Ben’s new folly song, like his new duet with Phyllis, constitutes the most radical change of tone between 1971 and 1987. Rather than breaking down as he did in “Live, Laugh, Love,” with newly acquired equanimity Ben tells his 1987 audiences not “to disclose yourself” but to “compose yourself” as he sings “Make the Most of Your Music.” Among the ironies of the song—and perhaps also its subtext—with its instructions to “Make the most of the music that is yours,” is Sondheim’s decision to begin Ben’s song with a quotation from the opening of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto set to words in the vocal line (in the orchestra alone the related opening of Tchaikovsky’s first Piano Concerto directly follows).92 Ben initially considers himself “something big league” along with “Tchaikovsky and Grieg.” Soon, however, he advises his admirers that even if they are unable to produce a work like Debussy’s Clair de Lune, they can “make the most of the music that is yours” and eventually produce music that “soars.” Whatever Sondheim is saying about the relative merits of Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Debussy, Sondheim himself might be accused in this rare case of not practicing what his character preaches.
Although Sondheim’s new songs were expressly composed for this revival rather than for other shows, the results are not dissimilar. In fact, the 1987 London Follies, with its rewritten book and deleted, reordered, and new songs, is clearly analogous to Porter’s Anything Goes in its 1962 and 1987 reincarnations, and perhaps even more closely akin to the changes in Show Boat between 1927 and 1946. Just as the comic, even farcical, touches added to Bernstein’s 1974 Candide (including Sondheim’s own new lyric for “Life Is Happiness Indeed”) no doubt contributed to its newfound success, perhaps at Voltaire’s expense, the more upbeat 1987 Follies might eventually have found the audience it lost in 1971. But it did not. Despite its relative grimness, the original 1971 Follies soon replaced the 1987 book.93
In his conversations with Mark Horowitz, Sondheim explains that he went along with Goldman’s and Cameron Mackintosh’s ideas about changing Follies for London, but like Goldman and eventually even Mackintosh, he voiced his strong preference for the earlier version: “It might have turned out better. It didn’t. And when it didn’t, I said: I don’t want this show ever shown in America, and I made it legally certain that the London version can never be shown here. I don’t want it shown again in England either, but Cameron has the right to do it. But Cameron’s given in now too, and there was just a production in Leicester last year, and it’s the original.”94 As George says in Sunday in the Park with George’s “Putting It Together,” “If no one gets to see it, it’s as good as dead.” This is a good description of the 1987 London Follies.
The Art of Compromise
By the end of Sondheim’s Company, Robert, the bachelor protagonist, has learned that compromise is an essential feature of marriage. The ambiguity that three of Robert’s married male friends feel toward their wives and their marriages, expressed relatively early in the evening in “Sorry-Grateful,” culminates in Robert’s final readiness to share their fate, “Being Alive.” It is widely known that “Being Alive” was Sondheim’s fourth attempt at a final song for Robert.95 “Marry Me a Little,” which expressed Robert’s unwillingness to compromise, has found a secure place, albeit a new place, in the revised book of Company. The extraordinarily biting “Happily Ever After” described a marriage that ends “happily ever after in hell.” The marriage envisioned in “Being Alive” is far from perfect, but advocates of marriage can take heart that Robert has come to realize that “alone is alone, not alive.” In his autobiography, Contradictions, Prince voiced his continued dissatisfaction with this final song, which he felt “imposed a happy ending on a play which should have remained ambiguous.” Otherwise, Prince concludes his chapter on Company by saying that this show “represents the first time I had worked without conscious compromise.” The producer in Prince was doubly pleased with its profit, however small, since “that is what commercial theatre must ask of itself.”96
Follies, which explores the compromise of ideals in the lives of two unfulfilled married couples, lost most of its backers’ money because of its creators’ refusal to compromise and offer a lighter touch. The characters in Sondheim’s (and Prince’s) next musical, A Little Night Music, may need to discover their true feelings and are subjected to humiliation in the process, but at least they do not have to compromise them. The compromises were artistic ones and occurred offstage, at least according to Prince, who wrote in his memoirs sardonically that “mostly Night Music was about having a hit.”97
