Side by Side by Side

As the Kennedy Center lines up six Stephen Sondheim productions in a star-spangled retrospective, the maestro candidly assesses his accomplishments—and confesses to some aspirations unfulfilled

an interview by Frank Rich

This is America’s Sondheim summer.

Through the final days of August, the nation’s capital will remain a destination point for musical-theatre aficionados from around the world, as the Kennedy Center throws its considerable resources behind an unprecedented tribute to composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Six Sondheim musicals, mounted in overlapping repertory with the participation of some of the brightest talents in contemporary musical theatre, along with two concert programs of his songs (by Barbara Cook and Mandy Patinkin), are on the Sondheim Celebration program, described by Kennedy Center president Michael M. Kaiser as "a theatrical version of a museum retrospective."

The first three productions—Sweeney Todd, directed by Christopher Ashley; Company, supervised by Sean Mathias; and Sunday in the Park with George, mounted by the event’s overall artistic director, Eric Schaeffer—were scheduled to run through the end of June. Still to come are Merrily We Roll Along, opening July 13 under Ashley’s direction; Passion, beginning July 19 with Schaeffer at the helm; and Mark Brokaw’s staging of A Little Night Music, due Aug. 2.

The affair kicked off on April 28 with "Sondheim on Sondheim," a public conversation between the composer and former New York Times chief theatre critic Frank Rich, during whose tenure on the theatre beat many of Sondheim’s greatest works appeared—and who was once facetiously dubbed by industry insiders as "the demon barber of Broadway" for his harsh reviews (not usually of Sondheim shows, which he, for the most part, championed). Here are excerpts from their wide-ranging conversation.

FRANK RICH: The first time I was in the same theatre with Stephen Sondheim was, indeed, here in Washington—at the National Theatre—and I looked up my old playbill and it was literally 40 years ago today: a Saturday matinee on April 28, 1962, when John Kennedy was in the White House and had not yet lent his name to a cultural center. Tell us what went on that day.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM: Well, it was a matinee of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and there were almost fewer people in the audience than there were on the stage. In fact, I said to Hal Prince, the producer, "Let’s invite them all back to the hotel for a drink after."

That would have changed my life.
The show was a disaster in Washington—it was very badly received. I remember that [critic] Richard Coe said in the Post, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum gives it the old college try, but the colleges do it so much better." Those things stick in your mind. However, we put in a new opening number, took it to New York, and everything was fine.

The new opening number was "Comedy Tonight." Where and when did you write it?
I think I was staying at the Jefferson Hotel, and Jerry Robbins came in at my suggestion and worked with us for the last week when we were in Washington. He said that what the show needed was a number at the beginning that told the audience what kind of an evening they were in for—a "baggy pants" number, meaning low comedy. Then he said something that rather put me off. He said, "Now, I don’t want you to tell any jokes; let me do the jokes." That’s why the lyric of "Comedy Tonight" is just a list of things. And for those of you who have had the pleasure of seeing that number, it’s one of the two or three best opening numbers ever. It would be very hard to have a flop show after that number, because Robbins did all these physical jokes on the stage. It was a dazzler.

What is it like when you have to produce a song like that on demand out of town?
It’s always easier. Historically, some of the best songs get written out of town because you know whom you’re writing for. At that point, I knew exactly Zero Mostel’s strengths and weaknesses. I’ve often said as a joke that I really don’t want to write the score until the show is cast and in rehearsal—then I wouldn’t make any mistakes. Silly as it sounds, it’s true, because by then you know the qualities of the people that you’re writing for. For example, I wrote "Send in the Clowns" during rehearsals of A Little Night Music for Glynis Johns—not just for Glynis Johns, but for Glynis Johns playing the part of Desiree in a specific situation, and as staged by Hal Prince. And when you have all those…parameters, if that’s the right word—when you have those, it’s so much easier to write. I wrote that song in two or three days, and it was a cinch because I knew all the materials. Writing Gypsy for Ethel Merman took about four months, which is a very short time to write a show. And it was because we knew the performer, as well as the character, so well.

