Interviewer: We ask everybody, why should anyone care about the Broadway musical? What does it do for our culture? Why, how does it represent us? What’s important about it?
Jonathan Sheffer: Ownership, I think. Americans feel they really own the Broadway musical, and this is something that didn’t come from anywhere else, despite where it came from. It feels completely American.
Interviewer: What about simply the kind of fun level and the sort of dream that everything is going to work out? Do you think that’s part of it or not?
Jonathan Sheffer: It’s always been a sort of bastion of optimism. And certainly nothing serious touched the broader musical for decades. And when it finally did, I think the groundwork had been laid so that it was possible to make a serious statement. But it began as light entertainment. And its strength has always been light entertainment, and there are the occasional subjects and writers who can take us into a more serious place. But by and large, people go in order to be diverted and to feel good about themselves.
Interviewer: Broadway musicals are a mountain of all these different parts, dance, scenery, whatever. What do you think is most important, or is there no one important thing?
Jonathan Sheffer: Well, I’m a conductor. The most important thing in a musical is the music. There’s no doubt about it. Nobody talks about the musical being a great dance show, a great libretto. People will say that it had those things, but it will always be remembered for its music.
Interviewer: So what’s important about it on the town? Who are the new kids on the block? I think they’re called the kids, actually, in the mid-40s.
Jonathan Sheffer: On the Town was a World War II musical that had all the energy of American patriotism. And it was a new group of people. Leonard Bernstein had come to New York, graduating from Harvard, and he wasn’t really sure what he wanted to do. He was so vastly talented in so many things that I don’t think anybody could have predicted what he was going to do, but he had grown up knowing the musical as well as he knew classical music. So it was inevitable, in a way, that he would want to contribute to all those things. And that was his personality. There was nothing that he didn’t want to try. On the Town came, as a result of the ballet, Fancy Free, which he had done with Jerome Robbins. And they were offered the opportunity to refashion it as a musical for Broadway. And Leonard Bernstein, at that time, was doing the first, they were the first group of people to do what would become Commonplace later, which was to start in little clubs. Writing songs because nobody would give them a chance to write a show. And then somebody decided that they were talented enough. And it was a very Hollywood kind of a scenario. And they were picked to make this ballet into a musical. And Common and Green, who was writing a group called The Reviewers, playing downtown in a small club, were hired to create this musical. And it carried with it all of the sophistication that he had as a musician, which was very sophisticated, even more so than Richard Rogers was able to do in… Oklahoma. Bernstein drew on this extraordinary amount of classical knowledge that he had. And he also had an interest in creating ballets as Rogers did. Well, Richard Rogers, let me go back a little further. In my mind, there are really two kinds of composers for musical theater. One is the primarily music composer who’s interested in writing songs, and the other is the theater composer who is interested in reading shows. And this a strain that goes back as far as Irving Berlin, really, who was a songwriter. Who really was never known for his shows. An Irving Berlin show was a show that had songs by Irving Berlin. Jerome Curran, on the other hand, was a composer who got more and more interested in writing shows. The result was Showboat. That was certainly not his last show. That was, certainly, his most well-known show. Richard Rogers was a songwriter, always a songwriter who became more and more interested writing shows his career with Larry Hart was all about songs in the traditional sense. But then with Oscar Hammerstein, he found a librettist who was interested in creating these theatrical works that were much more sophisticated theatrically. Leonard Bernstein was an interesting mix of the two, you might say. Unlike the earlier generation of songwriters, Leonard Bernstien was a completely classically schooled musician who brought to the musical an interest in making the musical a little bit more sophisticated in his mind, which meant incorporating everything he’d seen before. Agnes DeMille dances with. Richard Rodgers, then became Jerome Robbins dances with Leonard Bernstein. The ballets had this very sophisticated European sound to them, jazzy, Gershwin elements coming in. The songs themselves range everything from ballads, traditional Broadway songs, songs that wanted to be pop songs, removable from shows, and at the same time, very interesting operatic things that might have come from Showboat. Well, carry it away, how’s this wonderful… Sort of strophic form, so it feels like a theater song, but the music itself is very sophisticated. The musical sound is a takeoff, you might say, on a kind of bellowing tenor, which is the emotion of the lyric carried away. That’s the humor of the song. And the verses have this kind of European operatic sound to them, as though there’s something very urgent happening. And it’s a perfect, very funny song because of the lyrics.
Interviewer: Like, I guess, Gershwin, Bernstein manages to capture the sort of, you’re in a taxi, you are in New York, there’s that lurching, tell me about that.