In Pacific Overtures (1976), generally perceived as a less compromising musical than Night Music, the formerly obedient feudal vassal Kayama forsakes ancient traditions in order to profit financially from his new Western trading partners. In act II, Kayama sports “A Bowler Hat” and a pocket watch, pours milk in his tea, and smokes American cigars. The eponymous anti-hero in Sweeney Todd (1979) and the infamous historical murderers and would-be murderers in Assassins (1991) relinquish their moral decency for the sake of revenge, notoriety, or other misguided ideals. Into the Woods (1987) concludes with abandoned, deceived, and disillusioned fairy-tale characters who have compromised their innocence but now understand that “No One Is Alone.” Some, such as Martin Gottfried, find the moralizing tone of Into the Woods platitudinous, yet a critic as rigorous as Stephen Banfield assesses this show as “Sondheim’s finest achievement yet.”98
In his first two shows of the 1980s, Merrily We Roll Along and Sunday in the Park with George, Sondheim directly confronted the issue of artistic compromise in his own work, an issue previously faced more obliquely by several of Broadway’s spiritual fathers surveyed in earlier chapters. On Your Toes addresses the dichotomy between art music and popular music and The Cradle Will Rock offers a devastating attack on compromising artists, but Merrily and Sunday may be unprecedented in the degree to which they explore the creative process and commercial pressures on artists. Merrily tells the disconcerting story of a Broadway composer, Franklin Shepard, who has sold out his ideals and his artistic soul, the road pointedly not taken by Sondheim. Sunday presents two portraits of artists. In act I we meet a fictionalized but nevertheless once-real artist in 1884, the uncompromising painter Georges Seurat, who refused to sell out. In fact, Seurat reportedly never sold a painting in his lifetime. One hundred years later in act II, we meet his great-grandson, also an artist named George, a man who evolves from a compromising sculptor grubbing for grants and commissions to a genuine artist more like Seurat by the end of the evening.
Since Merrily is told in reverse, the disintegration of this Broadway Faust is all the more disturbing. When we first meet Franklin Shepard in 1980 as the graduation speaker of his former high school (a scene dropped from the 1985 revival), the once idealistic but now artistically sterile Broadway composer tells “young innocents a few realities” and introduces them to the two words that symbolize his abandoned ideals, “practical” and “compromise.” The older Frank says “compromise is how you survive”; the younger Frank answers that compromise is “how you give up.”
Twenty years earlier, but much later in the show, Franklin, his high school classmate and present collaborator Charley Kringas, and their mutual friend Mary Flynn, an aspiring novelist, sing “Opening Doors.” Sondheim has acknowledged the autobiographical aspect to this song: “If there is one number that is really me writing about me, it is ‘Opening Doors.’ That was my life for a number of years. It is a totally personal number. Luckily it fits into the piece.”99 In this song Frank and Charley are creating their first show, auditioning the material, facing rejection and disappointment, and struggling to reject compromising alternatives. Charley is typing and Frank is composing “Good Thing Going,” heard in its completed state earlier in the show when Frank and Charley sing it at a party in 1962. This is the party where Frank tells Mary, now a critic who has forsaken her dream to write a great American novel, that he has not composed the music for his own recent film. In fa
ct, Frank has long since abandoned his creative partnership with Charley, who did not sell out, yet has become a distinguished playwright. Frank may be “Rich and Happy” in 1970, but he is also morally and artistically bankrupt and sad. By the end of Shepard’s career, which real-life audiences witnessed with disappointment near the beginning of the show, the selling of an artistic soul is complete.
In the creation of “Opening Doors,” Frank experiences considerable difficulty going beyond the opening phrase, which, not incidentally, is the phrase that most clearly resembles the idealistic anthem that he and Charley composed for their high school graduation (both at the opening and toward the close of the musical in its original production).100 When Mary calls to tell Frank that she is about to abandon her principles and her novel by taking commercial writing jobs, she sings this same opening phrase. Later in the song Charley and Frank audition the first several phrases of their future hit song for a wary producer, Joe Josephson.
