Musical Theatre SONDHEIM SONDHEIM : Ellinger and Joe paraded through a sharply observed series of sketches and labere and without songs which exposed the little pretensions, vanities and rmances. impossibilities of a group of married, middle-class New Yorkers. 'Another Hundred People', 'Barcelona', 'Getting Married Today', 'You Could Drive a Person Crazy', 'The Little Things You Do Together' and 'The Ladies Who SONDHEIM, Stephen [Joshua] (b New York, 22 Lunch' each sketched a story or personality to fine revusi- rch!930). cal effect, and Company won its songwriter the first of what Stephen Sondheim had an early connection^ with the would become a bundle of Tony Awards in the years to musical theatre through a family friendship with the Oscar come, a good Broadway run, and the first of the fervent Hammersteins, and began his own contribution by writing followers who would soon become legion. college shows. He studied music, but had his first show- Company was followed by another piece on similarly business work writing scripts for television's Topper before revusical lines. Follies, however, exchanged the everyday providing incidental music for plays The Girls of Summer New Yorkers for a parade of everyday ex-Follies girls. Once (1956) and Invitation to a March (1961). again, as in Company, the audience had to look hard to find It was, again, not as a composer that he broke through a warmly drawn or sympathetic character amongst the into the Broadway musical establishment. As a result of mostly foolish, egotistical folk who peopled the evening's Arthur Laurents hearing some lyrics he had written for a parade of characters, but those people gave the songwriter non-start show called Saturday Night he jvas brought in to fine opportunities to display his talents in a number of work on West Side Story, supplying the lyrics the now too- fairly friendly parodies of the song-styles of past days: the busy Leonard Bernstein was originally to have done. The pattering of the comedian's 'The God-Why-Don't-You- vigour and variety of the show's 'Something's Coming', Love-Me-Oh-You-Do-Pll-See-You-Later Blues', the 'America', 'I Feel Pretty', 'A Boy Like That', 'Officer charming old Vienna 'One More Kiss', the dance routine Krupke' and 'Tonight' gave the young writer a memor- of overgrowing-up 'Who's That Woman?', the sweetie-pie able launch. He followed up by combining with Laurents duo 'Rain on the Roof, and the creaky self-serenade of an again, and with composer Jule Styne, on a second assign- elderly 'Broadway Baby'. Some of the burlesques ran close ment as a lyricist on Gypsy ('Everything's Coming Up enough to the real thing to be taken for the real thing, and Roses', 'All I Need is the Girl', 'Let Me Entertain You', the blowtorch song 'Losing my Mind' went on to join the 'If Mama Was Married', 'You Gotta Have a Gimmick', show's catalogue of a tough life, Tm Still Here', as a Rose's Turn), before, in 1962, offering his first score - nightclub favourite. But the Broadway production of Fol- lyrics and music - to Broadway in the classical burlesque lies, like Do I Hear a Waltz? was not a genuine success, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The although it played over 500 nights on Broadway, gave show's inherently comic nature gave endless possibilities Sondheim its second successive Tony award, and produ- for lyric wit, if little for expansive musical writing, and ced several enduring numbers. those possibilities were hilariously fulfilled in a set of An adaptation of the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a songs which helped the piece to a position alongside the Summer Night was a different kind of project to the two great classical burlesques of the past, from Orphee aux previous pieces on which Sondheim had worked. For the enfers to Phi-Phi: 'Comedy Tonight', 'Lovely', 'Every- first time since Do I Hear a Waltz? he was dealing with body Ought to Have a Maid', 'Impossible', 'I'm Miles 'real' people set in a story with a beginning, an end and a Gloriosus' etc. development, characters who, for all that many of them A third collaboration with Laurents on a sour, extrava- were again foolish folk, were without exception likeable gant piece called Anyone Can Whistle proved a curious and interesting. It was a piece which required painting in misfire all round, but Sondheim returned to form with a different colours, and this time Sondheim the composer vengeance in a collaboration with Richard Rodgers on the surfaced with as many trumps as the previously superior score to Laurents's adaptation of his own The Time of the Sondheim the lyricist. The waltzing score of A Little Night Cuckoo as Do I Hear a Waltz? Composer and lyricist com- Music was both an homogenous score, rather than a collec- bined to produce a musically and lyrically rangy score tion of songs, and as melodious as it was witty, and it which was as good as anything they had ever or would (to remains for many the most appreciable achievement of date, in the case of the lyricist) ever write. 'Someone Woke Sondheim the composer-lyricist. The score produced a hit Up', 'This Week Americans' 'Take the Moment', 'Moon song in 'Send in the Clowns', but that piece was only one in My Window', 'Here We Are Again', 'We're Gonna Be high spot of a score which mixed the wryly funny, the All Right', 'Stay' and their fellows made up a remarkable wordfully funny and the musically funny, but never the and remarkably shapely score in the traditional Broadway harshly or cruelly funny in such pieces as the three-part mould. But Do I Hear a Waltz?, manhandled in production, dilemma expressed in 'Soon', 'Now', and 'Later'; in the was not a success. characters' horrid premonition about a 'Weekend in the It was also the.J^&t time (to date) that Sondheim would Country' which they wouldn't miss for the world; in the supply lyrics to another composer's show score. In the aged ex-plaything of a king reminiscing about the devalued more than 25 years and nine shows that have followed - status of 'Liaisons'; in a husband telling his ex-mistress apart from a lyrical contribution to the 1974 revisions of 'You Must Meet My Wife'; or in two rivals for a lady's bed Leonard Bernstein's Candide - he has written both lyrics joining (separately) in regretful wishes ('It Would Have and music, although oddly enough never a libretto, to each Been Wonderful'). of the shows with which he has been involved. A Little Night Music found fond friends from one end of The first of these was Company, a revusical piece which the world to the other as it went on to a round of continu- 1345 1346