Michael Kantor: Broadway, Broadway Baby, what was the inspiration for that song and who sang it originally? I find who sang and what she brought to it so important.
Stephen Sondheim: I wanted to write three songs for three performers, in one case one of the performers was a couple, and actually I wrote that tune, it was originally called Two Ton Tessie, I think it was called. I want to write a comedy number, a kind of Sophie Tucker comedy number. And then, I can’t remember why I changed it. I actually think I… I think I finished the lyric but I decided to write something that would be a little more generic to what the show was about. So that’s how Broadway Baby came about, I just thought, you know.
Michael Kantor: Who was the original performer?
Stephen Sondheim: Well, it was Ethel Chautet who performed it in Follies in 1971, but it wasn’t written for a specific performer. It was written for that character.
Michael Kantor: But she brought a special, she actually, didn’t she have actual experience?
Stephen Sondheim: Oh yeah, she was in the Follies, as a matter of fact, I believe, and she was married to a band leader and then she went to California, you can still see her in the 1930 version of Girl Crazy, the movie they made. She was an eccentric dancer, she kind of double-jointed and Hal used that, Hal Prince used that to the advantage of the show, Michael Bennett did, I should say, in the staging of the number.
Michael Kantor: Who came up with that original sort of metaphor for follies with the photo?
Stephen Sondheim: Well, Hal wanted to, Hal always starts from a visual. He can’t get into a show until he has some kind of visual concept of what it’s going to look like. And that’s what he suddenly thought, yes, it’s got to look rubble. Just that notion of rubble, that’s what that photograph is about. Of course, there’s sort of the gallantry in it, but that was built into the show anyway, was, you know, these performers sticking to their last. But the rubble idea, I think, and I think that’s probably what excited Boris Aronson too. So, you know, that was, but that’s not so much a metaphor. That was, I mean, the original description of the first stage direction when we first started to write it was about rubble. It was about a ruined theater and about, and Jim Goldman’s description of it is quite detailed. But I think, I think something about that photograph gave Hal a visual hook on how he could latch onto the subject. But it was always meant to be. Of Torn Down Theater.
Michael Kantor: What about, you know, it’s clearly a dream play, people are moving in and out of reality, so to speak, but how is it also about the sort of collapse of a bigger dream in America, the American?
Stephen Sondheim: Well, it’s not so much that it’s about the collapse of the American dream, except that the Ziegfeld Follies represents a kind of entertainment, mindless, optimistic entertainment that existed between the two wars that I think was shattered by Vietnam, really. I think suddenly America became the bad guy for the very first time in history and in the consciousness of the country. And that kind of, I think it’s not coincidental that that kind of entertainment went out at the same time. Now, part of it is that it was taken over by television, that the review, so to speak, was taken over by TV, and therefore became no longer viable on the stage. It still exists in sort of small theater presentations, but that kind stuff really went into television. Comedy sketch followed by song, followed by dance. And also… Ziegfeld Follies very much depended, as did most of the musicals, in the between wars era, on stars. And stars fled Broadway, and there are almost no stars left, certainly in the musical theater. There may be Bernadette Peters, and that’s about it. And that had already happened by the 70s when Follie’s was done. So that’s another thing that disappeared. So it isn’t so much, it’s not so much that we were writing about that. As a matter of fact, it was Frank Rich who was a critic on the Harvard Crimson when he was a student who sort of pointed out that it was about the death of the musical, which is I think in itself what it really is about. The loss of innocence is represented by that, but we certainly didn’t sit down to write about anything except the passing of that era and what it meant in terms of the memories of these people who still lived back there when this was possible.
Michael Kantor: And the bringing in of those actual performers.
Stephen Sondheim: Yeah, well that’s, you know, that’s coincidental. A lot has been made of that. But in fact, all we were looking for were performers of a certain age, most of whom either had retired, gone to California and were doing television series, were occasional character actors in movies and had no intention of being on the stage anymore. And were out of training too. So how do you cast a show like that? Most of the people we cast were people who hadn’t gotten jobs on television, who hadn t gotten jobs in movies, and who hadn t anything to do. They were widows, because most of them were women. They either widows or retired, etc. In a couple of cases, we had to just get a young performer like Justine Johnson, who was probably in her 40s, to play a 75-year-old woman. But for the most part, they were just sitting around with nothing to do
Michael Kantor: What did Michael Bennett bring to the show?
Stephen Sondheim: Well, the first thing I think of is his idea of having all the younger… In this case, how about with his name? Oh, Michael Bennett. Michael Bennett had the notion of putting the young people in black and white to contrast with the colors on the… The so-called ghosts. I shouldn’t say young people, but the ghosts. So there was that contrast. And the notion of having the showgirls, six foot tall, on six-inch heels so that they became these kind of monolithic, gigantic. Science fiction shades wandering through the piece. And then, of course, he staged the numbers for the most part, not all of them. Bob Avian, his assistant, staged Losing My Mind, I remember. And Hal staged Could I Leave You. So Michael certainly staged.
Michael Kantor: I love the story of Lucy and Jesse.
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, that was all Michael. That was, as a matter of fact, a Michael’s request. I’d written another number for that called Uptown Downtown. And the reason for that number was that Alexis Smith said herself, she said, originally what I’d done was I’d written Losing My Mind for both women. And I wanted the two of them with an entire chorus of men all dressed and looking like Ben. And of course, some of those men would actually be the chorus, girls, the dancers dressed as Ben. But a line of Ben, so to speak, 12, 15, 16 Bens. And they would sing this song called Lucy My Mind. And Alexis came to me and said, you know, Dorothy is the singer and what I can do is I can dance a little but I have great legs and I’d like a number where I could show them off. I said fine by me. And that was fine by Michael. And so I had written this song called Uptown Downtown. Michael wanted a fresh number so just before we went to Boston for the out of town try I wrote Lucy and Jesse, which, because what Michael wanted was a chorus. And then let him develop a number where Alexis could strut and the chorus could come in and do the singing and dancing that she couldn’t do. She could sing somewhat and she could dance somewhat, but that wasn’t the point. What she had was great presence and a kind of stature and mian. So that was written for her by Michael.
Michael Kantor: Um let’s see how did you find the right musical style for the show everyone sort of tries to guess the inspirations for the different oh like
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, I just picked my favorite composers. And for each time I had to write a pastiche number, I picked a different composer, a different lyricist. I mean, I know the literature, so to speak, of most of the songwriters from about 1925 on. And, you know, I have a lot of favorites. And so it was, you can call it, as they say, in the movie business, an homage. But in fact, it was just an imitation. And then…
Michael Kantor: Give us a hint of just some of the ones that were… Oh shi-
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, sure. Let’s see. You’re gonna love tomorrow. That’s my idea of Burton Lane. The verse says you love tomorrow and love will see us through our kern. The last number, live, laugh, and love, is sort of Porter-esque. No, Broadway babies to Silver, Brown, and Henderson. I could go on, let’s see, and then there’s the frimal lehar, one more kiss. Actually, when I say Colport, it’s really a Fred Astaire number, Live, Laugh, and Love, but it’s Fred Astair, not so much as Irving Berlin Fred Astare, but more like Colport or Fred Astire. And Rain on the Roof is sort of a generic novelty number, and the French numbers the typical, you know, the French soubrettes who came over and were featured in the volleys.
Michael Kantor: At this point, Bennett was really emerging. I mean, you could tell me that, but as a, you know, he was breaking through, so to speak, into creating his own work. And did you feel that? How was he different, for instance, from?
Stephen Sondheim: From
Michael Kantor: Jerry Robbins, in terms of…
Stephen Sondheim: Well, Michael Bennett versus Jerry Robbins, Jerry, I think, Jerry was less interested in show business as a metaphor. One of the restricting things I think about Michael Bennett and Bob Fosse is that all they knew was show business. I don’t think they knew where Afghanistan was. Jerry Robins did. Uneducated and very defensive about it, quite widely read, and interested in many things and brought many of those things into his work, as you can tell in his ballets, which is I think one of the reasons that neither Fosse nor Bennett could ever really make ballets because they were only really interested in show business and their styles and metaphors are all show business. I think, one of things that appealed to Michael about Folley’s was that I also used show businesses metaphors all the time, starting with Anyone Can Whistle is where I first did that. And I think that’s one of the things that appealed to him. That even showed up in Company and in Side by Side. I wrote a vaudeville number to express something about the characters, and Michael liked that a lot. I think he would not have done Follies otherwise, and he insisted that he would do not just choreography, but that he co-direct, because he was starting to want to want to be the boss of the whole enterprise. And I think the combination of wanting to work with Hal, with whom he’d had a very good working relationship on company, and a show that had 22 numbers, 15 of which, or 12 of which I don’t know how many, are pastiches, and that used show business as a metaphor for the entire evening was just catnip to him. I think he could not resist it. I think if it had been about some other subject, he would have resisted it.
