking whether significant dramatic moments are sung or spoken. After the death of Tristan, his beloved Isolde must sing, and sing she does. Until a late stage in the creative process, Maria was going to sing, and Bernstein remained hopeful that he would be able to come up with effective love-death music to serve the dramatic moment after the death of Tony. For Bernstein, spoken dialogue for Maria was an option. If West Side Story were unequivocally an opera, Maria, like Isolde, would have no choice. She would sing.
The fact that by Sondheim’s estimation 80 percent of the first act of Sweeney Todd is through-sung seems to locate the work more in the direction of opera.34 Furthermore, much of the dialogue (the other 20%) is delivered over an orchestral backdrop. Dialogue over underscoring in fact is a key component in the traditional definition of melodrama, a word frequently used to describe Sweeney Todd—and used by Sondheim. Melodramatic story lines also are expected to be “thrilling,” with the audience in on violence to come (while the characters on stage are unaware) and occasionally moved to yell remarks such as “Don’t open the door” at evidently clueless players. Well-known operatic examples of early nineteenth-century melodrama include portions of Beethoven’s Fidelio and Carl Maria von Weber’s (not Lloyd Webber’s) Der Freischütz. Schoenberg adapted the technique to create a spooky heightened speech known as Sprechstimme in his chamber song cycle Pierrot Lunaire in 1912.
Sondheim loved melodrama. In fact, he found not only the inspiration but the source for his own version of Sweeney Todd when he attended a telling of the tale in an exceptionally artful melodramatic play by Christopher Bond at a theater known for putting on the genre in London. Perhaps idiosyncratically, Sondheim also considered the melodrama compatible with high art. At the same time, he acknowledges that in calling Sweeney Todd a musical thriller instead of a musical melodrama, he could circumvent some of the genre’s negative connotations, including its extravagant theatricality, the emphasis of plot over characters who are prone to be one-dimensional, and the sensationalism of the form. For Sondheim, “Melodrama is theater that is larger than life—in emotion, in subject, and in complication of plot.”35Sweeney Todd admirably fits this description.
Early in their collaborative process Sondheim and his librettist Hugh Wheeler “wanted to make a melodrama but with a twentieth-century sensibility,” and they wanted audiences to take the subject as seriously as audiences took nineteenth-century versions.36 Sondheim wanted both the story and the music “to scare an audience out of its wits,” but not with cheap theatrical thrills.37 In Sondheim’s view, “The true terror of melodrama comes from its revelations about the frightening power of what is inside human beings.”38 He also expressed his intention to achieve in a musical what Christopher Bond achieved in the play that inspired Sondheim, “which is to make Sweeney a tragic hero instead of a villain, because there is something of Sweeney in all of us,” even if most of us elect not to become serial killers.39
Sondheim’s interpretation of what Sweeney Todd is all about differed from Prince’s initial concept. Prince wanted the show to be about “how society makes you impotent, and impotence leads to rage, and rage leads to murder—and in fact, to the breaking down of society.”40 Sondheim credits Prince with developing this socially critical perspective in his setting of the story but does not identify with it. Instead, Sondheim interprets Sweeney Todd as a musical about an individual’s psychological obsession, an obsession that leads to revenge and murder.
Bernstein was not alone in his inability to find a musical solution for a major dramatic moment, in his case a final aria for Maria. Sondheim too has acknowledged that he was originally unable to determine how to musicalize eight scenes of Sweeney Todd, five of which he found solutions for after the fact: “I sort of figured the five, but I’ve never gotten around to doing them. I thought I would do them for the National Theatre production in London [1993], but Julia McKenzie said: ‘Oh, please don’t give me anything new to learn. Please don’t give me anything new to learn.’ That was all the incentive I needed not to work, so I didn’t do it.”41 Sondheim specifically identifies one of these scenes as “the trio in the second act, which I’d always wanted to do, where Mrs. Lovett tries to poison the Beadle.”42 Bernstein faced a creative impasse and Sondheim a time crunch and, as a result, dramatic moments in West Side Story and Sweeney are today spoken rather than sung.
Some critics consider the absence of music for such important moments a dramatic flaw or a lost opportunity, especially the final moments of Sweeney, which are occupied by a speaking rather than a singing Tobias. Sondheim scholar Stephen Banfield considers the brighter side of the musical respite: “Sondheim says that there are five spoken sections of the show that he would like to set to music one day. One of them is the ending. The last three minutes of plot involve very little music: after Todd has sung his last word, even the underscoring peters out and leaves the stage to Tobias’s last speech and still more to the silence of mime. It remained unsung and unplayed simply because Sondheim did not have time to add music before the production opened.” And yet: “Sweeney Todd, even if by authorial default at this point, demonstrates the dramatic potency and rightness of music’s self-denial in this genre that is not ope
ra, just as Maria’s final speech does in West Side Story.”43
Bernstein’s lack of inspiration and Sondheim’s lack of time may have played a role in the musical silence of Maria and Tobias, and some may continue to lament the absence of music within the finales of each show. It is also worth mentioning that in its present form Tobias may have the last words but Sweeney has the last musical word (in West Side Story Maria’s speech is similarly followed by a moving musical death procession). When Sweeney dies, so does the music. Only in the epilogue do the characters (including Sweeney) return to sing “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” one last time. On stage, Tobias needs to kill Sweeney, but he does not need to sing. In the film version, his final speech is also removed. As with Maria and West Side Story, if Sweeney Todd were an opera, neither Tobias nor Sondheim would have a choice; everything would be sung.
Banfield insightfully captures a crucial distinction between opera and musicals that gets lost in the shuffle when brooding critics focus with Sweeney Todd-like obsession on how much is sung and whether trained opera singers or singing actors are best equipped to handle the demands of the latter genre:
Yet we must again stress that Sondheim’s way of privileging music within melodrama is not opera’s way. The pacing of his sung verbal language remains that of spoken drama, rather than being, as in opera, subservient to the slower and longer-spanned emotional arcs of music. Thus, unlike most opera composers, he does not draw out syllables to unnaturalistic length, nor does he repeat verbal phrases except in a refrain context; the book of Sweeney Todd is consequently a good deal fatter than a printed opera libretto. Coupled with this verbal fecundity, he retains wit, colloquialism, and (taking the word in a neutral sense, as building action into the delivery) pantomime as governing Affekts in his songs, whose verbal values thereby remain those of the musical theater.44
Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Page 44
