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

“Make the Most of Your Music.” Among the ironies of the song—and perhaps also its subtext—with its instructions to “Make the most of the music that is yours,” is Sondheim’s decision to begin Ben’s song with a quotation from the opening of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto set to words in the vocal line (in the orchestra alone the related opening of Tchaikovsky’s first Piano Concerto directly follows).92 Ben initially considers himself “something big league” along with “Tchaikovsky and Grieg.” Soon, however, he advises his admirers that even if they are unable to produce a work like Debussy’s Clair de Lune, they can “make the most of the music that is yours” and eventually produce music that “soars.” Whatever Sondheim is saying about the relative merits of Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Debussy, Sondheim himself might be accused in this rare case of not practicing what his character preaches.

Although Sondheim’s new songs were expressly composed for this revival rather than for other shows, the results are not dissimilar. In fact, the 1987 London Follies, with its rewritten book and deleted, reordered, and new songs, is clearly analogous to Porter’s Anything Goes in its 1962 and 1987 reincarnations, and perhaps even more closely akin to the changes in Show Boat between 1927 and 1946. Just as the comic, even farcical, touches added to Bernstein’s 1974 Candide (including Sondheim’s own new lyric for “Life Is Happiness Indeed”) no doubt contributed to its newfound success, perhaps at Voltaire’s expense, the more upbeat 1987 Follies might eventually have found the audience it lost in 1971. But it did not. Despite its relative grimness, the original 1971 Follies soon replaced the 1987 book.93

In his conversations with Mark Horowitz, Sondheim explains that he went along with Goldman’s and Cameron Mackintosh’s ideas about changing Follies for London, but like Goldman and eventually even Mackintosh, he voiced his strong preference for the earlier version: “It might have turned out better. It didn’t. And when it didn’t, I said: I don’t want this show ever shown in America, and I made it legally certain that the London version can never be shown here. I don’t want it shown again in England either, but Cameron has the right to do it. But Cameron’s given in now too, and there was just a production in Leicester last year, and it’s the original.”94 As George says in Sunday in the Park with George’s “Putting It Together,” “If no one gets to see it, it’s as good as dead.” This is a good description of the 1987 London Follies.

The Art of Compromise

By the end of Sondheim’s Company, Robert, the bachelor protagonist, has learned that compromise is an essential feature of marriage. The ambiguity that three of Robert’s married male friends feel toward their wives and their marriages, expressed relatively early in the evening in “Sorry-Grateful,” culminates in Robert’s final readiness to share their fate, “Being Alive.” It is widely known that “Being Alive” was Sondheim’s fourth attempt at a final song for Robert.95 “Marry Me a Little,” which expressed Robert’s unwillingness to compromise, has found a secure place, albeit a new place, in the revised book of Company. The extraordinarily biting “Happily Ever After” described a marriage that ends “happily ever after in hell.” The marriage envisioned in “Being Alive” is far from perfect, but advocates of marriage can take heart that Robert has come to realize that “alone is alone, not alive.” In his autobiography, Contradictions, Prince voiced his continued dissatisfaction with this final song, which he felt “imposed a happy ending on a play which should have remained ambiguous.” Otherwise, Prince concludes his chapter on Company by saying that this show “represents the first time I had worked without conscious compromise.” The producer in Prince was doubly pleased with its profit, however small, since “that is what commercial theatre must ask of itself.”96

Follies, which explores the compromise of ideals in the lives of two unfulfilled married couples, lost most of its backers’ money because of its creators’ refusal to compromise and offer a lighter touch. The characters in Sondheim’s (and Prince’s) next musical, A Little Night Music, may need to discover their true feelings and are subjected to humiliation in the process, but at least they do not have to compromise them. The compromises were artistic ones and occurred offstage, at least according to Prince, who wrote in his memoirs sardonically that “mostly Night Music was about having a hit.”97

In Pacific Overtures (1976), generally perceived as a less compromising musical than Night Music, the formerly obedient feudal vassal Kayama forsakes ancient traditions in order to profit financially from his new Western trading partners. In act II, Kayama sports “A Bowler Hat” and a pocket watch, pours milk in his tea, and smokes American cigars. The eponymous anti-hero in Sweeney Todd (1979) and the infamous historical murderers and would-be murderers in Assassins (1991) relinquish their moral decency for the sake of revenge, notoriety, or other misguided ideals. Into the Woods (1987) concludes with abandoned, deceived, and disillusioned fairy-tale characters who have compromised their innocence but now understand that “No One Is Alone.” Some, such as Martin Gottfried, find the moralizing tone of Into the Woods platitudinous, yet a critic as rigorous as Stephen Banfield assesses this show as “Sondheim’s finest achievement yet.”98

In his first two shows of the 1980s, Merrily We Roll Along and Sunday in the Park with George, Sondheim directly confronted the issue of artistic compromise in his own work, an issue previously faced more obliquely by several of Broadway’s spiritual fathers surveyed in earlier chapters. On Your Toes addresses the dichotomy between art music and popular music and The Cradle Will Rock offers a devastating attack on compromising artists, but Merrily and Sunday may be unprecedented in the degree to which they explore the creative process and commercial pressures on artists. Merrily tells the disconcerting story of a Broadway composer, Franklin Shepard, who has sold out his ideals and his artistic soul, the road pointedly not taken by Sondheim. Sunday presents