A publication of the Shakespeare Theatre Company ASIDES 2013|2014 SeASon • issue 2 A Funny Thing hAppened on The WAy To The Forum Sondheim Speaks! page 3 Director Alan Paul is 29 Going on 90 page 6 A publication of the Shakespeare Theatre Company ASIDES Dear Friend, sondheim A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to 3 Sondheim Speaks! the Forum is a modern classic of musical Speaks! by Stephen Sondheim theatre, combining the timeless characters Stephen Sondheim on the writing, 6 29 going on 90 of the ancient playwright plautus with by Drew Lichtenberg a score by the incomparable Stephen rewriting and running around Sondheim. it was the first Broadway show to feature both 9 A Funny Thing... music and lyrics by Sondheim, as he discusses in this issue of Forum Cast of Asides. 10 Tragedy Tomorrow, Comedy Tonight This is the first time that the Shakespeare Theatre by Hannah Hessel Ratner Company has produced Forum, and i am delighted to introduce our Associate director Alan paul, profiled in A Funny Thing... 11 this publication, in his STC mainstage directing debut. Artistic Team To bring his vision to life, he has collaborated with many 12 how to Write a of Broadway’s finest designers and artists, some of plautine Comedy whom worked on the Bard’s Broadway shows in our 25th by Laura Henry Buda Anniversary Season and others who are new to our theatre. 14 play in process Alan’s passion and enthusiasm will surely be echoed 15 roman holiday onstage by STC favorite Bruce dow, pseudolus, whom you by Rob Weinert-Kendt may recognize from his role as Bottom in last season’s Stephen Sondheim wrote about A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bruce’s unforgettable 18 The Science of Comedy Forum in Finishing the Hat (Knopf, performances stem from his belief that comedy and by Garrett Anderson 2010). The Shakespeare Theatre Company is tragedy are closely related, which he further discusses in 20 performance Calendar and this issue. reprinting his writings here, in adapted form, Creative Conversations with his generous permission. For more information about the play and production, i invite you to visit Asides online at Lansburgh Theatre A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was Asides.ShakespeareTheatre.org. 450 7th Street nW to be the first Broadway show that featured my own Washington, dC 20004-2207 enjoy learning more about this enduring musical comedy music attached to my own lyrics. Burt Shevelove, Larry Sidney Harman Hall classic and its ideal fit for the STC season. 610 F Street nW Gelbart and I had written it over the course of four years and it had gone through two Washington, dC 20004-2207 major producers, two major directors and one major star by the time we were ready to Warm regards, Box Office go into rehearsal. I should have been feeling exhilarated at the prospect. Instead, I felt a 202.547.1122 rapidly burgeoning panic, which I attributed to hysteria from the excitement of finally Administrative Offices launching myself as a composer. 516 8th Street Se Washington, dC 20003-2834 Michael Kahn 202.547.3230 I had a terrible time writing the score to Forum. Next to Merrily, it was the hardest score Artistic director I’ve ever had to write. I had been brought up by Oscar Hammerstein to think of songs ShakespeareTheatre.org Shakespeare Theatre Company Asides.ShakespeareTheatre.org as being little scenes or one-act plays which were necessary to telling the story. Forum required exactly the reverse of what Oscar had taught me to do. It was a farce: a play Connect with Us! production Sponsor: restaurant partner: with broadly drawn characters who find themselves in uncomfortable situations which, when seemingly solved, lead to further and more uncomfortable situations. As in every HRH play, the situations arise from character, but the characters in a farce, like those in traditional musical comedy, are one-dimensional, one-adjective, one-noun personalities: Cover: photos of Bruce dow by Teresa Wood. Foundation A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum 2013|2014 SeASon • issue 2 the conniving slave, the lecherous husband, properly was the robustness of the book Burt and Larry had written: low farce clothed the braggart warrior. It is the clash among in elegant language. I was deceived by the details of the dialogue, by aphoristic lines these personalities that keeps the like “I meant yes, it just came out no” or comically poetic phrases like “clump of myrrh,” plot boiling. as in “Hide the girl behind that clump of myrrh.” I appropriated their style without appreciating its substance. The problem is that one-dimensional characters do not give rise to songs I think that the book of Forum is the tightest, most satisfyingly plotted and gracefully that move like Oscar’s one-act plays, written farce I’ve ever encountered* (pace lovers of Molière and