Happy birthday Andrew Lloyd Webber!Today is the birthday of one of the greatest musical minds alive today. Certainly he's one of the two composers who's had a significant influence on me (the other is Arthur Sullivan). He changed the shape of the Broadway stage (you know, from rectangular to that kind of rounded square that sort of pokes out at the orchestra pit?) and his innovative musicals are still masterpieces, even though enough time has passed for his practice to become commonplace. Somehow, his work has avoided the deterioration over time that plagues
Oklahoma!, an equally innovative musical that just seems average today. Every time I listen to one of his scores, I get something new out of it.
That's right...
Happy Birthday Stephen Sondheim!Sondheim's professional career started with
Saturday Night, a small project, and not a very good one. He got his kickoff after Arthur Laurents told him that he, Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein were working on a musical adaptation of
Romeo and Juliet, and that they might be short a lyricist. Sondheim auditioned his lyrics for Bernstein, and after denying having written anything more "poetic," got the job. The result? The ever-popular
West Side Story. For the record, Sondheim considers there to be a number of problems with the lyrics to
West Side Story. For one thing, most of the songs he had to write lyrics for preexisting melodies -- and melodies by someone with a more romantic mentality. After his next big lyrical splash,
Gypsy, he struck out on his own, and in the rest of his career, the only times he wrote lyrics for someone else were in adaptations of his own songs for specific occasions, other one-off songs, and two instances in his musicals where he set a preexisting poem to music. His collaborators on those two songs were William Shakespeare, and Charles Guiteau. That's right, the bard and the assassin.
He also wrote the lyrics to Richard Rodgers' show
Do I Hear A Waltz?, but he's kind of disowned that one.
Sondheim's first show with his own music was
A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, which is a fine show, but not quite as awesome as I should be recommending. That said, it still has a number of memorable tunes, and catchy ones (Sondheim was still finding his own voice at this point, hence the hummability of the score). His next show,
Anyone Can Whistle, was a flop, and one of the finest flops I've ever heard.
It also was Angela Lansbury's stage debut, and we all know that turned out very well for her. (Hint: She's now
Dame Angela Lansbury)
Sondheim’s penchant for the experimental showed itself first most prominently in
Company, also his only pop score. And a pop score I can not only abide, but actually like. Although, to be fair, it is 70’s pop, and it’s still much more Sondheim than pop.
(This song was actually originally cut, but then later added back in, and is nowadays ubiquitously part of the show.)
Company, along with
Anyone Can Whistle,
The Frogs, and a few others, is a show in which you can really hear the pure Sondheim sound. He’s just that good at changing his style to fit the setting, as exemplified in his next show,
FolliesMost of the songs in
Follies are pastiches of various styles and composers which and who would have been sung by the characters in the show, all of them retired Follies members.
His next show was
A Little Night Music. You know this one.
Sondheim wanted to make every song in this show in triple meter. He did a good job of it, but I still maintain that he cheated in a few places.
The Frogs was originally a small one-act show performed in a college gym, but Nathan Lane (in the role of Dionysos) convinced Sondheim to adapt it into a full length Broadway show. Sondheim has expressed mixed feelings about it, but I like it, not as a great work of art, but as a fun show between great works of art. Also, it’s got one of the greatest opening numbers ever.
(Frankly, I think every light comedy should open with this song)
Pacific Overtures is one of those shows that you can use to study for history class. Sondheim has said he enjoys making historical references, and this show is all history. It’s about Japan’s being opened up to the western world. The characters and plot are incidental. The story is all the textbook. That sort of show with story but no plot is fairly common in Sondheim’s work, including, as we’ve already seen,
Company and
Follies. It has the wonderful song Someone In A Tree, which Sondheim often offers as his favorite song. It’s a puzzle that fits together three different perspectives on the same event -- the sort of puzzle Sondheim has said he enjoys in lyric writing.
Pacific Overtures also contains a Gilbert & Sullivan pastiche in Act II, and while Sondheim dislikes G&S, I love them (Sullivan will get his own birthday post in May, probably), and the pastiche is done expertly
The first Sondheim show I was seriously introduced to was
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and it remains one of my favorites, with its darkly humorous, semi-operatic style. It was made into a movie, starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, and Sondheim has said it’s his favorite musical-to-movie adaptation, since Tim Burton actually turned it into a movie rather than just essentially filming a stage production.
That said, I still prefer literally filmed stage productions. I call them video productions, to differentiate between seeing a show live, seeing it recorded, and seeing it as a movie. And yes,
Sweeney Todd has one of these with Angela Lansbury and George Hearn.