You wanted to write the music and lyrics for Broadway shows, but the first two shows you actually got on, West Side Story and Gypsy, you could only write the lyrics. Was that frustrating? And did you learn the things from Leonard Bernstein and Jule Styne that you expected to?
The answer to both questions is yes. I got the job doing West Side Story by accident, by running into Arthur Laurents at a party. I didn’t know him at all, but I had auditioned for him for another show. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he was about to start on this musical of Romeo and Juliet and they were looking for a lyric writer. He said, "Well, I never thought of you. I didn’t much like your music but I thought your lyrics were terrific. Why don’t you come in and play for Leonard Bernstein?" Well, I wasn’t the least bit interested in writing just lyrics, but I sure wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. I went up the next day and played for Lenny and he said, "Actually, Comden and Green are supposed to do the lyrics but they may be stuck in Hollywood. We’ll find out within a week and I’ll let you know then." I was thinking to myself, "It doesn’t matter anyway, because I don’t want to do just lyrics." But Oscar Hammerstein, who was, as most of you know, my mentor, said to me, "I think it would be very smart of you to take this job. You would be working with men of high quality in the theatre: Robbins, Laurents and Bernstein. You’ll learn something from them." And, boy, was he right.

It was very frustrating not writing the music, but, because I was a composer, Lenny listened to me when I talked music, so we had a collaboration that was closer than it might have been if I weren’t a musician. I was able to learn a great deal from him, musically. What I learned from him most, though, is that Lenny was never ashamed to fall off the high rung of the ladder—whenever he failed, it was always because his reach was greater than his grasp. He never had a piddling little failure. They were big failures and I like to think that my failures are big failures, too [laughter].

As for Gypsy, I was supposed to do music and lyrics for it, but Ethel Merman didn’t want an unknown composer. She had just done a show called Happy Hunting that was not a success, and she was feeling very skittish and defensive. But she had seen West Side Story, so she was perfectly willing to have me aboard as lyric writer. And, again, I balked, and, again, Oscar told me to do it. He said, "You’ll have a different experience this time. You’ll be writing for a star. It’s a quite different process." So I figured there was something to be learned there, and, indeed, there was.

About Oscar Hammerstein: Sometimes people have trouble making the connection between the man who wrote Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music and the man who wrote Sweeney Todd and Pacific Overtures. Explain what you learned from him.
Well, I learned a lot about technique from him, and, up until the day he died, I always showed him everything I wrote. But the major thing I learned from him came about when I was 16 or 17 and starting to write under his guidance. He taught me a very simple and very profound lesson. As you know, he used a lot of nature images in his work, lots of larks learning to pray, cattle standing like statues and that sort of thing [laughter]. And though he lived on a farm much of the time, he was a city boy, absolutely urban. People think of him as a sort of simple kind of fellow with hay in his mouth. In fact, he had a very sharp tongue and was a very good and articulate critic. But that was not how he wrote. So the first songs I started to write were full of clouds and, you know, not necessarily cattle but a tree here and a tree there…and a bird, maybe. And he said, "You’re writing like me. You’re trying to imitate me. Write what you feel. Write for the character and for the way you feel the character feels." That seems like a very simple lesson but, you know, it takes a lot of guts to share your own emotions and observations publicly?you’re naked when you write something and it’s out there in public. Oscar told me not only to be not ashamed but not to imitate?and to try to find, in myself, a way of relating to the characters so that it would be unique to me. Again, I’m sure that sounds simplistic, not just simple, but, boy, it has stood me in good stead for a long time. Anyway, that’s why what I write is so different from what he wrote.

It’s amazing to me that you can get into the head of everyone from a flight attendant in Company, to a 19th-century Japanese peasant in Pacific Overtures, to the demon barber of Fleet Street. Where did you get that kind of chameleon-like quality?
Well, it may sound ridiculously modest, but it’s because of the librettists I work with. These are good writers who imagine vivid characters. The characters—I’ve said it before and I’ll say it many times—are their inventions. What I am good at is imitating. I have the approach of an actor. I get inside the character the way an actor gets inside a character. I never write a song—a lyric, anyway—until there are at least one or two scenes written by the librettist so that I can get into the diction. That’s the talent I have, for mimicking. In fact, when I was in college, I was a pretty good actor. I’m terrible now. I got much more inhibited as I got older, although I act pretty well when I sing. But, where I really act well is when I’m writing for characters that somebody else has created.