Feydeau), I don’t think that nor do they allow for the subtext and farces can be transformed into musicals without damage—at least, not good musicals. resonance that Arthur Laurents had The tighter the plotting the better the farce, but the better the farce the more the songs taught me to appreciate when we wrote interrupt the flow and pace. Farces are express trains; musicals are locals. Savoring West Side Story; they generate songs moments can be effective while a farce is gathering steam, but deadly once the train gets which, like the characters who sing going. That’s why the songs in Forum are bunched together in the first half of the first act, them, deal with only one idea at a time where there is more exposition than action, and then become scarcer and scarcer until and play with it. To use a graceful phrase eventually in the last twenty minutes before the Finale there are no songs at all. Those of Burt’s, such songs “savor the moment.” twenty minutes comprise one long frenetic chase in which all the characters are on the This had been the function of songs in run; for one of them to stop even an instant and sing a song would kill the momentum. Roman comedy and remained so for the Farcical musicals such as The Boys from Syracuse and Where’s Charley? better part of two thousand years afterward. have songs sprinkled throughout, but those shows don’t attempt to “Savoring the moment” describes most maintain the tension of a true farce; they pause for diversions. Even Broadway theater songs prior to Oklahoma! though it’s based on Charley’s Aunt, one of the most durable farces Costume rendering of pseudolus and hysterium by david C. Woolard. Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin in the English language, the intention of Where’s Charley? is to and their contemporaries wrote lyrics that be amiable and jolly, not tense and hysterical and threatening, presented one idea, toyed with rather than developed. which is what a serious farce should be. The stakes are lower in shows of that kind, shows that wear the trappings of Oscar’s influence on musical theater was not seen by everyone as entirely beneficial. As farce but are actually traditional musical comedies with Larry Gelbart put it in his Introduction to the published libretto of Forum, “Broadway, farcical moments. Farcical operas stand a better chance of in its development of musical comedy, had improved the quality of the former at the maintaining the necessary tightness because the music is expense of a good deal of the latter.” The playfulness of musicals had been dampened by continuous, but is Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi one tenth as Oscar and his imitators and here I was, a convert myself, confronted with a musical that funny as Forum or any play by Goldoni? was nothing if not playful. At the time, I complained incessantly to Burt that although I had loved many of the savor-the-moment songs in the old shows and had written my fair share for Saturday Stephen Sondheim has written award-winning music and lyrics for theatre, film and television. he is also the Night, West Side Story and Gypsy, trying to write an entire score of them was cramping my co-author of the filmThe Last of Sheila and the play tutored style. I grumbled that Forum would be better off as a play than a musical. Burt Getting Away with Murder. Sondheim is on the council of the dramatists guild of America, having served as its replied that if it were just a play, it would be relentlessly and unrelievedly funny and the president from 1973 to 1981. he lives in new york City. audience, unable to recover between gasps of laughter, would soon become restless for a Costume rendering of miles gloriosus by breathing space. The few of Plautus’s plays which survive probably didn’t last more than david C. Woolard. an hour, but even so, they included songs which served as necessary respites from the *And for good reason, Burt and Larry approached the piece with the utmost seriousness of intention. unremitting farcical push. I had to write one-joke songs, so I picked spots for them where As Larry wrote in his aforementioned Introduction: “We would preserve the classic unities of time, the situations would supply substance: songs like “Impossible” and the drag version of place and action. We would have no anachronisms or sly references to today. We would use Plautus’ “Lovely,” which were dramatically static but theatrically funny. What I didn’t appreciate characters, but we would have to invent a plot (the original plots are negligible) to accommodate the characters we wanted to use.” 4 5 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum 2013|2014 SeASon • issue 2 for Cabaret.” Work at Arena led to an internship after graduation at Woolly Mammoth 29 going on 90 Theatre Company and assistant directing gigs with Rebecca Taichman and Moisés Kaufman.