The Nation's Pulse / The American Musical's Last Hope
Podhoretz, John
THE NATION'S PULSE THE AMERICAN MUSICAL'S LAST HOPE T he Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim occupies a unique position in American cultural life, for by common agreement the future of a great...
...Only one of Sondheim's musicals, A Little Night Music, went easy on its audience in telling a slight but lovely story of summer romances and mismatched couples...
...Sondheim's effort to expand the frontiers of the form came smack-dab against the frontiers themselves...
...George, and its audiences left the theater unsatisfied...
...and Mame), can be a startling and bracing experience...
...They were, by design, off-putting, intended to provoke and stimulate, rather than entertain, an audience...
...Now, more than fifteen years later, the same pattern is reasserting itself...
...He first hit the Broadway stage in 1957, as the precocious 24-year-old lyricist of West Side Story...
...The nerves were understandable...
...Investors would henceforth avoid American shows...
...Even though it ended up losing money, Sunday in the Park did manage to complete a 500-performance run, the magic number that signifies a long-running show (rather like a .300 batting average or a 100-r.b.i...
...That is why the fate of Into the Woods seemed so important...
...It became what William Goldman once called a "snob hit," the sort of show that sells tickets because people think they should really go to see it in order to improve themselves...
...In other words, the score is largely tuneless by design...
...4° Investments Asset Management The Lemley Letter SPECIAL OFFER FOR AMERICAN SPECTATOR READERS The Lemley Letter Model Portfolio was up 38%* for the year and 30% cash on October 1, 1987...
...Name: Address: City: TAS-I State...
...The common wisdom is that hits breed more hits, and if Sondheim could write something that would appeal to the audiences generated by those two imports, that might turn things around...
...Its subject matter, fairy tales, is uncustomarily light and frothy for Sondheim and Lapine...
...And that reason is that the form itself cannot carry them...
...Without that triumph, the musical will go the way of its progenitors, the Victor Herbert operettas and the vaudeville circuit...
...The songs actually improve over time...
...The New York Times took to reporting rumors from backstage as news stories on its cultural pages...
...The word "brilliant" is overused, but in Sondheim's case it is the perfect way to describe his gift...
...Its star is Bernadette Peters, the critics' darling...
...Sondheim's score for Sunday in the Park is a musical version of pointillism: The first song in the show is accompanied only by tinkling piano, and as the painting proceeds farther and farther along the music becomes richer and fuller until finally the painting is completed and the first act concludes with a gorgeous harmonious chorale...
...The second act, which features the by-now standard tack we have come to expect from a Sondheim show of punishing the characters for the fun they have had in the first act, is this time not so terrible...
...liked Sunday in the Park with THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH ISO 29...
...His lyrics call atby John Podhoretz tention to their glittery rhymes, puns, and clevernesses...
...He is the last best hope of the Broadway musical, the vineyard in which he has been laboring with distinction for more than thirty years...
...Were Sondheim capable of writing music in the manner of Hindemith and Britten, he would trivialize it by setting it in the fluffy surroundings of Broadway...
...The only real problem was that his shows—conceived in collaboration with director Harold Prince and a series of librettists—were bracing as well, but not at all in a pleasant manner...
...Every show of his is awaited with desperate hope: If he can really make a go of it this time and at last create the breakthrough financial success that has thus far eluded him, he will singlehandedly save the form...
...Since 1970, with the premiere of his breakthrough musical as composer-lyricist, Company, he has reigned as undisputed master of the form...
...Last-minute changes, new songs added, others dropped, fights between the producers and the director, and the wholesale removal of a central character all contributed to a Broadway-wide bout of opening-night jitters...
...In the early 1970s, when Sondheim had set himself the task of redefining the musical, the biggest hit on Broadway was a revival of a 1920s musical called Nq No Nanette...
...plot that every musical before had featured, Company was about the anxieties and neuroses of affluent New Yorkers...
...The music was a revolt against the high sentimentality of the operettas that preceded it and the 12-tone style that was beginning to dominate serious classical music...
...Young songwriters who in earlier days would have been eager to try their hands at writing a musical have instead devoted themselves to the world of pop music...
...There have been some middling successes like Nine, a series of moneymaking revues like Ain't Misbehavin...
...The attitudes that inform them are barely recognizable today...
...The old-time Broadway songwriters, like Berlin and Gershwin, created the first really distinctive popular American art.' They used bits and pieces of previous musical styles to create a new kind of song, a brassy, melodic, short, and memorable piece that was as characteristic of its nation as "Greensleeves" was characteristically British or "Plaisir d'Amour" characteristically French...
...The qualities that made the Broadway song (and the Tin Pan Alley songs that were written up the block) so American were its commonsensical and no-nonsense directness and clarity...