Sondheim’s career temporarily ended with
Merrily We Roll Along, another failure. It was a failure for pretty much the same reason
Anyone Can Whistle was. He wrote it more for himself than an audience. Franklin Shepard, the disgruntled theater-composer protagonist, is what Sondheim might have become had he not disowned
Do I Hear A Waltz?. Indeed, the similarities between Shepard and Sondheim are numerous, several of them actually planted as jokes (for instance, in one song, Shepard’s tunes are accused of being unhummable -- in one recording, Sondheim is the guy making the accusation). Merrily is told backward, and Sondheim shows this off in the music, reprises coming before songs, and music being developed before being introduced. The song That Frank (or Rich And Happy in the original) makes more musical sense the second time through,
after you’ve heard the “finale”, since That Frank develops those musical themes before the audience can recognize them.
Sondheim basically retired at this point, but then he met James Lapine. The Sondheim-Lapine collaborations I think are his greatest works. First we’ve got
Sunday In The Park With George, which, though it’s not sung-through, is composed-through, all the music being somehow connected in a theme and variations form. If Frankly Shepard is who Sondheim might have become, George Seurat as portrayed here is who Sondheim did become, Finishing The Hat being the only song Sondheim has taken from his own life.
Immediately after
Sunday in The Park With George Sondheim and Lapine set to work on
Into The Woods, probably the composer’s biggest public hit. Because it’s normal. The music isn’t tremendously unconventional, it uses familiar characters and plots, and there aren’t any -- as Sondheim puts it -- four-letter words, which makes it acceptable for children. (I kind of wonder if that’s also what Cole Porter was going for with the line “Good authors too who once knew better words/Now only use four-letter words”) Although a lot of productions in elementary and middle schools cut out Act II, both for time and tragedy.
Into The Woods is finally getting its movie coming this winter, and I’m super excited. I’ve got a lot to say about
Into The Woods the movie, but I’ll wait until the trailer comes out, and then post that all in the Reviews And Clues board.
Into The Woods, by the by, is a large conglomeration of faerie tales. Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood and Jack (of Jack and the Beanstalk) all play out their stories, which intertwine variously, largely through the connective tissue of a fabricated faerie tale, involving a baker and his wife, who, for various reasons, need to collect “The cow as white as milk/The cape as red as blood/The hair as yellow as corn/The slipper as pure as gold.” Unfortunately, by Act II, it becomes clear that Sondheim and Lapine are using the Grimm versions of these faerie tales.
Assassins is another one with story but no plot, and, unlike
Into The Woods, has a lot of four-letter words. Which means that this is the only song from it I can post:
Assassins, although originally about assassins all through history, became ultimately restricted to those who killed -- or tried to kill -- the president of the United States. How many of these friendly faces can you recognize?
Finally, Sondheim reunited with Lapine for their third show,
Passion, which I consider to be an opera, even though Sondheim went out of his way to avoid it being an opera (the difference is that he doesn’t like opera, and I do). When Sondheim collected the lyrics into the books
Finishing The Hat and
Look I Made A Hat (from which most of this information comes) he split the lyrics of
Passion not into songs, but into scenes.
Passion is really a magnificent, beautiful, slightly disturbing work, and was originally planned as one half of a double feature, alongside a piece Lapine wanted to write. The two stories had a number of similarities, but Lapine’s
Muscle was in a modern setting, and called for a modern score, which Sondheim just didn’t feel up to. But
Passion was, and is, enough for an evening of its own.
(
Passion is so great, I recommend you
watch the entire thing.)
After
Passion, Sondheim reunited with John Weidman (
Pacific Overture and
Assassins) for another jab at American idealism, this titled
Wise Guys, then rewritten as
Bounce, and then rewritten again as
Road Show (also at one point titled
Gold!). I find it incredibly confusion, not the least because I have to navigate a labyrinth of annotations to find the right songs in the book. So I’m not comfortable putting a song from it here.
Sondheim has done other smaller projects, and is reportedly working on another full show, but for now, there’s more than enough Sondheim to go around.
Sondheim has said some of his favorite songs to write are the sort of mini-operettas that slyly develop the plot through song. They’re a puzzle, not unlike Someone In A Tree, above. He considers his first of this genre to be A Weekend In The Country from
A Little Night Music, but he’d previously delved into the genre. These also happen to be some of my favorites, so I thought I’d link them.
Any song by the Spice Girls ROCK!