Broadway Revisited

 (10/21/08) 08-43

A half century and counting.

Gypsy overture-- 1; fades under)

Hi, this is Art Hilgart and this is Broadway Revisited, a weekly exploration of the songs and shows, composers and lyricists, and performers who created the American musical theater.

(Music up, then fade)

Composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim has been writing shows for Broadway for fifty years, a longer career than any of his predecessors. He has a shelfful of Tony and Drama Desk Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, an Oscar, an Emmy, the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Medal of Arts. In the spring of 2008, he received a Tony for Lifetime Achievement. Today we'll revisit some of the shows that have won him this recognition.

The first Broadway show with his words and music, Saturday Night, was written when he was 24, but it didn't open when the funding was withdrawn. It did bring him to the attention of playwright Arthur Laurents, who was working with Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story, and they hired Sondheim to write the lyrics. He had his first hit show on Broadway when he was 27.

1. America 3:34

Sondheim wrote West Side Story with Leonard Bernstein's music, and two years later he wrote another hit, Gypsy, with a book by Arthur Laurents and music by Jule Styne. You hear that music every week as our opening and closing theme.

In 1969, Sondheim finally had a show with both his words and his music, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It ran even longer than West Side Story and Gypsy. Here's Sondheim himself, playing and singing a number that was replaced by a similar one before the opening.

2. Something about a War 4:11

While Forum was still running, Sondheim had his first flop, Anyone Can Whistle. From the original cast album, here is Lee Remick with the title song.

3. Anyone Can Whistle 3:37

After Anyone Can Whistle, Sondheim wrote for the last time with someone else's music-- Richard Rodgers-- for Do I Hear a Waltz. And then he wrote a television musical adaptation of Evening Primrose, a favorite John Collier story about a failed poet who decides to live in a department store, hiding by day and writing at night. It starred Sondheim's friend, Anthony Perkins.

4. I'm Here 3:29

A few years after Evening Primrose, Sondheim and Tony Perkins wrote the script for a great mystery-thriller film, The Last of Sheila, available on dvd.

Sondheim's 1970 show, Company, with a book by George Furth, won six Tonys. Here's the original cast.

5. Another Hundred People 2:42

Sondheim does not write standalone songs, but tailors his scores to the plots and to the specific characters. In the case of Send in the Clowns, his most popular song, it was also written to fit the actress, Glynis Johns, who has a limited range. At this point in the show, she has failed in her attempt to revive an old love affair. The character is an actress, and all of the metaphors in the lyric are theatrical.

6. Send in the Clowns 3:24

The last line, "maybe next year" suggests that when the touring actress returns to her old lover's city she may be successful.

Sondheim's next show, Pacific Overtures, with a book by John Weidman, dealt with Commodore Perry's overtures to Japan. Like all of his shows, it demonstrated that unlike his Broadway predecessors, Sondheim never repeats himself with dependence on a standard formula. His next show, Sweeney Todd, was an adaptation of the legend about a homicidal barber.

7. The Ballad of Sweeney Todd 3:33

Sondheim's musical vocabulary is vast, and among his favorites are Ravel, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Harold Arlen, and film composer Bernard Herrmann, a major influence on Sweeney Todd.

Sondheim's next show, Merrily We Roll Along, was another flop, but like all of his shows, its original cast recording is still available on compact disc. With a book by James Lapine, he had another hit with Sunday in the Park with George. In this number, the painter George Seurat is singing to his dog as he paints, and wonders why his model and mistress has left him.

8. Finishing the Hat 3:20

Mandy Patinkin played Seurat in Sunday in the Park with George.

Sondheim and Lapine followed Sunday in the Park with George with another hit, Into the Woods, where they used Grimm's fairy tales as the framework for a show about husbands and wives, parents and children, and experiences leading to personal growth. These intentions are delivered in a charming story with witty music and lyrics.

Working again with a book by John Weidman, Sondheim turned to a fact-based grim subject in Assassins, a survey of the men and women who killed or attempted to kill American presidents. The show opened in a shooting gallery where the assassins, including John Wilkes Booth, are assembled.

9. Everybody's Got the Right 6:00

What follows is a vaudeville-like series of songs performed by each of the assassins in the style of their historical periods.

Working again with a book by James Lapine, Sondheim then wrote a love story, Passion, his work most close to an opera. It begins with an army officer and his mistress, played by Jere Shea and Marin Mazzie.

10. Happiness 5:09

In that song at the beginning of Passion we heard that the mistress's pity for the officer had turned to love. The balance of the show displays how the officer's pity for another woman transfers his love to her.

11. Invocation 3:43

Sondheim's next show, Road Show, opens next month. With John Weidman's book, in vaudeville style it follows the careers of the real Mizner brothers, Wilson, a notorious con man, and Addison, a successful architect. The show has a long history. With its original title, Wise Guys, it was performed in workshops and then temporarily abandoned. Then in 2003, the authors revised it, and retitled Bounce, it had fully staged tryouts in Chicago and Washington. Here, from the Chicago cast, are Howard McGillen and Richard Kind, as the brothers, reunited after their deaths.

12. Bounce 4:04

Now that Bounce is called Road Show, that song may not be in it when it opens next month.

Whether commercial successes or not at first, all of Sondheim's shows are of consistently high quality and are in continuous revivals in regional theaters in the U.S. and England, and on Broadway and the West End. Several have been translated for foreign productions, and all of the original cast albums are still available on compact discs. There are excellent dvds of the Broadway productions of Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park, Company, Into the Woods, and Passion, along with the Hollywood versions of Gypsy, West Side Story, A Little Night Music, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

All of the recordings on today's program are from a Masterworks Broadway four-cd box with six hours of selected cast recordings from all of his shows, miscellaneous songs written for film and television, and many of Sondheim's own demonstration records. It also includes a 76-page book with intelligent commentary by Mark Eden Horowitz, the curator of Broadway materials at the Library of Congress. Sondheim himself supervised the selections and supplied many of his private recordings. The Masterworks Broadway box is called Stephen Sondheim: The Story So Far.

We'll end with a song from before the beginning. Sondheim was a fan of the television program Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, and in 1952, he submitted a song for Fran Allison to sing to the puppets Kukla and Ollie. The show's producer returned it unused, but in 1978, when Burr Tillstrom and his Kuklapolitans were serving as the narrators of the anthology show Side by Side by Sondheim, Kukla sang it on Broadway. Here is Sondheim's own recording, proof, if any is needed, that if his brain may seem cynical at times, his heart is romantic.

13. The Two of You 1:39

(Gypsy overture-- 2; to end)

Please stay with us again next week for another Broadway Revisited. National distribution is funded by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and it's produced with the assistance of Martin Klemm, in the WMUK studios of Western Michigan University. Our website with program schedules and stuff is broadwayrevisited.com. "broadwayrevisited" is all one word. Our e-mail address is Art@broadwayrevisited.com. And I'm Art Hilgart.

Total music: 48:25; Estimated talking: 9:40; Intro/outro: :30; Estimated total: 58:34

Promo (14): That's one of the Stephen Sondheim songs you'll hear this week when we review his first fifty years on Broadway. And he's still writing new shows. Stephen Sondheim: The Story So Far, this week on Broadway Revisited.