“One of the first things
you have to decide on with a musical is, why
should there be songs? You can put songs
in any story, but what I think you have to
look for is, why are songs necessary to this story? If it’s unnecessary, then
the show generally turns out to be not very good.” Composer and lyricist
Stephen Sondheim was the most important figure
in American musical theater of the last half-century. [singing] “Will it be? Yes, it will.” In shows like “West
Side Story,” “Gypsy,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the
Way to the Forum,” “Company,” “Follies,” “Sweeney Todd”
and “Sunday in the Park With George,” which won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1985, he created songs essential
to the stories and changed the nature of the
Broadway musical. “I like to change styles. That’s one of the things that
appeals to me about stories, is if I’ve never done
anything like it before. It has to be some
unknown territory. It’s got to make you nervous. If it doesn’t
make you nervous, then you’re going to write the
same thing you wrote before.” We sat down with
him in June 2008 to talk about his own story
and his accomplishments. “What is it about the theater
that attracted you so, that made you want to
spend your career, your life working in it?” “It was very simple. It was when I was 11 years
old, I met Oscar Hammerstein, and he became a
surrogate father, and I just wanted
to do what he did. And he was a songwriter
for the theater, so I became a songwriter
for the theater. If he was a geologist, I
would have become a geologist. Which is, I’m sure, an
exaggeration, but not much.” [music playing] Sondheim wasn’t known
for Top 40 hits, but one of his songs,
“Send in the Clowns,” from “A Little Night
Music,” rose to the top of the charts. [singing] “But where
are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns.” He wrote it specifically
for Glynis Johns, one of the show’s stars, and
it remains without a doubt his most popular and
financially successful work. “Wrote it during rehearsals,
brought it essentially overnight. Glynis Johns could not
sustain notes, so I thought, I got to write a song
with short phrases. And if they’re going
to be short phrases, what are better short
phrases than questions? So the whole idea
of, ‘Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair?’ Question,
which ordinarily would not occur to me, came
into my head. And once I’ve gotten that,
once you get the idea of questions, then it’s
quite easy to write.” [SINGING] “Isn’t it bliss? Don’t you approve?” “Once you get the notion
of, ‘Isn’t it rich? Aren’t we schmucks not
to be together?’ I mean, you get that tone, that takes
a very short period of time.” [singing] “Send
in the clowns.” Stephen Sondheim was
born on March 22, 1930, to upper-middle-class
parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His father
manufactured dresses, and his mother designed them. But his childhood
wasn’t all privilege. His family life was difficult,
with a distant and remote mother and parents
who didn’t get along. “When I was 10 years
old, my parents divorced. My mother got custody of
me, and she bought a place in Doylestown, Pennsylvania,
as a sort of summer residence. And I was an only child. And because she was a working
woman and also a celebrity hunter, she knew the
Hammersteins slightly, and they had a son my age,
a year younger, Jimmy. And so we became
friends and companions. And Oscar obviously
realized that I had some gift for songwriting,
so he encouraged me during my teen years,
and in fact, taught me. And I brought
him a show when I was 15 years old
that I thought he would want to produce. It was a show about the school
I went to, George School. And I was very disappointed
to find out that he wouldn’t produce it. But I wanted to be the first
15-year-old on Broadway with a show. But he said, if you want
to know what’s wrong with the show, I’ll tell you. And he went over
it page by page, starting from the
first sentence. He treated me like an adult
instead of like a kid. By the time the
afternoon was over, I really knew more about the
nuts and bolts of writing a musical than most people
learn in a lifetime.” Hammerstein and his partner
Richard Rodgers were fresh from the success of
‘Oklahoma!’ and ‘Carousel’ when they hired the
teenage Sondheim to work on their next musical,
‘Allegro,’ in 1947. [singing] “His hair is
fuzzy, his eyes are blue.” Unusual for its
day, it followed the life of an everyman
from birth to age 35. It was their first failure,