Jonathan Sheffer: Pernstein knew how to set a mood very quickly with a musical accompaniment. This is something that Stephen Sondheim would later kind of borrow. Richard Rogers and earlier generations of composers were not as interested in what went with the basic melody and lyrics. Rogers began to get interested in this more in carousel, I would say, where he created scenes where the accompaniment really becomes a comment on the. Leonard Bernstein could set a mood as a taxi ride very easily with that rhythm, da, da. Everything is slightly off balance. And you feel you’re riding along in a taxi, and it’s very, very evocative.
Interviewer: So the broad question is why is Jerome Kern so important to the development of Broadway music? He’s sort of like, Cohen does his thing, but Kern is more important.
Jonathan Sheffer: I think Jerome Kern, first he’s American-born, that’s very important, then he has this European training somewhat and he works in London for a long time. I think he was interested in making musicals American. I think Americans wanted to see American subjects and contemporary subjects on the stage. This is when the audience appetite sort of begins to catch up with the writers. And then you have people seeing themselves. In a show like Very Good Eddie, which was his first show for the Princess Theater, you have people running around by the seaside in bathing suits. This is something that feels very American to us. It’s not Paris. It’s the exposition of 1898. It’s right here. It’s Atlantic City or Newport or wherever. And I think that’s a very important change, that the writers want to locate the stories and the music in their own country. And he Jerome Kern was very interesting because he never really worked with one lyricist. He’s not part of a songwriting team. He went from person to person on every show. He may have worked with Dorothy Fields for a while, he worked with Oscar Hammerstein on Showboat, but he was a composer who had a kind of a musical interest in taking this American sound and he would work with anybody he could. It didn’t matter. They weren’t two people always who always had the same idea about something. Jerome Kern had worked on some musicals in London, and he made a lot of theater contacts there and brought them back to New York, including authors that he worked with, like Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, and he moved in a more serious direction in his career. And when he started working with Oscar Hammerstein, there was a much more serious, dramatic intent. I think Jerome Kern’s unique strength as a composer of songs, which is a very tight song form and a very limited number of bars that you have to make a musical idea. Was transformation. He was the master of transforming the simple phrase and then harmonically twisting it around and making it sound fresh. And he changed song form as he wrote. It became such extended song forms in these very short amount of bars. Songs like They Didn’t Believe Me, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, which came later in his career, harmonically going through five or six keys in 32 bars. And he was the real genius at making you think that you were hearing new phrases all the time when, in fact, you were just hearing slight changes on things you already had heard.
Interviewer: For Shobo. When you think about Shobos…
Jonathan Sheffer: When you think about showboat, the most important thing to remember is that it was Jerome Kern’s idea. The composer saw in the story something that he wanted to set to music. This was not a producer’s idea of a big show, it was not the librettist’s idea a good story. It was a composer’s idea music, and that’s very, very important. The subject matter, of course, very for the musical theater, as I said, a very kind of serious subject, one that probably would not have been treated by an earlier generation of composers. Then you have his ambition to create a more through composed musical in which songs become background music. This is almost a completely scored show, like a movie, which of course at that time, movies were integrating music in much more sophisticated ways, and it was the very early days of the talkies. Music in Showboat has an almost cinematic quality in that it plays under scenes and the way that it is. Varied and the way the music comes back you may be reminded of a character in incidental music in show but that’s not on stage or hasn’t been seen for half an hour very effective use of music to remind you of where you are in the story
Interviewer: Also, it doesn’t need, because of the scope, the periods that the play covers, he kind of like… Yeah, the history. … Fon Hun, Son of Hunters, and Foway.
Jonathan Sheffer: Jerome Curran’s scene interested in Showboat in tracing the history of popular music in America, which is a very ambitious thing to do, but he must have seen in the setting of the Showboat all of the possibilities of all kinds of music being played. He quotes everything from Stephen Foster to his own songs that he wrote that were meant to sound like period songs, and it’s a fascinating mix, and he takes us all the up to the present, which would be the present time of the show, 1927. And there’s a change in the style of the music in the show, which gets into the Charleston. And it’s very jarring because the show begins in a sort of operetta, operatic mode. By the time it gets to the Charlestown, you really feel that music itself has sort of pushed the story along. Jerome Kern began his theater career much the way Gershwin did, which was being asked to put a song in a review or some kind of a proto-musical or a Ziegfeld Follies. It wasn’t until later in his career that he had the chance to construct the show and to think about the plot of the show and the flow of it so that he could create more theatrical types of songs.