Michael Kantor: The way he describes it, it’s almost inevitable that he goes on to do chorus line.
Stephen Sondheim: Yes, chorus lines and outgrowth of company and follies very clearly. Because of, just the way Fosse, you know, all that jazz is and outgrowth of the same, you can, I think Bob Fosse saw the last 20 minutes of Follies and it changed his life. He thought, oh my goodness, show business is a metaphor. You can write about war, but you do it as a trio, you, you know as a kind of song and dance trio and that kind of thing appealed to both those guys. Because it was a language they knew intimately, Bob from his nightclub and then later from musicals I’m Michael. From musicals.
Michael Kantor: What was the biggest problem with follies?
Stephen Sondheim: I don’t know if there was any big problem with it. I don’t remember any big problems. The biggest problem was once we had decided, the climax of the show, as James and I wrote it originally before Hal got into it, was that the Follies sequence actually came out of a flashback. It was a realistic Follie. The wives had decided that they would put on a Follis and the husbands were to sit in the front couple of rows of the auditorium. And, um… And during it, they had a kind of, the four principals had a kind of fugue in which they remembered the traumatic incident in which Buddy and Phyllis caught Ben and Sally making love up in Weisman’s office, which was an office that overlooked the theater, you know, up in the back of the auditorium. And they came in on them. And so it was a realistic flashback and a realistic follies that they put on. And Hal said. Why not make it, you know, a metaphoric Follies? Just let him do it. I said, the problem with that is, how do you get back to reality? Nobody had an answer. And that was the hardest thing. And that’s one of the reasons, I wrote the entire Folly sequence, except for losing my mind, during the rehearsal period, because nobody could figure out how to get out of it. And then because I’m a fan of Pirandello, I suddenly thought, why not have Ben forget his lyrics right in the middle of his number? And it’s like cracking back to the reality. And once, But that was the hard thing, was trying to figure out how to get out of the follies and back to reality. That’s what I remember is the biggest problem we had. The other problem was in the writing. When we first started, James and I wanted to write a sort of murder mystery. It’s not really a mystery, but at the end of the first act, all four principals were at a state of such tension that they had reason to want to kill each other. And the second act was who’s going to try to kill whom, and it turned out that he tries to kill Ben. There was a very funny moment where she actually drew a gun on Ben, and he had to put his glasses on to see what she was threatening him with. When we finished our first draft, we read it over, and the first ten minutes, which were just a set-up, and sort of the guests arriving and nothing happened, seemed very good. As soon as the plot started to kick in, it seemed contrived. So we decided we would delay the plot. So the second draft. The plot didn’t come in until 25 minutes in, and the first 25 minutes seemed great. And then finally we got the message after about the third or fourth draft, which is no plot. And once we’d gotten that, that was the other major hurdle that I remember, is having to discover that. We wrote 11 drafts of that show.
Michael Kantor: Let’s jump over to something else, which I think in its time was maybe controversial for that very issue of No Pot Company. What do you think made company controversial in its day?
Stephen Sondheim: I think one of the things that made company controversial, probably the major thing, was that there was no plot. The audience kept waiting for a plot. They were so used to plots. They either had reviews, and when they came in to see a review, they knew there could be no plot, so they were relaxed, or they wanted to know what was going to happen next. The notion of a series of snapshots in a man’s life, and also taking place in a vaguely metaphysical birthday party, which didn’t make sense because it keeps changing. And flowing back and forth and you don’t know if the guests know each other and there’s a girl in a bridal gown and it’s all very weird and so the disorientation and the kind of deconstructivist if you’ll have, if you say, as they say, that kind of attitude I think was made an audience. Then of course it’s a very close to the bone piece which says, you know, after musicals for decades have… Not a bad word to say about, or not, I shouldn’t say a bad word, they had no doubts about the efficacy of a happy ending and that if you find the right person, you may go the bumpy road, rocky road of love, bumpy road of love, as they say in the song. But it would always lead to bliss. It would lead to a so-called happy ending. And we were saying something ambiguous, which is, actually, there are no endings. It keeps going on, is what really company is about. And it’s always difficult to make contact with, commit, and live with somebody. And at the same time, it’s impossible not to. But it’s never going to be easy, and it’s never going be solved, because it’s not a problem that has a solution. It’s not even a problem. It’s just that’s what life is. Well, that kind of unsettling, we’re not giving you a sampler to take home and we’re giving you something neat, leaves audiences They left, I thought, see I thought because of what had happened to movies with the Nouvelle Vague, which is, the Nivelle Vague is what started the whole thing off. Company would not exist without the Nievelle Vogue. And movies had started to be accepted that did not have happy endings, that did even necessarily have endings. But that, you know, a movie like Breathless, you now, left audiences very, when’s the other shoe going to drop? And a lot of Truffaut’s stuff. And audiences, we thought it, I would have thought, would have started to accept that. And they didn’t, not in musical theater. And they still have trouble accepting it even today. They still want a story. They still wanna moral. They still won a happy ending and a happy. Ending can have a lot of people dead like West Side Story, but it’s still a happy end.
Michael Kantor: What about, I mean, it was also captured, one thing you didn’t mention, in a very, in, you know, in the context of a very alienating world.
Stephen Sondheim: Well, a company does deal with a lot of so-called brittle people and upper middle class people with upper middle-class problems, but I think the audience in those days was upper middle class audience. So I don’t think that would have been, I think if anything that would’ve alienated them because we were dealing with their problems and shoving it in their faces. They couldn’t say, oh that’s that world of people, because they were that world of people. And since Broadway theater has been… For many years, until quite recently anyway, supported by upper middle class New Yorkers. They were shoving stuff in their faces. And people, it’s no joke, that cliche, that musicals are escapist entertainment. They still are. They still. That’s why people go to the Disney shows. They really want to escape. And here we’re saying, bring it right back in their face. What they’ve been trying to, what they came to a musical to avoid. They suddenly find facing them on the stage. See, something like West Side Story, that was easy because it wasn’t them. That was, oh, those poor kids were their problems. Oh, those Poor Puerto Rican kids. Oh, Those poor lower class white kids. They, oh they’re gangs. Isn’t it just awful? Where will you have dinner? So very easy to say, oh it was so moving. Because it wasn’t about them.
Michael Kantor: Another 100 people.
Stephen Sondheim: The only time it’s ever happened in my professional life, a girl came in to audition for us and her name was Pamela Myers and she knocked us out. She sang two songs, a slow song and a fast song, or I should say a sad song and funny song. And Hal literally said, it’s the kind of thing you see only in the movies of the 30s, said, if you can write a song for her, we can find a part for her. She came and she auditioned for Marta. Marta was written by George Firth. As a dark-haired Jewish girl, very New York. And of course, Pam Myers is a blonde Catholic cutie. I don’t know if she’s Catholic, but I mean it’s a non-Jewish, I should say. And as we say, and as my people say, a shiksa. But George said, I can change the part enough. And so I wrote a song for her. And it was another hundred people. We got to Boston and we had a first preview and it ran about 20 minutes too long we felt and so we had to meeting the next day which was a Sunday and The one thing one song we decided to cut them along with a lot of other stuff was another 100 people and was Pam’s Only song in the show and it was her debut. She was fresh out of the University of Cincinnati or the Conservatory there anyway, I should say and When the news was handed to her on Monday, she took it so well, so un- she never pouted, she never complained.
Michael Kantor: You were right at the point where you were telling me that by combining everything, you actually saved the park scene.
