Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

Broadway efforts, West Side Story and Gypsy. Robbins was notorious for relentlessly asking, “What is this show about?,” a question that led to the late (and uncredited) insertion of “Comedy Tonight” in Forum to inform audiences and prepare them for what they might expect in the course of the evening. Robbins’s insistence on getting an answer to this probing question soon led to the show-opener “Tradition” in Fiddler on the Roof (1964), a song that embodied an overriding idea (rather than an action) that could unify and conceptualize a show.

After Fiddler, the concept musical was principally championed by Prince (b. 1928–), who had co-produced two of the above-mentioned Robbins shows (West Side Story and Fiddler). Prince also directed and produced John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Cabaret, Zorbá, the considerably altered 1974 hit revival of Bernstein’s Candide, and produced the first four of the six Sondheim shows he directed from Company in 1970 to Merrily We Roll Along in 1981.29 While producing or co-producing such major hits as The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, West Side Story, Fiorello!, and, with Sondheim, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (with Sondheim), and Fiddler on the Roof between 1953 and 1964, Prince came into his own as a producer-director with Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s She Loves Me (1963). The use of a German cabaret as a metaphor for pre–World War II German decadence in Cabaret exemplifies Prince’s continuation of the concept idea developed by Robbins.

Arguably, the Sondheim-Prince standard of the concept musical—in the absence of a more meaningful term—throughout the 1970s, with the non-linear Company as its iconic exemplar, was in the end, like most of Sondheim’s work with other collaborators, less a revolution than a reinterpretation of the integrated musical.30 In line with high-modernist aestheticism, narrative structures became more avowedly experimental in the Robbins-Sondheim-Prince “concept” era, and ambitious attempts to expand the expressive scope of the musical were also in vogue. Open appeals to a broad audience Lloyd Webber-Schwartz style, perhaps borrowed from rock, were as critically suspect as a pop song by Babbitt might have been in the same era. Nevertheless, at least one influential director, Prince, managed to navigate through the treacherous shores of the Broadway aesthetic divide.

During the Sondheim years Prince also collaborated with the man this volume has singled out in its Epilogue as the other major Broadway composer who flourished from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, Lloyd Webber (see chapter 16). In a dazzling display of Prince’s versatility, the Lloyd Webber-Prince collaboration, Evita, appeared only a few months after Sweeney. In addition to his work with Sondheim, Bernstein, Kander and Ebb, and Lloyd Webber, Prince during these years managed to direct On the Twentieth Century with yet another composer, Cy Coleman (with the legendary librettist-lyricists Comden and Green). Coleman was another distinguished composer with a long career that flourished during the Sondheim-Lloyd Webber era in musicals from Wildcat and Sweet Charity in the 1960s to City of Angels, Will Rogers Follies, and The Life in the late 1980s and 1990s. By the later 1990s, Prince had received more Tony Awards, twenty-one, than anyone since the awards were established in the later 1940s. Of these, no less than eight were bestowed in his capacity as director: Cabaret, Company, Follies (shared with Michael Bennett), the Candide revival of 1974, Sweeney Todd, Evita, Phantom of the Opera, and the Show Boat revival of 1994. The quantity and range of Prince’s achievement is nothing short of staggering. This chapter will focus on selected moments in the historic collaboration between Prince and Sondheim.

Although Prince and Sondheim had been friends since 1949—according to Prince’s recollection they met on the opening night of South Pacific—and Prince had co-produced West Side Story and produced Forum, Company was the first of the six Sondheim productions he either directed, or in the case of Follies, co-directed (with Bennett). These six shows, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily We Roll Along, form a remarkable group. We have already noted the historical and artistic significance assigned to Company and an example of subtext in Follies.

Each musical in the first trilogy of Sondheim-Prince shows, Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music, earned Sondheim Tony and Drama Critics Circle Awards for best score. This was a major critical achievement, if not always a financial one. Company and Night Music earned some profit despite relatively modest runs, 706 and 601 performances and profits of $56,000 and $97,500 respectively, while the more lavish Follies lost $665,000 of its $700,000 investment during its 522 performance run.31 As a tie-in with the “nostalgia” revival along with the more successful revival of Vincent Youmans’s No, No, Nanette (1925) in 1971, Follies even appeared on the cover of Time magazine.32 Only Night Music, however, was spared the criticism that Sondheim was destined to share with another early twentieth-century modernist, Igor Stravinsky, who was also, unfairly, accused of cynicism, coldness, and “bloodlessness.” In the waning days of high modernism, Sondheim was neither high nor low, but somewhere in between. Thus he suffered from some critics’ binary high/low expectations. Like Stravinsky in his early Ballet Russe period (Firebird, Petrushka, Rite of Spring), Sondheim was delightfully novel for some in the audience, and yet still not too cerebral and difficult (at least some of the time) for the mass of musical theatergoers with more traditional expectations of a diverting night out with a happy ending.

The career of Sondheim marks, perhaps for the first time, not only the consistent failure of a composer of the most highly regarded musicals of his generation to produce blockbusters on Broadway, but even major song hits (Night Music’s “Send in the Clowns” is the exception that proves the rule).33Pacific Overtures, competing in the same season as A Chorus Line and Chicago, lost its entire investment as well as most of the Tonys. Sweeney Todd, which lost about half of its million dollar investment, received more than half of the major Tony awards, including those for