Interviewer: Starting in the late teens and then into the 20s. How does Gershwin’s are pushed to broadly use gold? There’s musical genre all over.
Jonathan Sheffer: George Gershwin’s musical life is really the equivalent of America’s musical life. His ambition grew as his ability grew and that really is a kind of a metaphor for America because he started out having a rudimentary sense of what he wanted to do and everything he heard he soaked up and his ambition just increased geometrically. Every song he wrote seemed to want to take on a new challenge musically and his writing just got bigger and bigger. It went in every direction it could go, to the peak of his writing, which was Porgy and Bess. It’s hard to imagine a time at which a certain sound of music was so strange to our ears, because we’re so flooded with music now of every variety. You have to remember a time in which ragtime came to New York from New Orleans, and Irving Berlin wrote Alexander’s Ragtime Band. The use of that syncopation in that song was so jarring to people. Because they had never heard music that regionally came from New Orleans. There’s no region left practically in America or in the world that isn’t saturated with the same kind of music now. So the sense that this new sound could come from a region of America to New York be turned into a popular song that could change the way people hear music is an idea that we’ve completely lost. Gershwin was hearing everything. With Gershwin, this… Part of his life, this early part of his professional career is really an interesting time in which music is changing and he is learning the ropes. And it set the tone for his whole career really, which was that he was able to put a few songs in a few shows and very quickly became known as this very interesting composer. But while he was doing that, he was making money as a song plugger at Harms, music publisher, and people would come in and say, I wanna hear this song played. So of course, when you have him at the store plugging songs, it’s a very American notion that somebody could come in test drive a car, they want to test drive a song, and he would play the song for them. And he got very good at improvising and selling the song, basically. And he developed, in his piano style, which became his writing style, he was a composer who wrote very much from what he was able to play. And he improvised music that he wrote down, essentially, because he was such a brilliant improviser, and found in his fingers voicings and jazz sounds. So in being a song plugger, he really learned to be a composer. Well, if you see Gershwin’s piano roles played, as you always have this experience with piano roles, you sort of can’t believe it because there seem to be 20 fingers flying in every direction. The strange thing about a piano is when the pianist isn’t there, you can’t really believe that all those keys can really be played. But he covered a lot of ground and he was able to develop what’s called the thumb line. This was a big thing in the American musical, of course, is this sort of internal tenor line of harmony. And he was doing such interesting things with his fingers. Incorporating stride and all kinds of harmonies that he was hearing all the time. When you think about the development of the musical over its long history in the 20th century, you really have two kinds of expression. You have the very personal and you have the big, extravagant, showy entertainment. And interestingly, the writers of those songs and those stories have really been divided among those two types of personalities. In the case of Rogers and Hart, you have Larry Hart, who is a very shy, four foot 10 gay man who really did most of his best work after he’d been on a bender for a few days. I’m sure it didn’t make Richard Rogers very happy. But Richard Rogers is a focused, business-like guy who understood that the product was important. And you have the sense that he had to pull Larry Hart in all the time to get him to finish things. Rogers always wrote the music first in their collaboration, which is remarkable when you consider the way the words in the music coexist. They seem to have been written by one person, and yet the music came, we are told, effortlessly. I’m sure it was note by note, but the sense is that it sort of rolled out, and then Larry Hart supplied these very personal lyrics, often subjects that were very painful to him or personal to him, became songs that were somehow universally. Seen that way, and there’s a strain of this through all of the Broadway musical. The brash, not very thoughtful you might say, very often the composer putting out lots and lots of very entertaining music and the lyrics sometimes reflecting a different side. Cole Porter is always thought to be this very cheerful guy who had a bon vivant life and all of his songs were very witty, and when in fact this was a life of. Utter desperation after a certain age, after his riding accident. He was in physical pain his entire life. He had something like 30 operations on his knees. His life was measured eventually in thimble falls. This is not the impression you get from the lightheartedness of his music. Porter became more and more withdrawn. And at the same time, he was never a very profound person in terms of the theater. He never wanted to change the theater, he always wanted to write the college show, he just wanted to write the best college show he could. Kiss Me Kate is probably the best college show ever written. But it certainly doesn’t have the ambition of Oklahoma, although it came 10 years later. Uh, Porter was somebody that was actually telling us a great deal about himself and about his sufferings and his sadness in songs that very often had a smile on their face.
Interviewer: So when you think about Rodgers and Hart, that’s a sort of perfect example.