Of all of those diverse characters you’ve written, are there some that you particularly liked inhabiting more than others, or vice versa?
No, I enjoy all the characters I’ve ever written for. I think they’re all terrific. You have to like your villains as well as your sympathetic characters. And you get to know them so well. They do become—this all sounds so corny—they become family. While you’re writing something, you’re really living with those people. The most interesting one was Georges Seurat in Sunday in the Park, because he was so secretive. Very few people knew anything about his life. They referred to him as "the notary" because he was always formally dressed and very reserved. The only things he ever spoke with passion about were color and his experiments with color. He did not consider himself a painter, he considered himself a scientist about color. He lived a few blocks away from his mother and would see her once a week for dinner. His life was very, very organized that way. And only after his death did she learn that he had a child by his mistress—that’s how secretive he was; he kept his life compartmentalized. Well, when you have a character like that, you can fill him out in any way you want.

You were talking before about how you sometimes write your characters with specific performers in mind. Is it weird to then see them, as you are about to see them here, in other productions with actors that you never knew existed when you were writing?
No, it’s not weird; it’s what makes theatre so much more satisfying for a writer than the movies. I mean, performances in movies don’t get any better. When you see Gone with the Wind again, they’re still giving the same performances—they’re very good, but they don’t get any better [laughter]. It’s really wonderful to see different actors do the same piece. Actors are so different from each other. For example, in the new production of Into the Woods, when the Witch, who was originally played by Bernadette Peters, is played by Vanessa Williams, all the values start to change. The other two leading characters?the Baker and the Wife?are played by actors with entirely different weight and sensibility than the first cast, which is very deliberate on the part of the director James Lapine. The idea is not so much to reconceive the show as to give it a different tone, both in its visual approach and in the choice of actors. And the result is that it’s alive.

What about the way the shows change? I saw Into the Woods last week in New York and there was a palpable feeling in the second act of something that was obviously not your intention when you wrote it--of Sept. 11. It was upsetting. The show played somewhat differently because of things falling down, massive destruction from an evil outside force. A show like Company, to take another example, was written about New York and a sort of social milieu of 1970. Is it applicable now?
No, Company is topical in the same way that, let’s say, Gilbert and Sullivan is. It’s very much of its time. I mean, if it’s still fresh, it’s fresh because of the writing itself, but it is very much of its time. When, however, you deal with shows like Sweeney or Sunday in the Park with George or even A Little Night Music, all of which take place in an era that’s so long ago, it’s much easier to absorb them into whatever is going on today. Similarly, Into the Woods takes place in fairy-tale time—let’s call it medieval times. Therefore, any of the actions and overtones in the play may become relevant (that awful word, "relevant") to what’s going on, may take on colors the way any so-called classic work does (classic meaning something that takes place in a different time).

You know, there’s a scene in Company where a couple is being turned on to marijuana for the first time, and all the humor in the scene comes from that. I happen to think that scene is still as fresh as it was back then, because it’s not about marijuana, it’s about something else—a relationship in which the marijuana cigarettes become the…the means by which we discover who these people are. And they, too, discover something about themselves. But you think, gosh, what year are we in? People who try to update Company make a mistake, I think. It should either be performed as a ’70s piece or with no date, but not with an attempt to make it ’90s or contemporary.

As a child, which came first for you in terms of passion—music or the theatre?
Oh, I guess the theatre, but it wasn’t a passion, it was just fun. I was a movie buff; movies were my passion. And I took piano lessons like nice Jewish boys on the Upper West Side did, when I was six and seven years old; but, you know, it was so that my parents had something they could show off at cocktail time. I would play "The Flight of the Bumblebee" and everybody would say, "Oh, he’s so gifted!" [laughter]. I had a very good right hand. I still have a very good right hand, very fleet. But I stopped. Then, when I was in military school at the age of 10, they had this huge pipe organ there. That was the next time I encountered music. I wanted to press all the pink and yellow buttons and use the four manuals—it was just great. Then I lost interest in music again until I met Oscar and got interested in writing music for the theatre.

If you hadn’t hooked up with Oscar Hammerstein might have you gravitated toward Hollywood or…?
I don’t know. What I really loved was mathematics, and I think I might have become a mathematician. In fact, I deliberately didn’t take any math courses in college because it was like candy to me. I thought, if I get into math I’m going to distract myself.