Stephen Sondheim: So anyway, I said, let’s combine the park scenes, and then Marta can sit and comment on the other two girls, and then take over and play her own scene. And we rehearsed it Tuesday, and it went in for opening night on Tuesday night. She stopped the show and got great reviews. So it was one of those real little Hollywood stories, right from the day that she auditioned. And we said, we’ve got to write her a part, which you never do. And they did that in the 30s, but in the 20s, but not. Not in the so-called integrated musical. And in spite of the fact that George had written a specific character, he was able to adjust the character to Pam. And it’s the only time I’ve ever done that.
Michael Kantor: Where did you get the images for that?
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, I don’t know. I’ve lived in New York all my life. I was born here. I was in Manhattan, so, you know, my goodness. You walk through the park, you see what’s going on with the trees. Observation.
Michael Kantor: What about the Genesis for the ladies who lunch?
Stephen Sondheim: Well, I had originally written a number called Crinoline, which I didn’t finish because George Firth, my collaborator on the piece, thought that it was not quite the character of Joanne. It was a song in which she sort of longed for the days when people didn’t smoke in night clubs. I mean, everything that she was, she longed the days that people were not like her. The world was not like her world. And so it was supposed to be really about time changing. And, but we wanted a number for the character and also by that time we knew it was going to be Elaine Stritch even though she was the only one, I think, cast in advance of the, you know, before the rest of the cast. And so I just, there isn’t much more to say. Was written. For Elaine, I listened to a lot of her recordings. And because she’s, you know, she’s not a Chantous. She’s really a Dizouz. She semi-speaks, semi-sings. And so I wanted something sort of conversational. And also Though the character is not, per se, is not really familiar, well, I know women who could be Joanne, but I grew up in an upper middle class society. My mother and father were in the fashion industry in the dress business, and a lot of their friends were the Joanne types. And the women were rich and had nothing to do with their days except get fittings and have their nails done. Occasionally do good work, but essentially waste their lives, and so I wanted to write about a woman who recognizes this, and um, so it was fairly easy to draw on my mother and father’s friends from the dress industry particularly.
Michael Kantor: What about your own state of mind at the time? How much it emerged from specifically from the George Firth material and how much of that period in your life were you feeling that sense of you know living in this alienating city?
Stephen Sondheim: It’s all about George’s characters and what he wanted to say. I mean, I rarely write consciously myself into anything, and once or twice I’ve done it, but not with company. I just was writing the characters that George had made up.
Michael Kantor: What about Michael Bennett at this point? This wasn’t a big dance show.
Stephen Sondheim: No, I’m not sure why he took it on. I think Hal probably persuaded him to, talked him into it. It was a very good choice. One thing that did emerge, and I think it’s another reason he wanted to do Follies, was nobody had ever written him numbers to stage before, as completely as I did. Because I staged the numbers. What’s something I learned from Jerry Robbins was to stage the number in my head, so that there’s a blueprint to give to a choreographer or a director. And then they can do anything they want. But at least they can turn to me and say, well, what’s going on in these four bars? And I can say, Well, I thought he would get up and go over and kiss her. Whatever. But the point is I have something planned. And the first number I played for Michael was the opening number. And I had worked out, I’d asked Boris how long it would take for the elevators to get down, et cetera, et cetera, and he said 25 seconds or whatever it was. And so I’d written this long thing. And Michael asked me. I said, well that’s to get them in case you want to get anybody down from the elevator. Michael had never been given a blueprint like this before. I could tell he was really happy because he didn’t have to supply things or say Jesus I need something or I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. He had something to springboard from and so it made him, I think it made them very happy.
Michael Kantor: What about on something like the title, I don’t know, it’s titled Crazy, but you can drop personal crazy. What did you bring to that?
Stephen Sondheim: Well, I want to write an Andrews Sisters number. That was the hardest number. That was last number I wrote for the show. Because I couldn’t figure out how to get a number into that scene. There’s a very curious quality about George for his writing. It does not lead into song. It’s very dialogic. It’s always been difficult in that sense. And so that’s one of the reasons the company, all the numbers in company, do not arise out of dialog. None of them does. They are all inserted like. Nuts into a fruitcake, they’re inserted into the scenes, or they occupy, as in the case of Barcelona, the whole scene. But none of them just arises out of dialog the way, you know, I’ve been trained to do by Oscar Hammerstein. And so it was a question, actually my original number, my original idea for a song for that scene would have been funny if I could have worked it out in George’s dialog, which was Jenny and David are high for the first time. And I just want to write a number called wow, and then long pauses where there would just be music and they would just go wow, that kind of thing, how time gets distended. But finally I hit on this notion and I said to Michael I’m writing an Andrew Sisters number. So he stayed to like an Andrew Sister number, which is what I did to have them bring on a microphone and actually do it. He went full out, which was wonderful about it. He didn’t have them just appear and start to do it, they brought out a microphone, they planted. They sang the number, they looked daggers at Bobby, and they picked up the microphone and carried it off.
Michael Kantor: Um, let’s cut for one sec. Oh, I got another question. You can learn about it. How’d you feel about the ending? I’ve heard, I’ve read different.
Stephen Sondheim: Well, the original ending would have been nice. I wrote a song called Marry Me a Little, because what happened was in the original version, Bobby decided that he would marry Amy. Amy did not get married at the end of the first act. She reneged on the ceremony and did not go out after Paul, so she was unmarried in the middle of the second act, and what Bobby did was he decided he needed to marry somebody. He needed to commit himself to somebody, and Amy was the girl. So he wandered through all the apartments of the various characters on the stage because by that time Hal had had the notion that he wanted all the apartment visible all evening long. Now, it turned out not to be because he was actually gonna have them living there, nobody would ever leave the stage and it just, you know, it would have been probably oppressive. But, so he had abandoned it, but they each had an area which was their own. And so I thought if Bobby went through all the houses, and he picked up one token, as if he had learned something from each of the couples, and maybe pick up a rose here, or who knows what, a prop or something, he arrives in Amy’s kitchen, and all the time he’s doing it, he’s singing Marry Me a Little. Meaning I commit myself, well, not all, but I’ll commit myself, ambivalent feelings. And he arrived there, and then she said, as she does in the play now, she said you’ve got to want to marry somebody, not just somebody. And so it amounted to the same thing. But it seemed like too much of a self-realization, that song, Mary Neelittle. It’s as if he had learned his lesson already. And so we decided not to. So I wrote another song called Happily Ever After, which is a sort of scream of pain of Bobby’s, and brings into it what Boris Aaronson had said and observed about the whole piece, which was, the temptations in New York are so great. Go on the subway, you see all these posters and they’re so inviting and there’s a kind of impersonality that happens as a result of that, that we’re all exposed in the city. So many outside forces that are tempting and do not allow us to fulfill ourselves. And so I used that in the song, that’s sort of the central part of the song. Bobby then excuses himself for not committing himself to anybody because there are so many other things you can commit yourself to having to do with daily pleasures and the activity of the city. When we opened in Boston, Hal felt that was too negative. So I then wrote the positive version of that song, which is Being Alive. And that’s how it was what happened.
Michael Kantor: How do you feel about being alive now? I mean, not being alive, but this song. I like it.
Stephen Sondheim: I like it when it’s sung well, it’s good.
Michael Kantor: What what is it
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, don’t believe what you read. Oh, no, I don’t think being alive’s a cop-out. No, we’ve been accused of copying out in the ending. The problem with the ending of Company is the transition in the nightclub scene when Bobby is drunk and Joanne propositions him. And he says, who will I take care of? And she says, did you hear yourself, kiddo? Did you just hear yourself? It’s a tiny moment and does not convince everybody that that is enough to make Bobby blink. Think what he says. Start looking back at his life, but I believe it because the whole evening is about his reviewing his life. I mean if you understand that he comes into his apartment at the beginning and the play takes place in 30 seconds of thinking or five seconds or two seconds of thinking reviewing his life and saying I got to do something about my life this is ridiculous then I think it’s convincing. I actually saw one performance where that was totally convincing to me. It was an off-Broadway production. And somehow the actor made it work. I don’t want to mention names.
Michael Kantor: Ambivalence on stage.