Jonathan Sheffer: Well, a perfect example in Rodgers and Hart of the mixture of this sort of sad and the beautiful, you might say, or the sort of entertainingly pretty and the really wistful is a song like Spring is Here. Spring is here, why doesn’t my heart go dancing? It’s a very, very, very sad monolog, and yet the music is so, is so beautifully endearing, you might say that there’s a real irony in there. And that was really the essence of their collaboration. Is these two really opposite kinds of people were working on the same songs together.
Interviewer: So, by the time Bernstein starts doing what I said, sorry, he’s both had a fluid experience in Broadway, he knows what works in Full Town. But also, he…
Jonathan Sheffer: Well, Bernstein, by the time he wrote West Side Story, had been focusing on his conducting career for at least the decade after his first few Broadway shows. And so he really was steeped in classical music. Ironically, he also used to vacation in Mexico and Cuba a lot, and I’m sure like a lot of Americans, he heard the wave of South American and Caribbean music that was hitting our shores, which just like the music of New Orleans that hit Irving Berlin 50 years earlier. This music came as a jolt to people and he, I’m sure, absorbed it with the same interest as everybody else. He just had a very, very smart way of doing it. West Side Story is probably, in my opinion, musically the greatest musical ever written. Dramatically. The music is driven by the music, the show is driven by the music. It’s intense from beginning to end. It’s difficult. It is a mixture of Wagner, Stravinsky, Mahler, Mambo, Broadway, it’s all rolled into one. It packs a punch. It never lets up on you. The score is absolutely driving.
Interviewer: So Bernstein’s genius in terms of trying to capture an American, mixing everything in but becoming an American.
Jonathan Sheffer: American music, certainly of the first half of the 20th century when the American musical was being developed, you might say, was interested in direct speech. It was interested simple ideas. American musicals, as opposed to European operettas, were interested in directly contact. They were American subjects, American characters, American vernacular. American music reflected a need to be American and to speak directly to us. The musical has always taken all of its influences from Europe, from jazz, from Asia, from anywhere that it takes them and wrapped them into that sense of wanting to communicate directly. If anything, America’s impatience with opera, aside from the fact that most of it is not in English, is that it doesn’t speak directly to us. A lot of theater composers impatience in opera and they’re making fun of opera as often do. Is that it doesn’t speak to us quickly enough or directly enough. American musicals speak to use in doses of amounts of time we can take in and in bursts of energy that really speak directly to us. West Side Story is no different in that way. West Side story just happens to be a symphonic American musical compared to a songy American musical which was certainly still the norm at the time that it was written. But it took a giant leap in terms of ambition and what the music could contain. West Side Story is very akin, in my mind, to Carousel, in a sense, because they both have a dark strain to them. In fact, Oklahoma also, with Judd Frye, there’s a very dark element to it in a basically romantic story. West Side story is basically a romantic story, but the setting is so. Uh… It’s so energized by this disagreement between these two gangs of people then you have Jerome Robbins adding this amazing kind of jazz element in the dancing and the ethnicity of these two groups plays very strongly into the music and into the story so the tragedy of it is sort of lifted to a higher level uh… Well when you think about Cole Porter you think of about uh… No Cole Porter did. What every good boy from Peru, Indiana does, which is go to Yale, become the most sophisticated person in the entire world, and go and study music in Paris. And when he studied music in paris, he learned the basics of counterpoint, something that is pretty invisible in most of his work. Cole Porter understood that in a 32-bar song, you need to begin simply and to grow to a climax, which is typically about 2 thirds of the way through the song. At which the bass and the melody are their most extreme. So he always, if you look at his songs, he very carefully chose where the high note of the song was. And it very typically went with the most interesting lyric. For example, in every time we say goodbye, when the marvelous end of the songs when he says how strange the change from major to minor, which is not only goes with a minor chord, but it is also this beautiful little fill up that’s the peak of the melody. And at the same time, you’ll find the bass very often going down. In the opposite direction, this wonderful contrary motion musically. The song of his, All Through the Night, is especially beautiful in this way. The melody climbs higher and higher and the bass goes lower and lower. And it opens up a very profound sense of feeling. So while he appeared to be this devil-may-care sophisticated nothing bothers me. In fact, he was exactly the opposite. He was a very serious musician who thought exactly about the placement of every song, every note in his songs. And he himself was having a terrible life while this was going on. So there’s a very complex picture there. Cole Porter and Kiss Me Kate saw which way the wind was blowing. And he also hadn’t written a show in a number of years. So he came back with probably a desire to show everyone that he still had some of what it took. I think that the show is more integrated in the very clever way that Shakespeare’s woven into the contemporary story. But musically. It would be wrong to say that he made any great strides. This is just the peak of his writing, which always had the hallmarks of brilliance and precision. It’s just in Kiss Me Kate, he did it a little bit better than he had ever done it before.
