Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber
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21. Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 64.
22. Ibid., 70.
23. Ibid., 70–71.
24. Ibid., 71.
25. Hammerstein, “In Re ‘Oklahoma!,’” 11.
26. Babbitt’s encyclopedic knowledge of popular music of the 1920s and 1930s and his aborted aspirations to composing popular music in the 1940s are less widely known. For those familiar with the breadth of his interests it is not surprising that in addition to teaching the European classics, Babbitt would also analyze the popular songs of DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson, Kern, Rodgers, and Gershwin “with exactly the same serious tone.” See Eugene R. Hubert, ed., “A Conversation with Stephen Sondheim” (typescript), quoted in Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 22.
27. Gordon, Art Isn’t Easy, 7. See also Steven Swayne, How Sondheim Found His Sound, 257–59, and Block, “Integration,” forthcoming.
28. Sondheim remarked in an interview that “Moss Hart did a concept musical. His Thousands Cheer was a concept musical in 1933. Concept musicals have existed forever.” Quoted in Ilson, 195. For an application of the “ideal type” to the Broadway musical, see Block, “The Broadway Canon,” 537–39 and note 15.
29. See Foster Hirsch, Harold Prince, and Carol Ilson, Harold Prince.
30. The use of the concept musical on behalf of the integrated ideal is analogous to the practice of classical modernists (for example, Schoenberg and later Sondheim’s teacher Babbitt), who offered increasingly complex exhibitions of motivic unity to generate new heights in organicism.
31. Prince, Contradictions, 231. Ethan Mordden’s take on whether Follies should be considered a failure is worth quoting: “Obviously, in days of lower costs, a hit made money and a flop lost money. But by 1971, hits lost money. No show that wins Follies’ awards and runs over a year and eventually gets four major recordings, all the while becoming a classic by any standard of measurement, can be called a failure” (Mordden, One More Kiss, 40). Twenty years later, Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, another relatively long-running, award-winning hit, managed to lose $25 million.
32. In his informative Everything Was Possible, Ted Chapin includes the Newsweek design that featured Follies on the cover. The caption reads: “Both Time and Newsweek were planning to do cover stories of the show. However, they never liked to run the same ‘soft’-news covers, so when Time went forward with theirs, Newsweek canceled, but not before this cover was designed” (Chapin, second page of photo inserts between 144 and 145).
33. Considering the alleged absence of song hits, one cannot help but be struck by the frequency and popularity of revues and other retrospectives based on Sondheim songs, especially Side by Side by Sondheim (1976) and Putting It Together (1993).
34. Sondheim (with Prince), “Author and Director” (published in 1985), 357.
35. Sondheim, “Larger than Life: Reflections on Melodrama and Sweeney Todd,” 3.
36. Ibid., 6.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 10.
40. Ibid., 11.
41. Mark Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, 155.
42. Ibid., 155.
43. Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 290.
44. Ibid., 291.
45. Sondheim, “Interview with Stephen Sondheim,” 1988, 229.
46. Sondheim, “Larger than Life: Reflections on Melodrama and Sweeney Todd,” 10–11.
47. Craig Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 246.
48. Sondheim, “The Art of the Musical,” 274. Banfield points out that the chord Sondheim labeled as his “Sweeney chord” (a minor seventh with the seventh in the bass, C-D-F-A) and which appears only rarely in the score—for example, the last chord of the Judge’s version of “Johanna”—is in any event not the same as the Hanover Square chord (a diminished triad with an added major seventh, spelled as a diminished octave, G-B-D-G) (Banfield, 305–7).
49. Sondheim (with Prince), “Author and Director,” 365.
50. Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 248.
51. In Sondheim’s “defense,” the version of the organ Prelude heard on the cast album alludes to but does not quote the Dies irae.