Stephen Sondheim: It’s not I enjoy ambivalence on stage. I don’t enjoy ambvalence on the stage. Ambivalence is the stuff of drama and has been always, well even in the most simple minded musicals, you know, you get a song, an Irving Berlin musical where I hate you but I love you. I mean, ambivalance is the the stuff, I don’t know why people have made so much out of it. It’s just that I tend to deal with it on a more realistic level than it has been dealt with in musicals before, had been, I should say. And, but ambivalence is what drama’s about, from Oedipus on, and so I don’t understand the great geschrei about it. I think it’s because people do want you to come out and say something either positive or negative. They don’t like the idea that you’re saying something positive and negative, particularly about a subject as close to the bone as marriage or personal commitment.
Michael Kantor: Let’s talk about Oscar Hammerstein. You know, if you have to cite his primary contribution to the development of the Broadway musical, what would you?
Stephen Sondheim: What Oscar Hammerstein did I think primarily was to marry European operetta and American musical comedy tradition and Showboat is the apotheosis of that in which you tell a story but unlike European opereta, a serious story or a story that has some. Realism, if you want to use such a word. It doesn’t take place in grouse dark. It takes place on the Mississippi. And marry that to American musical comedy techniques having to do with showstoppers, having to with comedy numbers, having to deal with, you know, certain amount of star power, things like that. Nobody picked up on that really during the thirties and then oklahoma cinched it because it was such a gigantic hit that people say ohhhhh oklahom is a very simple story but it is a story and it is about character though on a very two-dimensional level and a very naive level but it attempts to explore relationships the way a play does. That had not been done in commercial musical theater. People talk about Pal Joey. Pal Joey is, as far as I’m concerned, just another musical comedy, only it takes place in a sort of low-dive atmosphere. But those aren’t real people. Gladys Bumps, that’s not a real person. Ludlow, whatever his name is, Lowell, Lowell or Ludlow. I mean, it’s all silly stuff. And I’ve never understood why that show is considered in any way part of this development. I think it was Oscar. Single-handedly, and it’s not because I was close to him and think so highly of him, but I mean if you really look at the evidence, it’s from Showboat, then a long period where he tried to do it I guess, and I guess the show didn’t work. I saw two shows in the period between Showboat and Oklahoma in revival. One was Music in the Air, and actually I saw the first musical I think I ever saw or the second one was Very Warm for May, which was a silly little musical about the summer stock company. I think by that time Oscar maybe had given up on this grand ambition because he was having many flops, but I never talked to him about that. But Oklahoma, he was so gigantic a hit that it influenced what followed afterwards.
Michael Kantor: What do you think of the chief merits of the Broadway musical before Sheba?
Stephen Sondheim: Before Shobo, oh, the songs. Yeah, the song’s wonderful. A lot of songs are wonderful from musicals of the 20s and 30s. They’re wonderful songs. The fact they have nothing to do with character or plot is irrelevant, because that’s not what they were supposed to function as. The idea of a musical was you have a funny story or a silly story or a star vehicle, something that shows off your stars. And you have comedy scene. And then you have a song and or a dance number. And that’s what people came. They came for the songs and the dances. They didn’t come for the comedy or the characters. And to see the stars, very important. They came to see Ethel Moore and they came to see Marilyn Miller and they come to see William Gax and they to see Victor Moore, etcetera, etcetera. There were the satirical musicals like Let Me Cake and Strike Up the Band of the I Sing. And those had another function and were not so much connected to. Any tradition as much as Gilbert and Sullivan. And that was a whole other thing, but the so-called satirical musicals, because they’re so topical, they tend to be only of and for their time. And again, what’s good today about Of Thee I Sing is not the book. When I say good, I mean what’s relevant, and I hate that word, but what speaks to one today is the songs.
Michael Kantor: What do you, do you know much about Kern and his process writing showbooks?
Stephen Sondheim: Yes, I know he was as interested as Oscar was. Oscar told me this, and Billy Hammerstein, Oscar’s son, has told me that Curran, even starting with the princess shows, the idea of little intimate shows, granted they’re silly little shows, but the princess show of the late teens and the early 20s were an attempt to look at musicals from a different perspective, to make little chamber pieces out of them. Again, without any substance. But chamber pieces of another form, another view. And I think that one of the reasons Chauveau turned out as well as it did is that Kern knew what Oscar was trying to do and he was just as interested in doing it. Music in the Air, though it certainly feels like an operetta, is also an attempt to tell some kind of story about character. It isn’t just silly-billy stuff, although it seems that today.
Michael Kantor: What about… How did the opening in Oklahoma tell everyone this is totally…
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, that’s exaggerated. It didn’t tell everyone. They just told them they were in for an unusual evening because most musicals start out with a chorus number. This starts out with Acapella singing and just two people on stage. And right away it’s personal and it’s different. But I don’t think it’s firing on Fort Sumter. It’s been vastly exaggerated. It was the total effect of the show.
Michael Kantor: Why do you think Oscar believes so much in rural images?
Stephen Sondheim: I’ve never quite understood it. I got to know him, of course, in the country, not in the city. Dallstown, Pennsylvania. I knew him in the City, but essentially what I associated with is that front porch and sitting there and looking at the sunset over the fields and the cows in the distance. And there was something in him that yearned for that. But he was a real city boy and his tongue was sharp. He was not a hayseed in any shape or form. But he was a very benevolent man. And he was, I think, as far as I can tell, a non-competitive one. Now people who knew him on the business side or might disagree, I don’t know that side of him. But Oscar was centered. I think he was happy with himself. And at least when I knew him. I know he went through all kinds of personal turmoil in the 20s, but I didn’t know him then. So… I asked him once, I said, why don’t you write more sophisticated musicals? He said, do you mean musicals that take place in penthouses? I said yeah, he said, because they don’t interest me, end of statement. He had to be cajoled even into writing Me and Juliet, which took place in a theater because the partnership was falling apart, he and Rogers, and Rogers wanted desperately to do a show that took place at the theater. Oscar couldn’t have been less interested, and he told me so, in writing about the He found a way of telling a story that was personal to him about being a big man, he was a big man. And he wrote a story about a big and a little man, how the big man bullies the little man. And so he could relate to it, but all Dick Rogers wanted to do was write about the theater. And if you look at me and Juliet, it’s a Squares version of the theater, you’d swear that the guy who wrote it had never been in a theater in his life, because people in the theater don’t talk that way or behave that way. But because Oscar wasn’t interested in that aspect of theater, he’s not interested in backstage life.
Michael Kantor: What about South Pacific? Do you remember opening night?
Stephen Sondheim: Not really. Hal remembers opening night, Mary remembers opening, Hal Prince and Mary Rogers remember opening night better than I do. My major memory in my teens is when Oscar took me and Jimmy Hammerstein, his son, we were about the same age, to New Haven to see the first night of Carousel. It was a major event in my life. It’s something I will never forget. I was so moved at the end of the first act that I cried into Dorothy Hammerstein’s fur. She had this good luck fur she always wore. And, you know, tears can stain fur, and I think she was never able to use it again because I was bawling so heavily. But I remember the way the stage looked at the end of the first act, and it was just a wash. It was a major event for me. But I don’t remember the OV United of the South Pacific.
Michael Kantor: I was just thinking about the, so you’ve got to be carefully taught, which some people point to as, you know, maybe preachy or not, but what, how do you feel about that?
Stephen Sondheim: It’s preachy. It’s preachy, but he believes it. So is Puzzleman. Oscar liked to write preachy songs and it’s a question of is it so preachy that it gets in the way of the song or not. That’s a personal reaction. It doesn’t mean you’ve got to be taught. I like it because I like the song, but it’s certainly preachy, no question about it. So is puzzleman, which is a song I don’t particularly like.
Michael Kantor: Describe your relationship with Oscar. What did you call him?
Stephen Sondheim: I called him Aki and added to the family, and he was a surrogate father. I was in custody, yes, my mother had custody of me in more ways than one, and I saw my father occasionally and liked him. We got along great, and when I was, in fact, after my first year in college, I moved away from my mother and went to live with my father, my own decision. But in between, Oscar and Dorothy were my surrogates parents. From the age of 11 to 15. And it was that describe, the relationship was no more complex than that I think. I do know that Oscar saw in me somebody he could pass knowledge on to, somebody who was interested in writing songs.