Even without Sondheim’s admission, reaffirmed at the March 2008 public interview in Portland with Frank Rich, it would be difficult to overlook the autobiographical component of Josephson’s criticism, so closely does it correspond to the critical reactions which the modernist Sondheim, a close contemporary of the fictional Mr. Shepard, had by then been facing for more than two decades. Ironically, however, when Josephson tells them that “There’s not a tune you can hum.—/ There’s not a tune you go bum-bum-bum-didum” or that he will let them “know when Stravinsky has a hit,” he sings Frank’s tune. After this initial rejection, Charley and Frank continue to pitch their song. Josephson then abruptly dismisses them and sings his own: “Write more, work hard,—/ Leave your name with the girl.—/ Less avant-garde.”
At this moment the ghost of Rodgers and Hammerstein returns to haunt Sondheim as well as Franklin Shepard. The “plain old melodee dee dee dee dee dee” that Josephson desires is none other than the chestnut, “Some Enchanted Evening,” from South Pacific. Characteristically, Josephson does not know the words to this familiar classic and apparently does not even realize that he is trying to hum a Rodgers and Hammerstein song. In addition to several conspicuously incorrect pitches, Josephson also sings its opening musical phrase completely outside of its proper metrical foundation (with an extra quarter-note within a measure of 4/4 time, one extra beat too many for the measure).
Sondheim is reinforcing what we all know: that in 1958 as well as in 1981 a Rodgers tune was and is the ideal Broadway theater song and the standard by which Shepard—and Sondheim—will be measured. In defiance of this expectation, Charley and Frank refuse to alter their work and write a Rodgers and Hammerstein-type song, and instead join with Mary to create something new and all their own, an original revue. Within a few years the rejected song becomes a hit song in Frank and Charley’s new Broadway show, produced by Josephson. By the 1980s, people everywhere were beginning to hum Sondheim’s songs, too, and by the 1990s and 2000s more and more could be heard out of their original stage contexts in cabaret theaters, recordings, and television.101 And although few, if any, of his songs match the familiarity of “Send in the Clowns,” and of course many songs by Rodgers, Sondheim’s songs have belatedly begun to receive broader recognition. Paradoxically, what was uncommercial has become, to an extent, evergreen (and belatedly commercial as well).
The fin-de-siècle classical modernists are rarely accused of compromising their ideals, but they are, like Sondheim and Seurat, equally faulted for lacking artistic passion. Sondheim also shares with his modernist counterparts a profound awareness of his classic predecessors and self-consciously responds to his tradition in varied and profound ways. Just as the European modernists recreate the past in their own image, so Sondheim pays allegiance to and reinterprets his tradition and makes it his own. At the center of this tradition are the integrated musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Sondheim’s one-time collaborator and long-time mentor, respectively. Sondheim’s shows depart from the Rodgers and Hammerstein models stylistically and dramaturgically, especially in their subject matter and in their use of time and space. But at least from Company on they preserve the concept of the integrated musical. As with Rodgers and Hammerstein, the morethan-occasionally compromising characters in a Sondheim musical sing lyrics and music that reveal their essences and nuances and move the drama, narrative or non-narrative, uncompromisingly forward.
Sondheim, like Seurat and his modernist musical counterparts, Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, has long since demonstrated his ability to move on, to learn from the example of his mentor Hammerstein who wrote “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and to give the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition renewed life in “No One Is Alone.” Throughout his more than fifty-year career on Broadway, Sondheim has successfully combined the musical trappings of musical modernism and created works that encompass an extremely broad dramatic range. Like Beethoven, who radically reinterpreted the classical style without abandoning its fundamental principles, in a larger sense Sondheim’s modernism might also be construed as a reinterpretation rather than a revolution. Nevertheless, despite this allegiance to the innovative but traditional principles of Hammerstein and Robbins, Sondheim’s music is more dissonant and less tonal than his predecessors’—with the possible exception of Bernstein’s tritone-laden West Side Story—and his characters are usually more neurotic and even occasionally psychotic.