52. Sondheim, “The Musical Theater,” 228–250.
53. In Laurents’s revised version of Do I Hear a Waltz? performed at the George Street Playhouse in New Jersey in 2000 and the Pasadena Playhouse in 2001 (Fynsworth Alley CD 302 062 156 2), the reprise of “Take the Moment” was deleted and replaced by “Everybody Loves Leona,” which had been discarded from the original production.
54. Sondheim (with Prince), “Author and Director,” 365.
55. “City on Fire!” is first heard at the beginning of No. 26 and repeated after a short reprise of “Kiss Me.” It returns in No. 27, after the Searching music “Not While I’m Around” and again after the Beggar Woman’s “Alms … alms.”
56. The eight songs that are not reprised in the final sequence are “The Worst Pies in London,” “Green Finch and Linnet Bird,” “Johanna” (Anthony’s version), “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir,” “Wait,” and “Ladies in Their Sensitivities” from act I and “God, That’s Good!” and “Parlor Songs” from act II.
57. Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, 143.
58. Ibid., 144.
59. In “Sondheim Dismembers ‘Sweeney,’” Green cites Love Me Tonight, Under the Roofs of Paris, The Smiling Lieutenant, “and a couple of the MGMS” (none mentioned by name) among the short list of Sondheim’s favorite film musicals.
60. Several useful discussions on the Sweeney Todd adaptation include Jesse Green, “Sondheim Dismembers ‘Sweeney’”; Mark Salisbury, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (n.c.: Titan Books, n.d.); and Andrew Buchman, “Tim Burton’s Cinematic Sweeney Todd (2007),” an unpublished paper presented at the Symposium on the American Musical held at the University of Washington, April 11, 2008. I am grateful to Andrew Buchman for allowing me to reap the benefits of this paper. The special features in the 2-Disc Special Edition of Sweeney Todd (DreamWorks Pictures 2007) also provide considerable information about the film (see especially Sondheim, “Interview with Sondheim,” 2007).
61. The soundtrack includes the music and lyrics attached to the Beggar Woman’s coarse sexual solicitations that follow her plaintive solicitations for money, which Anthony gives her before he asks about the residents of the house.
62. Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, 136–37.
63. Green, “Sondheim Dismembers ‘Sweeney’” (“Slashing the Score”), quotation by Green.
64. Sweeney Todd, 2-Disc Special Edition, Special Feature, “Musical Mayhem: Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd,” DreamWorks Pictures 2007.
65. Another excellent example of this approach occurs in the film version of “A Glamorous Life,” in which Frederika sings about her mother; it is accompanied by images of her mother, Desiree, played by Elizabeth Taylor, who does not sing in this number.
66. DreamWorks 2007.
67. The published literature on Sondheim offers numerous and often valuable discussions of Sunday in the Park with George (see especially Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 343–79; Stephen Citron, Sondheim & Lloyd-Webber, 289–99; Gordon, Art Isn’t Easy, 262–300; Martin Gottfried, Sondheim, 155–66; Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, 91–98; Scott Miller, Deconstructing Harold Hill, 153–89); Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim, pp. 327–41. I am grateful to Larry Starr for making available to me in typescript the penetrating critical overview of Sunday he presented at the Annual Meeting of the Sonneck Society for American Music (now the Society for American Music), Nashville, Tennessee, April 1989, “The Broadway Musical as a Critique of Modernist Culture, or Sunday in the Park with Sondheim.”
68. The motive of “Putting It Together” (Ex. 15.3a) adds one additional long note to the horn call. Although neither of the two new long notes of the former are as long as the single long note in the horn call, the connection between these motives might be discernible even to those who disdain the idea of organic connections.
69. See Banfie
ld, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 364–79, especially 375–79.
70. Sondheim, “Interview with Stephen Sondheim,” 1988, 236. For a recent example of the opposite view, see John Lahr’s acerbic and unsympathetic portrait of the work in his review of the 2008 revival with its reference to “the strained, deadly second act” (Lahr, “The Haunted,” The New Yorker, March 3, 2008, 85).