Michael Kantor: Wait for the jets or the sharks to move past here. Um
Stephen Sondheim: Not a chance. It’s New York what they are.
Michael Kantor: What about, you know, if Oscar had been a songwriter, do you think he’d be?
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, I’ve often made the statement that if he were a geologist, I would have been a geologists. Certainly, he was my role model. That’s a phrase I hate, but it’s true. He was my roll model. And, of course, if he’d been geologists, I probably would have gone into theater anyway. Although, I wasn’t that interested in the theater. I mean, I liked it. And I liked music. I’d taken piano lessons for two years when I was seven years old. But I really hadn’t sort of… My bent was mathematics and I had sort of to major in math when I got to college. Not for any particular purpose, just because I loved it so much, and with a vague sense that I might go into research mathematics, solve Fermat’s theorem, and do things like that. So Oscar did open the path for me in the sense that I found something I wanted to imitate. I found somebody I wanted to imitate.”
Michael Kantor: Tell me about when you got the courage to show him something that you really hope.
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, well, I had this epiphanic afternoon when I had written a show in school, George School it was called, and the show was called By George, and it was about thinly disguised versions of the faculty and the students. And I just thought it was brilliant, and I was 15, you know, 15, maybe 14. And I brought it to him and I said, I’d love you to read this, because Rodden Hammerstein produced things that were not their own work as well as their own. I said, and tell me what you think, and to be perfectly honest, and of course what I meant by that was, you’re going to tell me it’s brilliant because I know it’s brilliant. And I went home and I was sure I was going to be the first 14-year-old to have a show on Broadway. And, I came back the next day and he said, do you really want me to treat this as if it just crossed my desk and I didn’t know you? I said absolutely, I want you to do it because you know me. He said, in that case, it’s really terrible. It may be the worst show I’ve ever seen. Red and I blinked and he said it’s not that it’s not talented but if you’d like to know why I think it’s terrible let’s start with the first stage direction and it was really wonderful because he treated me like a grown-up and he didn’t condescend to me for one second and he treated me as absolutely as if I were a peer and he just taught me everything that one afternoon about storytelling about how songs tell About how you don’t introduce characters and then drop them, about addiction, about plotting, about over length, about everything. And of course when you’re that age you soak things up like a sponge. And so I’ve made the hyperbolic statement but then I tend, it’s my favorite language is hyperbole. I think I learned more in that afternoon about songwriting and songwriting for the theater and theater writing and musicals. As I’ve learned in all the subsequent years. And he outlined a set of exercises for me. He said, why don’t you start by taking a well-made play and make a musical out of it. And by getting close to it, by having to examine it, you’ll see why it’s well-made and how it’s well- Made. And then try a play that you think is flawed and see if you can improve it as you write it. And then, try an original. Uh not an original, but a non-dramatic form like short story or a novel and then try an original. And maybe you can get them on in school and in college because this was the year before I went to college. And that’s exactly what I did. And by the time I got through the original, which I was still working on when I got out of college, which was called Climb High, and had a brief flirtation with getting produced. Still strictly journeyman work, but it was good journeyman work. I’d really learned something by then. And so by the time I was ready to be a professional, which was with a show called Saturday Night, I was a professional.
Michael Kantor: In your intro to this biography of Oscar, you mentioned a birthday party a few months before his death and an interchanged. It’s sort of stuck with me indelibly.
Stephen Sondheim: Well, yeah, it was another major moment in my life, was Oscar was dying of stomach cancer, and we all knew it, we being the family, and us, non-family family. And he had a lunch for his birthday, which was in July, and in New York, and he had on top of the piano two small piles of formal photographs that he had taken of himself, I think by Bachrach, the formal photographer in New York. And he asked me if I wanted one. And I thought, you know, it’s like my father giving me, you now, I said, sure, I’d love to have one. I said would you sign it? And he looked at me and lunch was announced. He didn’t know what he wanted to sign. Everybody went into lunch and he stood, suddenly he got a smile on his face and he signed And he went into lunch and I looked at it and it said, for Stevie, my friend and teacher. And if you remember, in King and I, he talks about how by your pupils you are taught. And that’s what he meant. And of course, it was a major moment for me and still is. He was that kind of man.
Michael Kantor: How are we best to remember him?
Stephen Sondheim: By his work, of course. You remember him by his work. His work, you know, naive as much as some of it seems. It’s very hard to listen to Carousel without being moved, no matter how hip or sophisticated you are or how far musicals have come in terms of the sophistication of manner and technique and approach in the last 45 years. It’s hard not to be. It isn’t just that it’s basically a story that moves you. It’s his way of telling it. And you listen to a lyric like, what’s the use of wondering? I don’t think you get a lot better than that. That says it. That could belong in a show today, in spite of the fact that it it’s got this vague New England accent, folksiness to it. But the best of his work is still kind of monolithic. And that’s one of the reasons the shows last. People go to see Oklahoma and Carousel and King and I and South Pacific, but particularly King and I, it’s interesting that South Pacific has done less than the others, and I think with good reason. And those shows retain their popularity because of what’s going on underneath. An audience response to what’s going on underneath. They have something that the audience wants to hear, because they are happy stories in that sense. Love conquers death, et cetera, et cetera. Whether you believe the happy endings or not, they’re characters and stories that concern them. And it’s because of the way Oscar told those stories. Because there are other shows that have just as good stories that nobody does anymore, because they’re not told as well.
Michael Kantor: Now, Richard Rogers is clearly a totally different kind of guy. How would you compare the…
Stephen Sondheim: You can’t compare a Rodgers and a Hammerstein either as far as I’m concerned, either as men or as artists. I made a statement in a Newsweek article once that caused a little gishry to the effect that I thought Oscar was a man of limited talent and infinite soul and Rodgers was a a man with infinite talent and limited soul. I still feel that. I think that’s one of the reasons that Rodgers were so able to adapt so well and so quickly. And change his style so immediately from Hart and that kind of New York guarded sophistication to Oscar’s kind of open-hearted view of the world. And there are those who quote, prefer the Rodgers and Hart songs to the Rodger and Hammerstein songs. I think the comparison is nonsense. There’s no comparison. Both have their own values and I like some Rodgers& Hart songs very much and some less and I liked some Rodger& Hammerstein shows very much. I like Rodgers, Hammerstein shows and I don’t like others. I mean, you know, the business of, if Richard Rodgers had merely changed his name, nobody would be making these comparisons.
Michael Kantor: But he, I mean, when you work with him, for instance… Why do you think after working with Oscar, he struggled so much?
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, I think Dick Rogers still had one foot back in the 30s. I think he didn’t understand what Oscar was doing, really. I mean, that’s perhaps a little too condescending to say. Not that he didn’t understand, but he needed Oscar to point the way to how to tell a story through song. I mean when I worked with Dick Rogers on Do I Hear a Waltz? He was still worried about how to get the reprise of the love song into the second act. That’s something that Oscar would not have thought about. And, you know, you don’t get a reprise of If I Loved You, you know the whole song in the second act of Carousel. The story goes on. The story goes on.
Michael Kantor: His era was sort of ending as Oscar done.
Stephen Sondheim: Absolutely. And I think… In the 20s and 30s, Oscar was starting to experiment with this form. In the twenties and thirties, Rodgers and Hart were turning out, you know, show after show after show, and this song doesn’t work in this one, you go into that one, that’s all they cared about. And they cared about hits.
Michael Kantor: Let’s talk about somebody else who cared about, well, first off, how did you get, Arthur told us this story, but I’d be interested in hearing it from your perspective. There’s a show, Isle of Goats, you don’t see it that night, but you get invited to a party, and what happens? What do you ask Arthur, and how does it conspire that eventually you work on West Side Story?