You could’ve written Copenhagen.
Copenhagen!, the Musical [laughter].

A couple of years ago, we did an interview together for the Times in which you were very, very gloomy about the state of the theatre and what’s happened since your career began. Do you still feel as gloomy?
Well, I feel pretty gloomy about the commercial theatre, yeah. Young writers aren’t getting a chance, that’s all. It’s simple, it’s the old cry. Nobody does plays anymore, everybody does musicals and musicals and musicals and musicals; they’re the badge of contemporary theatre. I’m not biting the hand that feeds me—I love musicals, but I also love plays. And plays are mostly done Off Broadway, and therefore playwrights can’t, even when they’re successful, make enough money to write another play. The young people who write musicals may get their work done, but they don’t earn enough to support a family—so most of them end up writing for television and movies. The theatre, as you know, is a profession you learn by doing. It’s a performing art. It has to be on a stage with performers, professional performers; and, in the case of musicals, not with a string trio but with an orchestra.

You’ve played an Oscar Hammerstein sort of role with some very talented young songwriters, the late Jonathan Larson, the author of Rent, and Adam Guettel, of Floyd Collins. I know you’ve been involved with the Young Playwrights Festival. You must hear from a lot of young people who want to do what you did. What do you tell them?
I tell them to just put it on any place. That’s the only way I can think of to be encouraging to people. One good thing about the current situation is that you can get your work heard. When I grew up, there was no such thing as Off Broadway—it was invented, I believe, in 1954. Now with Off Broadway and regional theatre, you can get your work heard a great deal. And once the work is heard, then sometimes a commercial producer will take a chance and put your work on in a commercial theatre. That has happened a number of times and continues to. I wish it happened more.

What do you think about the role of the theatre in American culture as a whole? Is it destined to be smaller in the age of television?
Yeah, I think so. The word "theatre" causes people’s spines to curdle—it’s elitist. I’m talking, again, about the kind of theatre that is in the big cities, that affects the public in a big way. I think there will always be live theatre: people wanting to put on plays, whether they’re in communities or in schools or in other places. But the business of a healthy commercial theatre, a supermarket where there you can find everything from, you know, sex farces to classic tragedies—yes, that’s all over.

Two developments that began in the ’80s were the growth of musicals that are sung through—rock operas, pop operas, whatever you call them—and the growth of musicals as spectacle. Sometimes they’re one and the same. What did you think of those two developments?
Well, you’ll notice they’ve disappeared. They have now been replaced by self-referential musicals in which you make fun of all other shows: Urinetown, The Producers, that’s the trend now. But rock opera and spectacles? What did I think of them? I suppose there may be elements of them that will find their way back in and help inform things. But they tend to be ponderous, and I don’t think they’ll have any particular lasting effect by themselves. I think that one of the reasons we’re getting so many of these self-referential shows now is that humor has been missing so long from the musical theatre—anything that’s fun and funny is very welcome now.

Of the seven shows that are going to be part of this Washington festival, five of them you did with Hal Prince, two of them you did with James Lapine. To what extent did they influence you and how is it different to work with the two of them?
Well, first of all, Lapine is a writer as well as a director, so he and Hal are different in that way. Hal’s not a writer, but he is a creator, and his vision of what a show should be extends far beyond just the visuals—although he always starts by thinking visually. He’s primarily a visual man, but he’s also very literate. He has opinions on storytelling that are quite often different than mine. We’re working together now, with John Weidman, and together we cause the best kind of abrasive creation. That’s what I think a good collaboration is; it’s not two or three people thinking exactly alike but two or three people who want the same thing, yet go at it from different angles.