71. Michiko Kakutani, “Beyond Happily Ever After,” New York Times Magazine, August 30, 1987, 30, 76.
72. For more on Follies, see Chapin, Everything Was Possible, passim; Hirsch, Harold Prince, 93–105; Ilson, Harold Prince, 177–97; Mandelbaum, “‘A Chorus Line,’” 66–78; Ethan Mordden, One More Kiss, 34–47; Prince, Contradictions, 158–70; Sondheim, “The Musical Theater,” 231–32; and Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 135–53.
73. Another post–Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Candide, underwent considerable literary and musical alterations between 1956 and 1989. See Andrew Porter, “Candide: An Introduction,” notes to the 1989 recording, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, Deutsche Grammophon, 429–73401.
74. The two librettos of The Girls Upstairs (from among the alleged thirteen) housed in the Theater Collection of the New York Public Library (Restricted Material #5870 [first draft] and Restricted material #2624 [second draft]) for the most part substantiate Prince’s recollection. Seven of the twenty-two numbers in the 1971 Follies (in addition to the “Prologue”) can be traced to these pre-Follies versions; four of these songs appear in Restricted Material #5870. The New York Public Library also houses two drafts of Follies, one dated September 1970 (Restricted Material #2625) and the other January 2, 1971 (NCOF+73–1867).
75. Ilson, Harold Prince, 180.
76. Many, if not all, of the discarded Follies songs have been recorded on Follies: The Complete Recording (1998) (CD: TVT 1020–2) 2-disc set and A Collector’s Sondheim (1985) (CD: RCD3–5480) 3-disc set.
77. Sondheim discusses the artistic limitations of “Can That Boy Foxtrot!” in Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 87–88.
78. The resolution of a triadic figure to the fifth of its triad offers a striking parallel (if not influence) in the culminating transformation of the principal motive in the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (the “Eroica”), first heard toward the end of the development and increasingly prominent in the recapitulation and coda. See the commentary by J. Peter Burkholder in Norton Anthology of Western Music. Volume 2: Classic to Twentieth Century, 5th ed., ed. by Burkholder and Claude V. Palisca (New York: W. W. Norton), 281–82.
79. Mandelbaum, “‘A Chorus Line,’” 70–71.
80. Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 143.
81. Prince, Contradictions, 163.
82. In honor of Bernstein’s seventieth birthday, Sondheim composed the parody “The Saga of Lenny,” which, according to a particularly helpful anonymous reader of this book (later revealed as Wayne Shirley), “shows a good understanding and sympathy with the original ‘Saga of Jenny.’” See also Steve Swayne, How Sondheim Found His Sound, 272n110.
83. Prior to Follies, Simon had written the books for Little Me (1962), Sweet Charity (1966), and Promises, Promises (1968) (the latter choreographed by Bennett). After Follies, Simon would contribute uncredited one-liners in Bennett’s Seesaw (1973) and A Chorus Line (e.g., Sheila’s “Sometimes I’m aggressive”), and the libretto for the adaptation for his The Goodbye Girl, like Chorus Line with music by Marvin Hamlisch. Bennett also played an important role in Simon’s work. He assisted (without credit) the direction of The Good Doctor (1973) and directed God’s Favorite (1974). See Mandelbaum, “‘A Chorus Line,’” 74, 78, 85–86, 124, 146–47.
84. Ibid., 74.
85. Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 150.
86. Ibid., 148, 150.
87. Ibid. Although he acknowledged that “many critics felt that Goldman’s book was the weak link in Follies, and that it contained unpleasant characters difficult to care about and action that was hard to follow,” Sondheim concluded that “these critics were only echoing Bennett’s sentiments throughout the tryout” (Mandelbaum, “‘A Chorus Line,’” 73–74). For a thoughtful defense of the book, see Mordden, One More Kiss, 34–47.
88. Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 322.