Stephen Sondheim: Well, how I got the job on West Side Story. Topic sentence. I first met Arthur when I was brought up to play stuff for him that I’d written, I’d written this show called Saturday Night, and it was, it, the producer had died and the show had fallen into the hands of his widow who was a little crazy, and so nothing ever happened with it, but I had a little portfolio of songs that I was not ashamed to play. And my first job was writing a series called Topper, the senior writer on it was named George Oppenheimer, he knew of this project, a musical of James M. Kane’s novel called serenade. It was to be produced by Marty Gable and Henry Margulies. And it was originally to have been written by Leonard Bernstein, directed by Jerome Robbins, and booked by Arthur Lawrence. And Bernstein and Robbins had dropped out. So they were looking for a composer. George brought me up. I played my stuff. Arthur Lawrence heard it. And then that show was dropped because Warner Brothers decided to do a musical movie with Mario Lanza of Serenade. Then I met Arthur one other time at a dinner party out in Long Island at the home of the mother of a college chum of mine. And Arthur said, oh yes, I remember you. He said, you know, I didn’t much like your music, but I thought I’d rather like your lyrics. A few months later, a great friend of mine named Bert Shevlov, the guy who wrote Funny the Happening Way of the Forum, was invited to the opening night of a play by Hugo Berry called Isle of Goats. And there was to be a party afterwards at the apartment of Zachary Scott and Ruth Ford. And he said, why don’t you meet me there? I wasn’t invited to the opening, but maybe you’d like to go to the party. I said, fine. So I got there. And Bert hadn’t arrived, so I was making small talk with a few people who were there, and one of them was Arthur Lawrence. I asked him what he was doing, and he said I’m about to embark on a musical version of Romeo and Juliet with Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins. And I just. Sheer curiosity I said who’s doing the lyrics he said I never thought of you and he literally smote his forehead and he said you got to come up and play for Lenny he said Comden and Green are supposed to do the lyrics but they are stuck in Hollywood and they won’t know whether they can get out of their contract until next week so why don’t you go up there why don’t you come and audition so I thought I don’t want to do write lyrics for anything I want to write music but to meet Leonard Bernstein why not what’s what’s So I went up and played for Lenny, and he kept saying, haven’t you got anything poetic? Saturday Night is a very vernacular show. I found out, when I started working with Lenny what he meant by poetic, which is purple prose is what he meant, but he didn’t know it. And anyway, so I left. And then I got a call a week later saying, if you’d like to work on the show, we’d love to have you, I said, gee, that’s very exciting. Let me call you back. I called Oscar. And I said, you know, I don’t want to do just lyrics. I just wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. And he said, I think it would be a very good idea for you. He said, it’ll frustrate you about writing music, but these are professionals and distinguished ones, Jerry, and Robinson, Bernstein, and Lawrence. And I think you would learn a lot. So I did. And I did learn a little.
Michael Kantor: What was it about, describe working with blending what?
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, there’s nothing much to describe. I mean, Lenny liked to work in a room with somebody. And I like to work alone and separately. So we would meet about once every three days. And the other two days, we would talk on the phone. And we would discuss the songs first. And I talked a great deal to Arthur. I worked with Arthur as much as I worked with Lenny, really. And in terms of how the songs could function, what should they function as, what should they do, and Jerry was less in on this part of it and then we would maybe I’d bring in a lyric idea or Lenny would play a melodic idea or some kind of vamp and we would start to develop a song together and then I go off and do lyrics and he’d develop music and we get together etc etc. That’s really all. Lenny had some interesting work habits. He had an 11 or 12 room apartment at the Osborne on 57th Street. The smallest and most unattractive room is what he chose as a study. It looked out on an air shaft instead of out on the avenue. It was just kind of homemade wooden shells with scores around in a piano. And a bar, and a couch, and coffee table. And that’s about it. It was the 20th century version of the monk’s cell. And it was really because he didn’t want any distractions. He didn’t wanna look at anything pretty, either outside or inside. And Lenny liked to trance out a lot. He would close his eyes and think the music that he had, if I said, well, what are we going to do with the release, or something like that? And he would think it and… I don’t know how much he wrote away from the piano. I think he wrote at the piano a lot. But by the time we got together, there was something to play, and then he would think about it that way.
Michael Kantor: What about the idea that he wanted things, maybe, to somehow be more important, and you were striving toward that?
Stephen Sondheim: Len, Len, I think, I, I… I’m sorry.
Michael Kantor: It’s just like there’s somebody singing outside.
Stephen Sondheim: About time. It’s a musical program.
Michael Kantor: Okay
Stephen Sondheim: Lenny, I think Lenny was, Lenny had a near fatal disease of wanting to be important. It’s such a cliché, but you know, if you’re thinking of being important, the chances are you will be pretentious or trivial, and I think the best of Lenny’s work is Candide of his musical theater work, is Candid because he really thought he was just writing fun pastiches. He would say, well, this is just imitation of Offenbach, this just imitation bronze. Well guess what? They may have been imitations of Bach and Brahms, but they were Bernstein. And that music has a freshness today and a liveliness and a vitality that I don’t think the other shows have.
Michael Kantor: How did that affect your work on their experience? How do you feel about it?
Stephen Sondheim: Well, when I would bring in lyrics to Lenny, he was always looking for poetry, he would call it. And, you know, my idea of poetry is, I just met a girl named Maria or I just kissed a girl named Marie. When it’s set to music, it’s like, oh, what a beautiful morning, it is like a souffle that rises, it flowers. Lenny, Lenny wanted, as I say. Purple prose is what he really wanted. He wrote a dummy lyric, or not a dummy lyric, he wrote a lyric for the second act. It’s now called I Have a Love, which is not my favorite lyric, but nevertheless, he wrote one such intense poetic coloration that you couldn’t believe any character in any milieu would have said it, much less the characters in our show. It went, once in your life, only once in your life comes a flash of fire and light. And there stands your love, the harvest of your years.” Now that’s the kind of thing you know you’re reading. Freshman English. And it just has nothing to do with those people. But I can understand why Lenny thought it was poetic. It’s just not my idea of poetry. And also, poetry and music don’t often go well together, particularly on the stage, I think. Maybe in art songs they do. But the tendency is for music to blow up the poetry and make it like the Frog Prince. I mean, it just becomes overblown. And I think you have to underwrite lyrics.
Michael Kantor: What do you like best about West Side Story?
Stephen Sondheim: What I like best about West Side Story is the kind of energy that’s in the dance music. I have the heretical feeling that Lenny was not a songwriter. I don’t think he was a song writer. I think, in fact, the best of what he did in musical theater, I think was dance music and underscoring. He had a wonderful theatrical sense. And in the case of Candide, because he was writing pastiche songs, they’re real songs. That’s an operetta, really. And so I think what’s wonderful about West Side Story is Not only its energy, but it’s also the amalgam of book music, lyrics, and dance. In that sense, it’s a remarkable piece, I think. I won’t say seamless, but virtually so. The technique of West Side Story is what’s really riveting to me.
Michael Kantor: And has it been enlarged for due to arthroids?
Stephen Sondheim: The book of West Side Story is a miracle. When you realize how much gets done in terms of story telling and action and how little there is in the way of just lines, how few lines, I think except for Folley’s it may be the shortest book of a non-opera musical ever and yet it’s packed with action. There’s not a scene in which… Something at least one really important event happens and you know writing an event is not just a matter of stage direction you’ve got to be in dialog and when you when you look at the way Tony and Maria meet they meet and fall in love in eight lines and he convinces you you believe it now it’s partly because is that music playing underneath the cha-cha and the music is wonderful for just convey for conveying just that much better than for some. But the whole prolog, you know, was originally set to lyrics. Lenny and I said, I mean, we had a whole song there that took us a month to write, and Arthur said, or Jerry said actually, both of them, I think it could be accomplished better if we just don’t have them sing it all, just have it danced and just that music. Absolutely right.
Michael Kantor: Jerry Robbins, the stories of how many people were scared of him are legendary. Why was it? Tell me about Lenny and his relationship. What did he have that? We’re not…
Stephen Sondheim: We’re not talking about musical theater, we’re talking about people now.
Michael Kantor: I don’t want to talk about that. Okay. Let’s talk about… Your next big job. Well, you originally promised the score for it,
Stephen Sondheim: A gypsy? Yeah, it wasn’t promised, but it was sort of, yeah, understood. Nathal Merman said she didn’t want an untried composer, so. And then, again, Oscar persuaded me to do it, partly because it was a limited period of time. We were to start in September, and the show was to be produced in February, so it was only six months. And he thought it would be useful for me to work with a star, and he was right.
Michael Kantor: And how is working with Julie Stein different?