Hal and I grew up in the commercial theatre—we’re Broadway babies. One of the joys of creating with Jim Lapine is that he comes from a different generation—he grew up in Off Broadway. Off Broadway has a different sensibility; it’s a much looser way of putting on a show—although James is a meticulous writer and plots very carefully. But his approach to a show, even his approach to writing, is not necessarily traditional—for example, the notion of starting at the beginning. Sometimes he starts in the middle. Working with Lapine was startling to me because of the different approach not only to the actual writing but to the producing. James said, "Come on, I have friends at Playwrights Horizons, we’ll put it on there." With Hal it was, "Okay, I think we can get the Majestic Theatre next fall, so we’ll do it then." It gears your mind differently. Hal makes me bubble with vitality. The minute a meeting or a phone call or a conversation with Hal is over, I can’t wait to get back to the yellow pad and the piano. Once I’m there, however…? [Laughter.]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that of the great songwriters in the theatre that came before you, the two composers you seem to most admire are George Gershwin and Harold Arlen. Why?
Oh, boy, it’s hard to talk about music and say specifically what you like about it. I can tell you that in both cases it’s about harmonic richness. Harmony is, of the three elements of music, the one that gets me—it’s not melody or rhythm, it’s harmony. The way one recognizes composers—not just Gershwin, Arlen, Kern, Rodgers, Porter, but Beethoven, Brahms and Stravinsky—is by their harmonic language. And the richest and most inventive harmonies in show music, I think, are those of Gershwin and Arlen. I could wallow in Porgy and Bess, the chords alone. And any song by Arlen is just, you know…

You once said that when you found your voice as a musical-theatre writer in Company in 1970, you were shocked by the hostility that it provoked.
Still am.

I know this experience [laughter]. People have said that your work is too intellectual, it’s not melodic enough, it’s too angry—whatever. What’s that about? And what do you think are the biggest misperceptions about your work, positive as well as negative?
I think, like a good play, a good musical should be worth more than one visit. I like to write with writers who have the same interest in--I don’t want to say complexity--complications, with layers still to be discovered, discovered on a second view. Most people go to musicals for the one-time experience. Generally, I find that people who have seen a show of mine that they disliked the first time may not like it any better the second time around, but they don’t dislike it the same way [laughter]. I didn’t mean that humorously, unfortunately [laughter]. Then of course there’s the matter of "unhummability." There are two kinds of songs that are hummable: one, the song that you’ve heard before you go into the theatre and you’re just hearing another version of; and two, a song that is reprised 64 times during the course of the evening and you can’t help going out humming it. At the end of the first act of Night Music, people in the lobby were humming "Weekend in the Country." Why? Because they had heard nine choruses of it in the space of six minutes [laughter].

Until about 30 years ago, people went to musicals not wanting to be anything but entertained on a very easy level. But starting in the late ’60s and early ’70s, we began experimenting with form, with content. Musicals were trying to encroach on territory that previously had belonged solely to plays. They started to become plays with songs, plays told through songs. That’s pretty well accepted now. Audiences have come to realize that when they go to a musical, sometimes they’ll get just a finger-snapping, easy kind of experience, but sometimes not. The easy ones will always be the bigger hits, but that’s been true for 2,000 years. I suspect Aristophanes would have outsold Euripides, but I may be wrong.

The beginning of that, at least in my time frame, was West Side Story, which did try out in Washington in 1957 and was considered sufficiently shocking that I know my parents wouldn’t take me to see it. I was eight, so they may have had a point. What was it like to play that in Washington in 1957?
Well, it was a shocker, but it got audiences. I mean, it sold well. It was kind of chic in Washington, but it didn’t sell very well in Philadelphia, which is where we went next. People think of West Side Story as being this smash hit. It wasn’t. When it opened on Broadway it got a very mixed reception from both the critics and the audience. On the second night—remember, this was my first Broadway show and, boy, was I pleased and proud—I thought I’d go in and stand in the back. Well, the curtain went up and there were the six Jets onstage, gang members in color-coordinated sneakers, going [snapping fingers] like that. [Humming] Da-da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-da…and then one of them went like that [gestures flamboyantly] and another went like that [gestures again], and this guy in the second row from the back got up, put his coat over his arm and made his way through the row, saying "Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me." When he saw me standing in the back looking kind of gob-smacked, he just fixed me with a baleful stare and muttered, "Don’t ask" [laughter]. That’s when I knew we were not going to have a smash hit.

West Side Story ran less than two years, with the last six months on "twofers" in New York. Then it went on the road and came back for another six months. I think the total number of performances was something like 719. It made its money back, but that’s partly because the cast were all under 25 and they didn’t get very big salaries [laughter]. The only Tony award it got was for choreography. It lost everything to The Music Man—and there’s a perfect example. The Music Man has a lot of original stuff in it, but it doesn’t exactly threaten an audience. I’m not putting it down—the opening number of Music Man is about as original a song as I’ve ever heard in the theatre.