Like Seurat and the modern George, Sondheim is willing to rethink his theatrical legacy to say something new. The ingenious incorporation of past models in the pastiches of Follies would reappear in subsequent shows, most extensively and literally in Assassins.102 In this respect, Sondheim’s shows are very much analogous to Show Boat, On Your Toes, The Cradle Will Rock, and West Side Story, to name only the musicals discussed in the present survey that prominently display popular and classical allusions. Sondheim succeeded in moving the Broadway musical to a new phase through words and music supported by imaginative solutions to perennial dramatic problems. At the same time, Sondheim’s approach to the musical can be placed firmly in the great tradition from Show Boat to West Side Story. The Broadway musical from the 1920s to the 1950s could hardly ask for a worthier heir or more enchanted evenings.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
The Reigning Champion of Broadway
The Lloyd Webber Problem
The composer’s career was thus marked by popular success and critical doubt; in the years since his death, these motifs have remained central to his musical and musicological reputation…. For some time his works remained objects of contempt, and even when he was not openly derided, he was often conspicuous by his absence, failing to merit more than a cursory mention in many supposedly “comprehensive” studies of the American and British musical.1
The above panegyric, purposely misquoted, contains one important omission that should be cleared up without delay. In place of the anonymous “composer’s career,” the author of the passage, Alexandra Wilson, put forward a particular composer. The composer named by Wilson in her critical reception study The Puccini Problem is actually Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), who composed operas rather than musicals and received little more than “cursory mention in many supposedly ‘comprehensive’ studies of twentieth-century music,” rather than in “studies of the American and British musical” as misstated in the passage. Instead of the anonymous “composer’s career,” try to imagine the name Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948) at the outset of the excerpt. Aside from the not unimportant fact that Lloyd Webber, at the time this second edition of Enchanted Evenings is written (2008), is only sixty years old and still quite active in the musical theater domain, the parallels in reception history between Lloyd Webber and Puccini are arguably present, perhaps uncannily so. The composer of The Phantom of the Opera has, in fact, like Puccini, so far endured an unresolved dissonance between high popularity and great wealth on the one hand and relatively low critical stature and recognition on the other. Before resuming our focus on the critic
al contradictions that surround the remarkable career of Lloyd Webber, it will be useful to review its well-known highlights.
While still a teenager, Andrew, the talented son of a prominent composer and teacher at the London College of Music, William Lloyd Webber, teamed up with Tim Rice to write a fifteen-minute staged cantata based on the biblical story of Joseph and many brothers for the students of a boys’ school, Colet Court, in 1968. A slightly longer version was recorded and then expanded still further into a full-length musical that was performed in London in 1972 as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. By that time, Lloyd Webber and Rice in 1970 had produced a two-record concept rock album based on another biblical theme, the last days of Christ told from the perspective of his betrayer Judas Iscariot. Jesus Christ Superstar, a stage realization of this album, significantly sung throughout, became a modest hit in New York in 1971 and a major hit when it opened in London the following year.
Andrew Lloyd Webber in 2004.
After the failure of the first version of the more traditional Jeeves (1975; revised as By Jeeves in 1996) with the playwright Alan Ayckbourn, the following year Lloyd Webber and Rice produced another two-record concept album in a mixture of rock and Latin styles based on the stormy life and early death of Eva Peron, the controversial and charismatic wife of Argentina’s authoritarian leader Juan Peron. Under the guidance of Harold Prince, Evita, first in London (1978) and the next year in New York, developed into another successful through-sung musical (i.e., with minimal spoken dialogue) on a provocative political theme. In retrospect, it is clear that Evita, the longest running imported musical until that time, was the true launching pad for the second British musical theater revolution (the first being the comparably earth-shaking arrival of Gilbert and Sullivan exactly one century earlier). By the time he was thirty, Lloyd Webber thus had created three significant works for the musical stage. The greatest successes would follow in the next decade.
Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Page 48
