The maestro who makes my heart SING!
Hard-hitting Mail sports writer MARTIN SAMUEL reveals his other great passion — the musicals of Stephen Sondheim
LIKE all love affairs it starts with a date. Mum and Dad went to see the original production of West Side Story at Her Majesty’s Theatre, sometime in the late Fifties. The old man used to say that he knew, instantly, that musical theatre would never be the same again. As if he’d seen the Sex Pistols play down the 100 Club in 1976.
And, growing up, the house was full of music. Harry Nilsson, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Diana Ross, The Who. But Stephen Sondheim, too.
As a kid, it’s the words that pull you in. The delicious love of language, the audacious rhymes.
I didn’t get all the references in Gee, Officer Krupke but I knew it made me l augh, and that i t sounded different. And from there it is a short step to . . .
. . . me and my mate John, listening to any obscure piece of vinyl we could dig out in the early Eighties, while trying to get to like Wild Turkey bourbon and smoking fags. Reggae, old soul, new wave, Burning Spear, Sly Stone, Magazine, until one day John pulled out a copy of the Broadway cast version of Follies. Dorothy Collins singing Losing My Mind. ‘Listen to this . . .’
Of course it made sense. If you love music, you’ll love Sondheim, even if you don’t yet know it.
You’ll love the melody to Send In The Clowns, you’ll love the beautiful sentiment of Somewhere. And you’ll love the i ntelligence. It’s about the ideas, too.
Art, not heart, is the criticism, but that i sn’t true. There’s plenty of heart in Sondheim. There just isn’t, well, all that other stuff.
Last week, we gathered for Disney’s production of Into The Woods. The preview cinema was showing Taken 3. You could hear it through the wall.
You have to feel a little sorry for Taken 3. Not even films as fine as The Godfather series survived having a 3 attached to the name.
Anyway, it sounded terrible. Even through a wall.
They probably don’t bother shouting ‘action’ on the set because that’s all there is. Action, action and more action. Action until it hurts. And s o we waited for Sondheim; for wit, for insight, for wisdom and dexterity and all the subtleties that have been forgotten in the age of action.
We waited for something new, not a jukebox musical stuffed with familiar top ten tunes, so there is never any question of the audience leaving not tapping its toes.
We waited f or a world of ambiguity, a worl d t hat challenges. Sondheim’s world.
He remains the finest exponent of musical theatre in this, or any other generation and, even at 84, it’s still his time. Into Th e Woods, hi s fairytale fantasy in which everything doesn’t necessarily end happy ever after, is Disney’s big winter offering.
Gypsy, for which he wrote the lyrics, starts previews at the Savoy Theatre in London in March , starring I mel d a Staunton. Sweeney Todd, with Bryn Terfel an d Emma Thompson, opens at the London Coliseum the same month.
Assassins, featuring Catherine Tate, is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, completely sold out.
Rob Marshall, director of Into The Woods, was inspired by a speech he heard President Barack Obama give on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Marshall thought it echoed the message of a Sondheim song, No One Is Alone, from Into The Woods. He calls Into The Woods ‘a fairy tale for the post-9/11 generation’.
So nothing has changed. People still step out of two hours with Sondheim thinking the world has changed. It’s a nice evening, but you won’t get that from Jersey Boys.
Assassins? Funny title for a musical, isn’t it? Indeed.
But Sondheim requires you to try a little harder; to identify with the 13 individuals that have attempted to assassinate the American President; to consider America’s relationship with Japan in Pacific Overtures; to spend Sunday in the park with impressionist painter Georges Seurat; to know your Ingmar Bergman. The good rhymes are there, still. ‘When a person’s personality is personable / He shouldn’t oughta sit like a l ump / It’s ha r der than a matador coercin’ a bull / To try to get you off of your rump, ’ sings Kathy in Company. If you think anyone else is about to rhyme ‘personable’ with ‘coercin’ a bull’, at any time in the near future, forget it.
There is a joy, an ambition in Sondheim’s work that is simply not found elsewhere.
The reason he can pull off the s ubject matter of Pacific Overtures is because the songs are dotted with so much humour and intricacy, stunning internal rhymes — ‘ it’s a herb that’s superb for disturbances at sea’ — and lines that are simply laugh out loud funny.
Have some tea, my Lord, Some chrysanthemum tea. It’s a tangled situation, As your father would agree. And it mightn’t be so tangled If you hadn’t had him strangled —
Sure, any i diot can make words rhyme. Sondheim’s gift is to make them rhyme, and count. Whether playfully, in Sweeney Todd. . . The worst pies in London Even that’s polite The worst pies in London If you doubt it, take a bite Is that just disgusting? You have to concede it It’s nothing but crusting Here, drink this, you’ll need it
. . . or with real meaning, from Passion. . . Loving you is not a choice And not much reason to rejoice But it gives me purpose Gives me voice To say to the world This is why I live You are why I live.
The chairman of Everton football club, theatrical impresario Bill Kenwright, quotes that to explain why he carries on sinking money into the club. No, really, he does. Tom Lehrer believes Sondheim is the cleverest lyricist since W. S. Gilbert. And he would know.
THERE are still those who think Sondheim doesn’t write tunes that can be whistled — but only if one discounts Comedy Tonight, Send In The Clowns, Broadway Baby and a hundred others, including some of the greatest introductions to a night i n the theatre ever casually tossed towards an orchestra pit, not least The Ballad Of Sweeney Todd that Tim Burton mystifyingly cut from the film version.
And last week, Dad went to see the film production of Into The Woods. On his own because, as Sondheim’s fable establishes, sometimes rotten stuff like that happens.
He then spent dinner time discussing it with his grandson, Robert, who had been to see it with his friend Grace.
They hadn’t gone because it was Disney. They went because it was Sondheim.
Half a century on from Her Majesty’s Theatre, he is still worth more than a listen.