...That is their beS heldcannot I . Americans held as till, the truth is that very few people right responsible for their poor judgment...
...To survive, the Broadway musical needs an infusion of the old brassy and vibrant clarity of its greatest days...
...Jazz enthusiasts will disagree...
...Lapine's book and staging are full of fun...
...Pacific Overtures was a Kabuki-style rendition of the opening of Japan in 1853...
...James Lapine's book—the quality of whose wit is indicated by the fact that he names Seurat's fictional girlfriend Dot—was similarly misconceived, although the show had an inventive set...
...A third, a prodigious Sondheim clone named William Finn, has not produced anything of value following his 1981 hour-long chamber musical, March of the Falsettos...
...Otherwise, the only Sondheim show to send the audience out smiling was Side by Side by Sondheim, not a musical at all but a cheerful and lighthearted revue of his best and wittiest songs...
...instead of the boy-meets-girl-etc...
...THE NATION'S PULSE THE AMERICAN MUSICAL'S LAST HOPE T he Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim occupies a unique position in American cultural life, for by common agreement the future of a great form of popular art rests entirely and solely on his shoulders...
...The most melodic and witty pop artists, like Billy Joel and Warren Zevon, write numbers that cry out for a stage, but they are too busy recording albums and giving concerts in basketball arenas before 20,000 people...
...In its sixty-year history, the Broadway musical has stayed away from large and serious subjects for a good reason...
...Conversely, Sondheim demonstrates contempt for his chosen form by performing the artistic equivalent of destroying the village in order to save it...
...In recent years, only two Broadway-sized talents have emerged...
...Lemley 4t...
...Nor would there be anyone left to pick up the slack from Sondheim...
...Unfortunately, that conservative posture didn't make much difference as the crash caused the value of the Model Portfolio to drop 201 in two days...
...But Into the Woods is, in the end, unsuccessful for a most surprising reason...
...This is the first Sondheim show that children might be able to stomach, and throughout the first act the theater is alive with the tonic sound of genuine laughter...
...John Podhoretz contributed "The Career Woman Lashes Out" to the January American Spectator...
...Follies, his next show, was about a showgirls' reunion and was dominated by a phantasmagoric sequence in which the pathetic fantasies of the main characters come horribly to life...
...One is Howard Ashman, who wrote the book and lyrics to the long-running off-Broadway Little Shop of Horrors before stubbing his toe and breakinghis heart over the ill-conceived Smile...
...If it went the way of 1982's Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim's disastrous sixteen-performance effort, that would be a devastating blow to the confidence of the theatrical establishment...
...He had also matured as a composer, judging from the difference between the Company score and that of his previous hit, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum...
...Into the Woods is doing quite well at the box office, and might well break even if it can stay open a year...
...The other was Rupert Holmes, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics to the gimmicky Mystery of Edwin Drood...
...Meanwhile, Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera—whose score is part Puccini and part Richard Rodgers—is sold out until December...
...Still in the thrall of Benjamin Britten, Sondheim has set his lackluster lyrics to the most inappropriate music imaginable, whose odd keys and odd rhythms only serve to make the action on stage seem distant and uninvolving...
...Company was the first serious "concept musical...
...Past performance is no indication of future perfurtuance...
...In future, the only viable musicals would be the spectacular operatic extravaganzas that have been coming over from London and taking most of Broadway's box-office receipts for the last five years: Cats, Les Mise'rables, Starlight Express, The Phantom of the Opera...
...So, too, is the Japanese economic miracle: "Do it better, do it faster," sing the colonized Japanese with savage irony, "let the pupil teach the master...
...T hat leaves Sondheim, and only 1 Sondheim...
...Ralph J. Leinley & Co., 2411 South LaSalle Street, Suite 50%, Chicago, Illinois 60604 YES, please send me your analysis of the 1987 market crash and a free issue of the Lemley Letter...
...But Sondheim's own taste is for the somber and magisterial works of the great twentieth-century composers, and that is a suicidal tack...
...If you're interested in a common sense (no options, futures or margin) approach to the stock and bond markets, send for our analysis of the meltdown of 19$7, and a free sample copy of the Lemley Letter...
...When Sondheim's tenth show as a composer-lyricist, Into the Woods, was in rehearsals prior to its opening on Broadway last November, it was the most hotly discussed show no one had ever actually seen...
...It is a misbegotten misconception, the kind born of a frantic desire to do things differently even if the style is prima facie ludicrous...
...and some hit curiosities like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 42nd Street, and My One and Only (which claim to be musicals but are actually revues...
...But the fault resides in Sondheim and not in his audience...