Stephen Sondheim: Well, Julie came from the old school. You know, he was not used to writing this kind of integrated stuff. So I just, I would just give him lyrics to set for the most part. I would write out the rhythms. And Julie was very fertile. And One of the problems with Julie was that he would not rewrite as much as he would write something new, so that everything was essentially a first draft.
Michael Kantor: I either spoke about him coming in with a tagline, may I say, sir, another hit, and he just didn’t.
Stephen Sondheim: Well, he thought about hits. Well, they weren’t all hits. That’s what he thought.
Michael Kantor: Arthur was highly critical about Ethel Merman’s acting ability. What do you think was her greatest strength and her greatest weakness?
Stephen Sondheim: Oh dear, all those questions, I’m sorry, you know, she belted songs, what can I say, I mean you know it’s, there’s just nothing…
Michael Kantor: She is an important part of the history of the…
Stephen Sondheim: I suppose so, but you say it’s just such a general question, what was your greatest strength?
Michael Kantor: I don’t know
Stephen Sondheim: In gypsy. Gee, I don’t know. The only thing I can say, we designed, Arthur and I designed, the lyric of every, the idea of everything’s coming up roses was predicated on the fact that Ethel couldn’t act. And so what I did was I wrote, like Cole Porter’s Blow Gabriel Blow, I just wrote a traditional Ethel Merriman driving song so that Herbie and Louise, the other two directors. Could cower on the side of the stage and you’d know this was a moment of horror, not a moment of triumph. Then it turned out that Ethel could act better than we thought and she made the number even better. But it was foolproof.
Michael Kantor: Um… Let’s jump to form. Why? Let’s go ahead, Joan.
Speaker 3 Well, you know, about Everything’s Coming Up Roses, I was fascinated by when I read that you used only traveling images and show business images and children. Would you like to talk a little bit about how you wrote those lyrics?
Stephen Sondheim: Um, everything’s coming up roses. The problem was to find a phrase that said, everything’s going to be better than ever, that was neither too poetic for Rose nor too flat and vernacular. It took me a week to come up with that phrase, everything’s gonna be roses. And I remember a great moment of pleasure in my life was, pick up the New York Times and finding that the phrase had passed in the language when they said, everything is not coming Roses in Vietnam was the lead sentence of an editorial, and I thought, oh, I’ve passed something in the language. The idea was to use images throughout the song that would relate to both Rose and Louise’s life. So it’s filled with show business images and child images like lollipops and stuff like that, because Rose is trying to make this proposition attractive to Louise. And there was an incident. Jerry Robbins was in Manchester rehearsing my side story for its British premier and Arthur and I went over and late one night I played the song for Jerry and he said I don’t understand everything is coming up roses what and I said Jerry if anybody else makes that mistake I will change the lyric but it took me a week to find that title I’m not If there’s any ambiguity about it, everything will come up roses-wide. I mean, it’s just nonsense, but…
Michael Kantor: Never happened. What about, why a farce? You know, farce is such a, when I think of farce, I don’t think, well, in terms of continuation of song for character. Song doesn’t work for character in the same way.
Stephen Sondheim: No, no. In Forum, which is a farce and which is not about character development, it was a very hard score for me to write because it was against all my training from Oscar. It’s not about character development. The songs are used as respites to use Burt Shevlov’s word. The show was Burt’s idea. And in fact, because I think it’s such a brilliantly written book, I used to say to Burt, I don’t know why it’s a musical. It works great as far as he said because it would be relentless. And it needs songs the way they were used in Roman comedies as periods of rest for the audience so that it will renew, they can catch their breath and go back and laugh. He’s absolutely right.
Michael Kantor: Comedy Tonight emerged very late.
Stephen Sondheim: Yeah, I had another opening. I wrote a song called Forget War, which amounts to the same thing it was all about in comedy, but George Abbott said he couldn’t hum it. So I had to change it, and I changed it to a song love is in the air, which is a rather charming soft shoe number. It’s what we opened with in New Haven, and it killed the show in a sense. That’s an exaggeration, but not much, in that it led the audience to think they were in for a kind of charming. Light-hearted evening instead of this knockabout, bawdy farce. So when we got to Washington and called Jerry Robbins in to save the show, Jerry said, you got to write a song that tells the audience what it’s about. I said, I did already. He said, You can’t use that one because Abbott doesn’t like it. So you have to write another one. So I did. And I wrote, over a weekend, I wrote Comedy of the Night. And Jerry said. I said, Jesus, God, do you know how long it takes to write those comedy songs? He said, don’t, don�t. Just write a general song about comedy. Don�t do any jokes. I�ll do the jokes. Just give me a background against which � and of course, he did the most brilliant set of physical and visual jokes that have ever been seen on the stage, I think. And that opening number made that show � I mean, you could have read the phone book after that opening, and the audience would still have loved it. It was that good.
Michael Kantor: Now, originally Milton Berle was going to play it later.
Stephen Sondheim: Milton Barrow was going to play the lead role, and Burt and Larry’s, the script they came up with, it took many years, over a period of many years to write this show. It sounds like something that was whipped up over an afternoon, or it wasn’t. It was a period, not steadily, but a period or four years to work out that kind of You know, I’ve said often, and I would stand behind it, that it’s much better than anything Fay Doe ever wrote. It’s much more brilliantly plotted. And, um…
Michael Kantor: But how do you feel about Mostel coming into that?
Stephen Sondheim: Well, the whole thing was, our original ideal casting was Mostelda as the pimp, as Lycus, and Milton Berle as Pseudolus, but the first script turned out to be about three hours and 45 minutes long, and we knew we had to cut, and when Milton Berl found out, actually there was an ad in the newspaper announcing him, and it was that close to production, and, and he saw that, among other things, his part would also be down. He reneged. I think it was fear that actually was behind and gave him an excuse to get out. But the point is he left. And so suddenly somebody suggested that instead of Zero playing the pimp, we ought to look to him to play Soutilas. And he needed a comeback role because of his problems with the House Un-American Activities Committee. So he took the part in a second.
Michael Kantor: Um. What did you think of, I mean you mentioned the Vietnam War earlier as having an effect on the nation. What was your reaction to it and how did you feel about shows like Hair at that time?
Stephen Sondheim: Well, I didn’t feel anything particular about hair and Vietnam. I mean, I think that loose thread of the kid having to face his obligation is probably very much responsible for the success of hair and preventing it from just being a review. But I didn’t particularly like hair. It struck me as very repetitious. And I sort of, I got it, I got it. I got. Kind of feeling. But I didn’t really, I related it to the Vietnam War in terms of that threat of subject matter, but otherwise not at all. It didn’t seem to me protest, it seemed to me much more flower children rather than protest.
Michael Kantor: But the war itself never, sort of, you thought, God, we should be doing a war piece.
Stephen Sondheim: I never start musicals from an idea. I start them from stories. I mean, either the stories that are brought to me by collaborators or stories that I’ve seen or movies or plays or something like that. I never stop with subject matter. It would never occur to me to write a song about the, write a show about the Vietnamese War. If a story came that was about the Vietnam War and I wanted to sing it, then I would.
Michael Kantor: Let’s jump ahead. To your most, well, within your canon, one song sort of. Jesus, you’re skipping a lot of shows there. Okay, that’s fine. Jumping around. One song has sort of emerged as the biggest pop hit. How is that written for the performer who originally sang it? This is in a little bit of music.
Stephen Sondheim: Ascent of the Clowns was written because we needed a song for Glynis Johns for the second act. And when I was writing the show, I figured that if we’re going to have a glamorous, charismatic lady in the lead, Desiree, that we would, we had to assume that she couldn’t sing because we wouldn’t be able to get one. Turns out that Glyn is at a small but very musical voice. And so I hadn’t written anything in the second Act. Hal said that there was a scene between her and Frederick. I was in the middle of writing a song for Frederick, because it’s really his scene. He’s the one who gets changed in the scene. And so I was writing a Song of Regret for him, which is now a speech. And Hal said, why don’t you come down and see the way I’ve directed it? I think you’ll see that I’ve direct it. So it’s a really Glynnis’ scene. And he had, indeed. And so I went home and wrote Son of the Clowns, that’s all, because it was really Glynis’s song. But Son of The Clown’s was a freak. There’s no reason that song should have been a hit any more than any, there’s no more reason that Son of the Clowned should be a hit other than that Judy Collins got hold of it and she was a popular artist and made it popular enough so that Frank Sinatra picked it up. But there’s, there is no reason losing my mind wouldn’t have been the same kind of hit if some artist hadn’t picked it.