89. Ibid., 151–52.
90. Ilson also notes that “ironically, when the show was revived in London in 1987, Goldman has them [Ben and Phyllis] stay together” (Ilson, Harold Prince, 196).
91. A folly song (in Follies) is a song in which each of the principals sings an honest diegetic “number” that reveals their deeper nature and conflicts. All the follies take place in the imaginary Loveland in the last part of the musical. After “The Folly of Love” (an ensemble number) and “The Folly of Youth” (separate and then combined duets by the principal married couples), Buddy, Sally, Phyllis, and Ben sing their solo follies in succession.
92. The first movement of Grieg’s concerto had also been featured prominently in Song of Norway (loosely based on the life of Grieg) and more briefly in the song “Rosemary” from Loesser’s How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying.
93. When I asked to study a copy of the 1987 Follies libretto, Goldman “turned the matter over to his attorney” and “notified the Library of Congress that no permission is to be given for an examination copy” (letter to the author from Barbara Deren, President, Barbara Deren Associates, July 5, 1994). From this letter I have inferred that the librettist came to favor the 1971 libretto, but I could be mistaken.
94. Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, 123.
95. The lyrics to all four songs, “Marry Me a Little,” “Multitudes of Amys,” “Happily Ever After,” and “Being Alive,” are printed and discussed in Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 92–97. See also Banfield, 166–73.
96. Prince, Contradictions, 143–57; quotations on 156–57.
97. Ibid., 183.
98. Gottfried, Sondheim, 189, and Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 382.
99. Gottfried, Sondheim, 151. Banfield considers the critical problems generated by Merrily’s autobiographical subject matter: “But it would be difficult to fix the audience’s sympathy—and regrets—on Franklin Shepard, for the simple reason that the musical is about the compromise of his talent and we can only measure that talent by transferring it to Sondheim” (Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 312).
100. Banfield would call this technique “reflexivity,” that is, “the words describing what the music is doing.” Ibid., 42.
101. The populist Sondheim composed two songs for Madonna to sing in the movie Dick Tracy (1990), including the Academy Award–winning Best Song of 1991, “Sooner or Later.” Sondheim gained major recognition with the popular and critically acclaimed 2007 film release of Sweeney Todd featuring box-office sensation Johnny Depp discussed earlier in this chapter.
102. Block, Review of Assassins, American Music 11 (Winter 1993): 507–9.
Chapter 16: The Phantom of the Opera
1. Alexandra Wilson, The Puccini Problem, 6.
2. Of these shows only Aspects of Love (closed too soon) and Sunset Boulevard (too expensive) lost money in their New York runs. It should be noted that Lloyd Webber musicals almost invariably enjoyed longer, usually far longer London runs. Here are the comparisons:
Joseph
New York, 747 performances; London, 243
Jesus Chris Superstar
New York, 711 performances; London, 3,358
Evita
New York, 1,568 performances; London, 2,900
Cats
New York, 7,485 performances; London, 8,949
Starlight Express
New York, 761 performances; London, 7,406
Phantom
New York, 8,771 (as of 2/2/09); London, 9,568 (as of 10/9/08)
Aspects of Love
New York, 377 performances; London, 1,325
Sunset Boulevard
New York, 977 performances; Los Angeles, 369; London, 1,529
Despite the apparent reversal of the norm
in the case of Joseph, according to Michael Patrick Kennedy and John Muir in Musicals, “the 1980 production became a provincial phenomenon in Britain, setting up a record as the longest-lived touring show of the postwar era, and making periodic appearances in London en route” (Michael Patrick Kennedy and John Muir, Musicals, 187). As of this writing, after Les Misérables (Boublil and Schönberg), the second, third, and fifth longest running shows in the West End (Phantom, Cats, and Starlight Express, respectively) are Lloyd Webber shows. Jesus Christ Superstar ran for eight years, Evita nearly seven. Evita was also the longest running foreign musical import up to that time, to be eventually surpassed by Cats.