...This was made most tellingly clear in Sunday in the Park with George, his 1985 effort with a new collaborator, James Lapine...
...Ask not, Stephen Sondheim, for whom the bell tolls...
...At its best, the Broadway song tried to capture one specific emotion in one specific way and succeeded indelibly: "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," or "My Funny Valentine,"or "Alexander's Ragtime Band," or "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," or even "I'm Still Here...
...Apparently, in his quest to save the musical, he has decided to jettison his greatest strength as a lyricist in order to appeal to the greatest number...
...It is, however, another death knell for the form...
...In determining to kill his clients and then dispose of the remains in meat pies, the barber Sweeney Todd sings bitterly: "There's a hole in the world like a great black pit/And it's filled with people who are filled with s---/And the vermin of the world inhabit it/But not for long/They all deserve to die . . ." Is it any wonder that audiences did not exactly flock to these shows...
...And that is that Sondheim's songs are largely unmemorable, uninteresting,and bereft of sophistication...
...If Sondheim were a great artist whose work was too shocking for the bourgeoisie to stomach, that might be a cause for concern about our cultural philistinism...
...The fact that Broadway cannot compete with the more fashionable world of album-oriented recording is indicative of its decline as a cultural institution...
...Sweeney Todd was a full-scale Grand Guignol operetta about cannibalism during the early Victorian age...
...Sondheim, whose later work indicates a close study of Benjamin Britten and Paul Hindemith, has been moving away from the standard Broadway chords and chord progressions to a more modernist style...
...Fortunately, the Model Portfolio on 12/31/87 was up 20%* for the year...
...The last few years have been particularly pathetic, as prestige musical after prestige musical—Baby, Smile, Grind, Big Deal—has opened, bombed, and lost four to six million dollars each...
...In the 1980s, only two American musicals have been bona-fide box-office triumphs: Dreamgirls and La Cage Aux Folks...
...Broadway would become a vanquished industry, the victim of a gigantic trade deficit, effectively taken over lock, stock, and barrel by the British...
...in the concluding song to Pacific Overtures, the blame for modern Japanese industrial pollution is laid squarely at the feet of Commodore Matthew Perry, the American who opened Japan's markets to the West...
...The sad fact is that precious few American artists are interested in Broadway anymore...
...As usually happens with art that 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 self-consciously seeks to expand the frontiers of human experience, most of these shows are amazingly dated now...
...year...
...Sondheim has laid a theoretical trap for himself...
...It is, in part, the story of the trial and trauma of creating a great art work, Georges Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte...
...Seurat was a pointillist, a painter who rendered his images by means of specks of color...
...It will become a memory, left to high school dramatic societies and sentimental archivists, and will in time seem only the hidebound representation of a certain peculiar age in American cultural history rather than a vital example of American popular art...
...It is hardly surprising that the only American musical this season that is playing at capacity is a reworked revival of Cole Porter's 1936 Anything Goes...
...Sadder than that is the quality of the music...
...There are endless pleasures to be had in listening to the original cast albums of his shows...
...His music had become supple, amusing, and memorable, occasionally very beautiful and always a match for the sophistication of his lyrics...
...Sunday in the Park found a champion in New York Times drama critic Frank Rich, who waged an ultimately successful campaign to get the show a Pulitzer Prize...
...The pressure seems to have gotten to Sondheim, because Into the Woods is an oddly tentative and gentle show...
...Into the Woods, however, just might be...
...What is more, its premiere in November followed a very good year at the Broadway box-office, whose receipts were skyrocketing as a result of the success of Les Misembles and another British import called Me and My Girl...
...It combines the stories of Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, and a new tale about a baker and his wife...
...Enthusiasts consider the show a signal accomplishment of the American theater, a profound evocation of the creative process...
...Rupert Holmes of Drood was himself a successful pop recording artist of the 1970s, and if his career had not taken a nose dive in the 1980s he might never have worked on Broadway at all...
...It was not the holy grail for which the Broadway musical had been searching...
...Even more timebound is the dark spirit that guides the score to 1979's Sweeney Todd, which is less suggestive of the mood of early industrial London than of Jimmy Carter's America...
...In a song called "I'm Still Here," a boozy has-been sex goddess reflects on the vicissitudes of stardom: First you're another sloe-eyed vamp, Then someone's mother, then you're camp, Then you career from career to career, I'm almost through my memoirs, and I'm here .. . Hearing a Sondheim lyric, after living through years of witless and gaudy bombast of the sort practiced by Jerry Herman (author of Hello Dolly...
...Company he demonstrated that he was without peer as a sophisticated lyricist in the great tradition of Irving Berlin, Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, and Alan Jay Lerner...
Vol. 21 • March 1988 • No. 3