Interviewer: Why don’t you start with, it’s hard to sum up Sondheim. What’s Sondheimer’s greatest contribution?
Jonathan Sheffer: Stephen Sondheim’s greatest contribution, I think, is his heart, and that he’s often thought of as a composer who doesn’t write melodies, whose lyrics are too complicated. This is the sort of common criticism, all of which, in my mind, is completely false. He is the most personal of songwriters. He is most direct. His songs address the places where we all exist, all the indecision we feel, all the regret, all the pain, all of the happiness, all the humor, all this silliness. It is all in his songs. It’s as if he took the best of every songwriter who ever lived and made them his greatest strengths.
Interviewer: What can you say about him that you can’t say himself?
Jonathan Sheffer: I would say that he has given his life to the musical theater in a way that probably was a high price to pay. And he has put in front of us all of his deepest feelings. And his fans, I think, understand that, and that’s why they love him so much. One thing about Stephen Sondheim’s work is that it’s really about something. There is no measure of music that hasn’t been thought about in terms of what its content is and what the shows are about. His shows, taken in the aggregate, are the most diverse group, from classical comedy to love stories to Japanese. I’m sorry, I’m just tripping over this. Hold on a second. Stephen Sondheim’s shows in their subjects taken in the aggregate represent his curiosity and his predilections for every kind of subject. But all of his shows are about something very important. Nothing is left unexamined, and nothing is a casual choice to write a show about. You have a wide gamut of shows with Stephen Sontime that cover a wide variety of genres, melodrama, kabuki, love story, European art film, everything you could imagine. The thing that distinguishes his writing is the way he takes his own feelings and puts them into the songs, his own reflections about what he’s doing. It’s a very personal kind of writing. Sunday in the Park with George, certainly, is the most autobiographical, I would say, because it deals with what creative people have to deal with and what they struggle with. And this is certainly what he dealt with every day of his life while he was writing shows. Hit now it would be I think incorrect to say that Sweeney Todd is autobiographical, but he has this amazing interest in melodrama. He happens to love the theater. Steve is a composer who loves the theater, he was only interested in creating theatrical works. Right, Lucy? Sweeny Todd is just the most overt and the most melodramatic, a form that he has a lifelong love affair with. Sondheim had… A very nice relationship with his father who by all appearances was a very warm man, but I think in Oscar Hammerstein he found not only a paternal figure in his life but somebody who was able to mold him at a time when his curiosity about theater was at its peak right in his teenage years. And this is a person who said, you know, I’ll take you seriously as an adult and also as a songwriter and if you want to be taken seriously, you show me your work and I’ll tell you what I think of it. And that’s probably the greatest gift he could have given him. Stephen Sondheim is a very personal composer, and he’s also so brilliant with words and music just as raw materials that he really has no airs, and any attempt to write like he writes in his style is immediately discernible. Everyone’s challenge as songwriters is to find their own voice, and it will be very difficult for someone to follow in his particular way of writing, I think. I think the idea of a rock and roll musical is a bit of a catch-all phrase that may be a misnomer. In fact, any music that is popular music, whether it’s current or somewhat dated, is basically, in order to work theatrically, it has to be conceived theatrually. It can sound like rock and role music, but it has be able to work lyrically and in terms of character, otherwise it won’t be successful in theater. Popular music. After rock and roll tends to flatten out in terms of rhythm. And so when rhythm becomes very fixed as it has really become in the last 10 years, it’s very difficult to have that theatrical element enter into it because songs tend to be so rigidly one kind of dimensional. That does not discount a lot of still good songwriting that’s going on. That can all be part of theater as it has been for the last 25 years.
Interviewer: What’s the musical release room? Where’d it come from? What’s it made of?
Jonathan Sheffer: Well, the Broadway musical is made up of many kinds of music. Again, it’s all about music, and the music came from many places. It came from Europe. It came the operetta tradition of the French, of the opera bouffe, of the English music hall, of vaudeville. It came form the Irish ballads. It came from the south of America. It came fom the minstrel shows. It came fro the early jazz, and all of this got mixed into this wonderful stew. Broadway is an American dream that sometimes comes true. Broadway is Brigadoon. It’s a town that appears out of the mist and goes away again.