but it would influence Sondheim tremendously. “It was experimental, and so
that incurred in me the whole notion of doing experimental
stuff, which I’ve done, one way or another, most
of the shows I’ve done.” Hammerstein laid out a course
of education for his teenage protégé, suggesting he
write four musicals, each in a different style. “The first one being an
adaptation of a play that I thought was good. The second being an
adaptation of a play that I liked but was flawed,
that maybe I could feel I could improve. The third, something that
was a non-theatrical story, but adapt it and
make it theatrical. And then the fourth was
to write an original. And that’s exactly what I
did over a period of years.” In the mid-1950s, when
Sondheim was in his early 20s, he wrote his first
professional show, ‘Saturday Night.’ [singing] “The moon’s like a
million-watt electric light. It shines on the city —” It was headed to Broadway when
its lead producer suddenly died, forcing the show
to close out of town. The ambitious young composer
was still without a credit, but then came an opportunity
to work on Broadway, albeit as a lyricist only and
not as a composer as well. It all began when he bumped
into renowned playwright and librettist Arthur
Laurents at a party. “And we fell to talking, and
I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m about to start
on a musical version of “Romeo and Juliet.”’ And I said, ‘And who’s
doing the score?’ He said, ‘Leonard Bernstein.’ I said, ‘Who’s
doing the lyrics?’ And he said, ‘Oh, my god. Well, I never thought of you.’ And he literally
smote his forehead. And he said, in his typical
Arthur Laurents fashion, he said, ‘I didn’t
much like your music, but I thought your
lyrics were kind of good.’ I said, ‘All right.’ He said, ‘Would you like to
come and play for Lenny?’ Now, I had no intention
of just writing lyrics. I wanted to write music. But I thought, chance to
play for Leonard Bernstein? Why not? So the next morning,
I played for Lenny. And Lenny said, ‘I will
know within a week, and I’ll let you know.’ And I said, ‘Thank you
so much, Mr. Bernstein.’ Sure enough, a week later,
the phone rang, and he said, ‘Would you like to do it?’ And I said, ‘Let
me call you back.’ Because I didn’t want
to do just lyrics. And I called Oscar, who’s
my adviser on everything. And I said, ‘You know, I
don’t want to do this.’ But Oscar said, ‘Look,
you have a chance to work with very gifted
professionals on a show that sounds interesting, and
you could always write your own music eventually.’ He said, ‘My advice would
be to take the job.’ That’s why I took it. And I learned a great deal.” [singing] “Maria. I just met a girl
named Maria.” Sondheim didn’t always
agree with Bernstein on how the lyrics should be written. “I knew that there were great
dangers of pretension with this whole show, and the only
way to write the lyrics was to underwrite them and
make them very simple.” “You’ve said over the years
that you’re not really happy with the lyrics you
wrote, even though they’re so popular. You are?” “No, no, no, they’re
very self-conscious. Lenny wanted everything, the
lyrics to be very poetic. But his idea of poetry
and my idea of poetry are simply not the same. I mean, you know,
I was 25 years old, and he was a big, big
force, and Lenny kept pushing me to be very fruity. ‘Today, the world was just an
address.’ That’s a perfectly fine line on paper, but
the boy from the streets is singing that?” [singing] “Today, the
world was just an address, a place for me to live in.” “And I’ve often quoted,
you know, ‘I Feel Pretty’: ‘It’s alarming how charming
I feel,’ says this girl from the streets, and she
sounds like Noel Coward.” [singing] “It’s alarming
how charming I feel.” “I do like
‘Something’s Coming.’ That’s my idea of
a poetic lyric, in the sense that
it uses imagery.” [singing] “Something’s coming. I don’t know what it is, but
it is going to be great.” “And I like the
‘Jet Song,’ too.” [singing] “When you’re
a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, from your first
cigarette to your last dying day.” “But you know, songs
like ‘Somewhere,’ I mean, that’s deeply embarrassing. So —” “West Side Story” got mixed
reviews when it opened in 1957, and didn’t win the
Tony Award as Best Musical, but it was revolutionary
in its combination of music and dance, and in
its searing plot. Sondheim had made
his first mark. He still longed to write both
music and lyrics on Broadway, and it looked as
if he was going to get the chance with
a new musical based on the early life of the
stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. [singing] “You’ll be great! Going to have the whole
world on a plate!” But the show’s star objected. “Ethel Merman was already
signed to play Rose, the mother, so it was all set. And then Ethel Merman
said she would not have me as a composer, because she
had just done a show called ‘Happy Hunting,’ with
two young writers, and it was a flop. And she didn’t want to
take a chance on an unknown composer. And she’s perfectly happy
to have me do the lyrics. So I said no, and Arthur tried
to persuade me, and I said, ‘No, I really want to write
music, this is nonsense.’ Again, Oscar stepped into the
breach, and he said, ‘Do it.’ He said, ‘There are
two advantages. First of all,’ he said,
‘you have the experience of writing for a star,
which is different than just writing a show. I mean, you’re tailoring
material not only for the character, for the
character as played by that specific actor or actress.’ That’s one thing. He said, ‘Secondly, it’s six
months out of your life. Do it.’ And that’s exactly
what happened. We wrote that show
in about four months. We wrote very quickly. That’s probably the quickest
I’ve ever heard of a major Broadway musical
being written. But it wrote, as Barbra
Streisand would say, like butter.” [singing] “Honey,
everything’s coming up roses and daffodils!” “It’s considered
one of the best, if not the best, Broadway
musicals of all time.” “Yeah, absolutely, it is. I think it’s probably it’s
the culmination of that era, that told musicals in
chronological order, in a linear style. I’d certainly say
it was the best.” In 1970, Sondheim teamed up
with director Harold Prince to write his breakthrough
musical, ‘Company.’ Just as ‘Gypsy’ had been
the culmination of the era of the narrative musical,
‘Company’ broke new ground. It fractured the
narrative, told the story in a nonlinear manner, and
opened the way for similar musicals, like ‘A Chorus
Line’ and ‘Chicago.’ Sondheim and Prince
followed company with more breakthroughs: ‘Follies,’
‘A Little Night Music,’ ‘Pacific Overtures.’ They were revolutionary,
but mostly, they weren’t financial hits. “It takes an audience a
while to get used to new ways of storytelling. There are exceptional
plays that break with the tradition, like
‘Death of a Salesman,’ and are hits at the same time. But usually, if you bring
a new way of storytelling to the stage — ‘Oklahoma!’ is the perfect
example of taking a chance and is a gigantic hit, but
that is not the usual case.” [singing] “These are probably
the worst pies in London!” ‘Sweeney Todd, the Demon
Barber of Fleet Street’ is considered by many to be
Sondheim’s best and most powerful work. A gruesome tale of
death and revenge, it shows the composer at
the peak of his talent. [singing] “Is that
just disgusting —” “It was full of blood
and gore and controversy. And though it, too, didn’t
make money in its original run, it has often
been revived, has been performed
by opera companies, and in 2007 was turned into a
movie starring Johnny Depp.” [singing] “I will
have vengeance!” “You want to talk about dark?” “Well, it’s not so dark. It’s really kind of funny,
that show, you know? I mean, nobody
takes it seriously. It’s not dark the way — it’s a melodrama. I don’t think
melodramas are dark. Anyway, but I get it. The point is, yes,
there’s a lot of blood.” “And there’s a lot
of comic relief, there’s no doubt about it.” “It’s not about comic relief. It’s the fact the attitude
is not a real attitude. They’re all cartoon figures. I mean, it’s an operetta. These are not real people, and
they’re not supposed to be. They’re supposed to be
big, larger than life.” “But isn’t there a real
sense in it about injustice and evil?” “If there is for you,
then there is for you. I know Hal always
thinks, always thought it was about the
Industrial Revolution. I thought it was
about scaring people.” “You all know Steve is a great
dramatist and our greatest living composer and lyricist.” In 2010, Sondheim received
an ultimate stage accolade. “I cry easy.” A Broadway theater was
renamed in his honor. “This is so much more
moving, to christen a theater the Stephen Sondheim as
opposed to the British Petroleum Playhouse or —” “What do you think — if
you think about this, what would you like
your legacy to be?” “Oh, goodness. Oh, I just would like the
shows to keep getting done. Whether on Broadway, or
in regional theaters, or schools or
communities, I would just like the stuff to be done. Just done and done and
done and done and done. You know, that
would be the fun.”