Michael Kantor: You don’t think it had to do with, you know, I read that, heard that you referred to Gunnus John’s voices, the way she phrased things, the short phrases, and the sort of rumpled bad idea. None of that you figured into.
Stephen Sondheim: No, because it wasn’t Glynis’s recording that made it a hit. It was Judy Collins. And it was much later after the show. The show had been out a long time before Judy Collins made that record.
Michael Kantor: What was it about Sweeney and Christopher Bond’s play that so hooked you that unlike many of your other projects where Hal convinced you to do a show, you really felt that this was it?
Stephen Sondheim: Well, most of the shows I did were brought to me by writers, and Hal brought Pacific Overtures. This was, I just saw this and I just wanted to sing it. I saw it in London. I’d wanted to see Grand Guignol, and I heard that this was Grand Guignon. It wasn’t. It was rather charming, not terribly suspenseful piece that was done out in Stratford East. And I just thought, gee, I’d love to sing that. And so I got it out of the British Museum, British Library, and. I found out the version I got was the 1848 version and it was terrible, silly play. And then I read all the other published versions. There were about four others. And they were all in varying degrees silly. And it was Christopher Bond’s version that had instilled in it versions of the revenger’s, aspects I should say, of the avenger’s tragedy and of the Count of Monte Cristo. And he was the one who gave Sweeney motivation and that’s what made the evening work.
Michael Kantor: And how did you find your musical in, so to speak?
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, it was an homage to Bernard Herrmann, who was my favorite film composer, and I’ve been very affected when I was 15 years old and seen a movie called Hangover Square, which has, I think, perhaps the most brilliant musical score I’ve ever written. He wrote up one movement, Piano Concerto, that actually frames the action, and yet it’s a real one movement, piano concerto. And his musical language I liked a lot because it’s tense and it’s full of foreboding. That’s why Hitchcock used him so much. And, um… I thought it would be fun to see if you can scare a contemporary audience the way movies can scare you. And I thought the way you do that is you keep music going all the time so they don’t get a chance to realize the artifice that they’re looking at. So that’s one of the reasons there’s so much music in Sweeney Todd. It’s an attempt to, you know, Hal doesn’t like that period and he claims not to melodrama, so he was very reluctant to have anything to do with it. He found his way into the piece by thinking of it as a sort of epic size. And so he talked to Eugene Lee about it. Eugene Lee found this iron foundry, so to speak, and brought it and Hal made it into this gigantic machine. And Hal has to also have some kind of sociopolitical. For what he works on. And it was certainly the whole class structure in England didn’t interest me at all. The way it interested Bond, I mean, I used what Bond had done, because Bond had his upper class folk talking in this kind of blank verse, and his lower class folk talking in cockney and things like that. So he was making a distinction between the classes, but he was not emphasizing it, and I wasn’t doing it either. And that was Hal’s way in, and that’s why there’s that. And Hal said… I know you want to scare an audience, you want a kind of, you know, door at small cast, which is what I wanted, and intimate and really frighten the audience, he said, but what you lose in that, I will give you in a kind epic feel, and I thought to myself, it can always be done small, why not do it big, and so I said yes, and of course House Production was dazzling, but huge. It’s since been done small. Was done at the Cosmo Theater, the National Theater. In London by Declan Donnelly and it was wonderful. It was the way I wanted it to be.
Michael Kantor: Arthur Warrens, when I asked him what he thought your best show was, he liked Sweeney and he said there’s an enormous emotional component in Sweeny, perhaps because there was some part of the character that you identified.
Stephen Sondheim: I guess there must have been, I think you always identify with people and the stories you write. Sometimes you discover what a show is about as you’re writing it, but certainly there was nothing conscious. I just wanted, as far as I knew consciously, I just want to tell this story. If there’s an identification there, I was unaware of it. I think the audience identifies with Sweeney, I mean, revenge is universal whether people will admit it or not. And that’s what the piece is about. It’s about revenge. It is about being done in justice, being done and in justice and getting your revenge. And I think that’s in everybody from the day they’re born, literally. Yanked out of the womb, slapped and made to face this world. Not to mention all the vicissitudes we have in the next fifty, sixty years of our lives, particularly when you’re growing up. I think everybody has feelings of revenge. Sweeney acted on them and I think The audience Senses that and I think they identify with him. I remembered how had wanted me to have a chase between this Sweeney chasing the sailor and the girl at the climax of the show He said because we got to sympathize with somebody I said how if we don’t sympathize, with Sweeny. There’s no show
Michael Kantor: To what effect is pretty women is pretty woman a war? Yeah
Stephen Sondheim: Yeah, Pretty Women’s a song in which Sweeney is lulling the judge, and also it’s because Sweeny knows that what’s behind the whole thing, what caused all this problem, is the judge’s lust. So he’s deliberately tweaking that, and he’s, as it turns out, fatally delaying the murder, but it’s a way of lull the judge and getting him, because he really wants to kill the judge at the point of orgasm is what he wants to do.
Michael Kantor: What about a little priest at the end of Act One? Did you have fun writing that?
Stephen Sondheim: Sure, it’s hard because I had to find professions that were one-syllable professions, the way I set up the music. And it’s filled with triple and quadruple rhymes, so it was a difficult lyric and it’s not as smooth as I wish it would be, although there are aspects of it that are smooth. It’s a stage direction. The last line of the first act of Bond’s play says, they fall into each other’s arms with laughter. And I thought, gee, that’s a moment to sing about, and what are they laughing And then I thought of, you know, they’re laughing at the prospect of what people taste like.
Michael Kantor: You know, it’s been done in an opera house. What, for you, what distinguishes the Broadway musical from that?
Stephen Sondheim: I’ve said before, and I truly believe, I think an opera is something that’s done in an opera house in front of an opera audience. And I think a musical is something that is done in a musical theater house in front of a musical theater audience. It’s the audience’s expectations that change what’s going on on the stage. And I to use one of the most blatant examples, when Menotti’s two operas, The Medium and The Telephone, were done on Broadway, I think they were Broadway shows. And when they were done in opera house, they were Same, same shows exactly. They were operas. Same thing with Sweeney. When it’s done in an opera house, it has a whole other dimension to it that’s brought not only by the size of the house, because it can be done in a small opera house but by what the audience brings to it. It’s easy to say and hard to prove but I profoundly believe it. The audience is the final collaborator. A piece does not exist without an audience, not just in terms of being seen. It isn’t just the question of if the tree falls in the forest and nobody’s around, does anybody hear it, it is. They affect an alchemical change to the piece, and the collaboration between the audience and the performers in an opera house is just different. It’s just different in weight, in atmosphere, in tone, in feeling, and that’s what makes it an opera.
Michael Kantor: What about porgy? What’s your sense of that?
Stephen Sondheim: That’s a folk opera, that’s an absolute opera, as far as I’m concerned. And when it’s done on Broadway, it’s a Broadway show. It’s my favorite. I mean, you know, that, that… I think there’s Porgi and then I think there’s everything else. Really? Oh yeah, oh yeah. I don’t think anything, I don’t think anything of it. Also, Dubose Hayward’s lyrics are the best lyrics ever written, I think, for the musical stage. Now, he only wrote 15 or 16, but they’re so far superior to Ira Gershwin’s. Ira Gerschwin’s stuff is, so smacks of show business and a kind of, you now, cutesiness. Whereas Heyward’s lyrics are to use Lenny’s criterion, genuinely poetic. They’re true poetry, but they’re lyrics. The music doesn’t overblow them and only enrich them. And they enrich the music, too.
Michael Kantor: Which are those?
Stephen Sondheim: Well, the whole first act is his, My Man’s Gone Now, Summertime, and Ira Gershwin gets a co-credit on Bessie Was My Woman, which surprises me, but it’s Ain’t Necessarily So, and I think they collaborated on, there’s a book that’s leaving soon for New York. But Ira Gerschwin gets the publicity, but It was Dubose-Heyward.
