60 Minutes Archive: Stephen Sondheim

60 minutes rewind if you don't know the name  steven sondheim you know his words and music   sondheim once said that if he hadn't become a  broadway writer and composer he would have been   a teacher in a sense he's managed to do both his  songs have taught us all something about growing   up getting hurt settling in growing old songs  that make you wonder what it must be like to do   what stephen sondheim can do that first moment you  know the first the first flush the uh the falling   in love and then you gotta let it cook and see  if you're still in love in the morning because   it's a form of showing off it's a but it's  also a form of sharing you want to say   hey i caught this moment with people but  it's a wonderful feeling it's a wonderful   feeling it's what everybody who writes or  paints or composes feels or else they want   to go along with it if you didn't get those  moments you couldn't put up with with the   rest of it the loneliness add the tedium and  the endless amounts of work you know the sweat   sweat but produce the lyrics for gypsy funny thing happened on the way to the forum  something for everyone everyone our comedy tonight he's the reigning heavyweight champion of american  musical theater don't expect steven sondheim to   give you songs about the moon in june he writes  about disappointment ambivalence bittersweet joy in short songs about the way people really feel sondheim has been writing on the  nerve ending since he was a teenager   his parents divorced he was lonely and spent  a lot of time with his next-door neighbor   even asking advice on an original high school show  nice when the man next door is oscar hammerstein   i had said to him please treat this as if it  just crossed you i was 15 years old as if it   just crossed your desk and pretend i don't know  you and i said all right in that case i have to   say it's the worst thing that's ever crossed my  desk it's the worst thing i've ever seen it's most   unproducible it makes no sense and i was stunned  because i was sure he was going to say well look   with a few changes ticking i would like to produce  this next fall and i'd be the first 15 year old   to have a show on broadway he really did say  the worst thing i ever wrote worst sounds cruel   and he was not cruel that way but he made it very  clear that if i were going to ask for professional   standards he was going to treat me like a  professional and he was going to show me this   was inept from the first stage direction do you  find yourself paying tribute to him in your lyrics   sometimes do you no i'm a city boy and oscar billy  was a city boy wrote a lot of bucolic images and   he did talk about larks learning to pray and  whether and he said i believe these you don't   and when i hear your lyrics i know that's not  what you feel he said right the way you feel   don't write the way i feel and then he  said the key thing he said if you do that   you'll be 90 ahead of the game and 90 ahead  of everybody else and as soon as you put it   on a competitive level i thought oh oh i get to be  better than everybody else if i write like myself   so i did right from that from that moment  hey i'm the brave dollar cannot deploy so what does a city boy write about in west  side story a street kid mocks those bleeding   heart excuses for his delinquent behavior  my daddy beats my mommy my mommy clobbers me   my grandpa is a commie my grandma pushes tea my  sister wears a mustache my brother wears a dress   goodness gracious that's why i'm a mess in the musical follies a sondheim character  sings a twisted anthem to a dead marriage   from those injured eyes leave the quips with a  sting jokes with a sneer passionless lovemaking   once a year leave the lies in a little  night music a maid celebrates promiscuity   i'm trying to imagine what it is to be able to  sit down and write it's a very short road from the   pinch and the punch to the punch and the pouch and  the pension does it make you laugh yeah once i got   the idea of that song well it's true of all the  songs i write particularly when they're uh very   verbal songs you make lists is what you do and  you start getting into the character it's always   about getting into the character and you start to  make lists of what she would talk about and you   suddenly find that certain words either if they  don't rhyme with each other relate to each other   and things concatenate it's it's very much about  serendipity it's a very much oh i didn't think   pinch punch pension once you get the idea of  let's say jowls and you think of pouch say wait   a minute those you know that maybe we can make  something out of the similarity of those sounds   so then you think all right let's go to  the thesaurus and look up all the words   that begin with p and have a ch sound in them go  to the thesaurus the thesaurus i have the most   well-formed thesaurus and rhyming dictionary oh  this whole thing this mystique about not using   reference books is nonsense why should you have  to sit there for five days and try to think of all   the words that begin with p that have a ch well  you've got a nice book that gives you all words   i guess i'll live oh come on this is really  nice occurred to you before this no i have to   tell you it didn't my goodness i was sure you  sat there and they tumbled out oh my goodness   no i was imagining you you imagine that kind of  encyclopedic mind you'd have to have to know all   the work you know rhymes trick rhymes you have to  think up yourself but to rhyme bay do you know how   many rhymes there are for that how many dozens  of words you can't think them all up yourself   and that's and looking down the list will give  you ideas tell me what happens at the moment   when you have the words that go with the music  that go with the emotion what is that like oh   the answer will disappoint you all it does make me  want to call my collaborator and say i got it you   got to come over here the song wait you hear what  i've done when you hear what i've done i got it   it's my best friend he got it all right  and the