By Fredric Dannen
I met Stephen Sondheim once. It was a party at the home of Anthony Tommasini, classical music critic for The New York Times, sometime in the mid-1990s – I can’t now pinpoint the date. Sondheim was already an almost mythical figure, considered by nearly everyone the greatest songwriter for the musical theater then living, and one of the small cadre of Broadway giants who wrote both music and lyrics. He arrived with Peter Jones, his longtime companion. Sondheim came over to me and shook hands and said, “Hi, I’m Steve.” I think I just nodded. I wanted to talk to him, I had about a thousand questions, but I had been invited to Tommasini’s New York apartment as a party guest, not a journalist, and Sondheim hadn’t come to be interviewed.
Quite honestly, I was a little wary of him, because of a story told to me by a friend from years back, Sally Klein, a member of the original Broadway cast of Sondheim’s 1981 flop musical Merrily We Roll Along, which had closed after 16 performances. Merrily tells the story of idealistic teenagers who become jaded adults, and the creators of the musical had gambled and cast teen and young adult actors. Klein was standing within earshot of Sondheim at a social gathering when someone came up to commiserate with the songwriter about the show’s failure. Sondheim, according to Klein, said failure could only be expected when you charged Broadway prices and cast your show with amateurs. Among those “amateurs,” it should be noted, were then-unknowns Jason Alexander, Tonya Pinkins, and Giancarlo Esposito.
It was a hurtful comment, but as I’ve come to learn from reading reminiscences of Sondheim, who died on November 26, 2021, at the age of 91, he was not an unkind man. And if he was angry at the time Merrily closed, I can’t blame him. By then, he had had so many successes – West Side Story and Gypsy, for which he wrote the lyrics, and A Little Night Music, Follies, Company, and Sweeney Todd, for which he wrote lyrics and music – that a lot of theater people wanted him to fail.
To get a sense of how jealous the Broadway community was of Sondheim, consider the Tony Awards acceptance speech given by Jerry Herman in 1984 when his musical La Cage Aux Folles beat Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George for best original score. Herman gloated, “This award forever shatters a myth about the musical theater. There’s been a rumor around for a couple of years that the simple, hummable show tune was no longer welcome on Broadway. Well, it’s alive and well at the Palace [Theatre].”
It was an unsubtle dig at Sondheim, who had a reputation for writing complex songs – certainly more complex than Herman standards such as the title songs from Hello, Dolly and Mame. But if myths are meant to be shattered, permit me to push back on Herman, whose suggestion that Sondheim was not a good melodist was way off base.
I am at present a member of the twelve-person company of the show Comedy Tonight: The Lighter Side of Stephen Sondheim, beginning a two-week run at the San Miguel Playhouse. (If you’ll excuse the plug, you can get tickets via boletocity.com.) The songs chosen for the show by director Lee Duberman are not simply hilarious – and no one has ever disputed Sondheim’s wicked sense of humor and gift for ingenious rhymes – but consistently, delightfully tuneful.
I’m talking about songs such as “Broadway Baby,” from Follies, “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” from Company, “Agony,” from Into the Woods, “A Little Priest,” from Sweeney Todd, “You Must Meet My Wife,” from A Little Night Music, and “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Not hummable? Only if you’re tone deaf.
Sondheim’s melodic gift is nowhere more evident than in Sweeney Todd, his quasi-operetta based on the Grand Guignol story of a mad barber in 19th century London who cuts the throats of his customers. It is the sort of grotesque subject that might have appealed to a nontonal composer such as Alban Berg. But in Sondheim’s hands, the score overflows with lovely melodies, such as “Not While I’m Around,” “Johanna,” and “Pretty Women.”
Another myth about Sondheim is that he was unrelentingly cynical and incapable of tenderness. I could explode that myth with numerous examples, but I will cite just one, his lyrics to “Little Lamb,” from Gypsy, sung by a lonely girl on her birthday. It is simple and heartbreaking – a masterstroke of lyric writing.
Sondheim was a man of strong opinions, and some of them, though they may have raised eyebrows, were spot on. He rightly pointed out that George Gershwin’s brother, Ira, gets too much credit for the lyrics to songs in the opera Porgy and Bess, and DuBose Heyward not enough. The words to “My Man’s Gone Now” – Sondheim’s favorite lyric from that opera, and mine as well – are entirely by Heyward.
Some of Sondheim’s other opinions are baffling. He was not much of a fan of the composer Jerome Kern or the lyricist Lorenz Hart, for reasons that elude me. I think he once derided Hart for rhyming the word “company” with “bump a knee.” But let us not forget that Sondheim is also the man who rhymed “personable” with “coercin’ a bull.”
Whether you agreed or disagreed with him, strong opinions always make for a good interview, and I wish I had had that opportunity with Sondheim. My forthcoming article for Billboard concerns Harold Arlen, one of his favorite composers, and that might have been a good pretext for an interview, had he lived a little longer. I missed my chance. But at least I get to help honor his legacy on the stage of the San Miguel Playhouse.