critical acclaim that goes with it   he's won five tony awards and the winner is   older and older not that sondheim suits everyone's  taste sometimes the audiences show up sometimes   they don't sometimes he startles them with  musicals that don't bother to have a story at all   like company and follies which are more like  musical essays about love and marriage and   fading dreams and then there are plays  with stories no one else would touch   even a horror musical called sweeney  todd at last my arm is complete again what's the process for you the emotional process  for you as a play gets headed toward broadway   oh i get terrified because for me the fun is the  writing once it gets into rehearsal i just want to   go away most people look forward to the rehearsal  process i feel just the reverse i start to feel   embarrassed frightened that that's where i start  to think oh people will hate this oh my goodness   they won't think that song's funny and the  actors will think oh god we gotta sing this   terrible song but we gotta earn a living  i get that's where i get really neurotic slightly different i just think there are too many notes in this we followed him to london where he was  worrying over the london production of follies which is two bars less now first of  all did you put those left passes in   because i didn't put them in uh anyway you're  gonna run this uh this part of it at the end of   the afternoon or something because what i'll  do is i'll work on some music and then see   how it feels okay okay once  more house lights are out if sometime lyrics are complicated  sometimes so is sondheim music   not always a tune you hear once and sing one  more time but now with confidence because the   with you is is really the climax of the phrase  don't drop your voice at the end of it obviously   room might be filled with  you that's the you is the   is the climactic word and so don't drop your voice  on it but push up one more time too many mornings the story will continue after this you is the worst word in the english language  humble oh no uh that the whole thing about   homobility has to do with familiarity uh  well but there are songs that you do leave   the theater humming only if you've heard  something very similar before which is most   most of the time they say the tune is  vaguely familiar or it's been played a   lot during the evening music is very difficult  to take in on the first hearing unless it's the familiar is wide and bright it's exactly  like prose writing or any kind of writing   it's express the emotion and express the character   i've often used the image that you know if you  ask me to write a love song i don't know what   to write but you say now write me a love song  about a girl who's just been jilted by a guy and   she comes into a bar and she's in a red dress  and she orders a grasshopper that i can write   because you've started to characterize and give  me specifics to write about now i know there's   a drink to write about there's a bar to write  about there's a dress to write about why did   she choose that dress who was the guy who jilled  her but say write me a torch song well what kind   of torso do you want you know how about a torch  song for a middle-aged woman who realizes too late   that her old love is the real one the song is from  a little night music it's sung by glennis johns the whole song is composed of those  hesitations and then coming back and   it's like almost like a hesitation walls the whole point of using words like rich is  to make the word short so it doesn't sound   like the singer has to sustain and can't  the word itself cuts off as opposed to   isn't it blue which you'd wonder why she doesn't  go isn't it blue but glennis was short breath so i   try to pick words that would cut themselves  off and also because the character is afraid   to go forward and so she would pull back  all the time so it made it active for her   but the song comes out of the character in  the act and the actress i would not have   written the same song it wasn't glinis and  where are the clowns there or to be clowns well maybe next year now sondheim who has written so much about middle  age has a new musical on broadway into the woods   this time the characters from the fairy  tales teach about the responsibilities   parents have to their children and children  to the future but as always with sondheim   the lyrics are so flashy and funny you don't  stop to think about the meaning until later   take the rap about zapping vegetables sung by  bernadette peters a tangle of tongue twisters even   the author has trouble getting it right but remind  me you too it's what raiding my arugula what   uh writing this video ripping up  the ramping and reading my arugula   into the reverse it's uh oh because it's  ready my arugula ripping up the rampion um you can't just take it did anybody here sing or  write this lyric i mean could we have somebody   here you're taking the middle of the lyric you  gotta go back to the beginning of the whole r   sequence uh he was robbing me raping me rooting  through my rutabaga raiding my arrow and ripping   up the ramp he and my champion my paper but  i should have laid a spell on him right there   put a ladder spell on him pause right there  because that's why she needs her breath give   me a phrase from into the woods that you think  is quintessential sondheim which feels when you   sing it more song time than anything it's a song  no one is alone and he says careful and i went   that steve i hear steve saying it i used to use  voice saying that careful careful no one is alone people make mistakes fathers mothers people make  mistakes the show is about parents and children did you want them children yeah i'm sorry i didn't  have any yeah it's it's uh it's it's uh i am but art is the other way of having children  teaching i believe that very firmly side my sidelines

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 126,962

Keywords: 60 Minutes, CBS News, stephen sondheim, sweeney todd, west side story

Id: _XPfnubkFD8

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021