Speaking of The Music Man, it had a great star performance in it. West Side Story was an ensemble piece. Is the day of the big star in the Broadway musical over?
Yes, because stars are not created any more. They don’t stand a chance. There are lots of talented performers around, but not enough musicals are being done for them to get a chance to be seen. Some of those talented people are going to be down here over the next few months—people like Raul Esparza and Melissa Errico and John Barrowman, not to mention established people like Christine Baranski and Brian Stokes Mitchell and Lynn Redgrave, just to name the ones who’ll appear first. How many chances do they get to do musicals? The Mary Martins, the Ethel Mermans, were created by doing dozens of shows. I don’t know who the last star created on Broadway is—maybe Bernadette [Peters]. I mean, a star in the sense of someone who sells tickets.

What is your role in these productions that are coming to the festival in Washington?
Oh, what I’m doing in each case is primarily making the cast feel good [laughter]. Somebody’s got to tell them they’re good before the audience does. And general checking-up. I’ll come down for run-throughs and check things like tempo and interpretation, and help any of the performers who are having difficulty—not necessarily with the singing but, say, blending the song in with the scene. Or telling them what I intended. It’s important to tell performers what you intend and let them take off from there. In short, I’ll come down when I can be useful and when the director tells me that I can be useful.

We’ll take a few pre-written questions from the audience. Prepare yourself for a little shift in tone [reads question]: If you could have someone’s head on a platter, who would it be?
The temptation is to say, 20 years ago it was… [gestures to Frank Rich, laughter]. But I won’t—it wouldn’t have been true, anyway. Actually, in my old age I’ve mellowed. I’m afraid the answer is: nobody at the moment.

Many new musicals are based on movies these days—even your Passion had a movie as a source of inspiration. If you were to create a new musical based on a film, which film would you choose?
I think Groundhog Day would make a really good musical. Now somebody will do it and I’ll be sorry I said it, although I suspect I’m not the first person to have thought of it. It’s a wonderful movie, and it’s a wonderful idea for theme and variations, which is a kind of musical I want to do. That’s a theme-and variations-story.

Leonard Bernstein said that every composer steals from others. Are there any lifts that you would like to cop to?
Well, not specific lifts. I don’t know of any conscious melodic lifts, but there are harmonic lifts all the time. I constantly use chord progressions from Ravel and Rachmaninoff, although I can only think of one specific one: the opening chord of "Liaisons" in A Little Night Music is the opening chord of "Valses Nobles et Sentimentales," which is one of my favorite pieces. I remember thinking, "Oh God, I’ve got to use that chord, nobody has ever used that chord except Ravel, I’ve got to do it [laughter]."

Can you comment on the decision to postpone the New York revival of Assassins after Sept. 11?
The day after, John Weidman and I spoke and agreed that this is not the time now. We were about to go into rehearsal one week later, but we felt this was just not a time when an audience could hear what we have to say—not just because of the wave of patriotism, but because of the fact that Assassins raises some questions about the purpose of this country and what people expect from it. A number of the characters—a number of the assassins—anticipate something that the country seems to promise them, etc., etc. Well, that just wasn’t a time to bring such things up. I don’t think an audience would hear it. I wouldn’t want to hear it. Six months later, the situation had changed. And if all goes well, we’ll be doing Assassins next year at the Roundabout Theatre.

Here is a really terrific final question from a member of the audience: What do you still want to accomplish?
Gee, I wish I had a dramatic answer. The fact is, I really like writing shows. It gets harder as time goes on. I thought I’d get more confident. And you’d think something like this Washington celebration would make me more confident—but it doesn’t. I think the more you write, the more you realize how much you don’t know. You get a view of yourself and your weaknesses, the dangers of things like repetition, the feeling that you’ve written it all before. Those things make it harder to write. But, in a way, that also makes me want to write more, because I want to overcome it. And, to put it sentimentally, there are just so many wonderful stories to tell, and I really would like to find some that would lend themselves to music that I haven’t heard before.

Frank Rich is the author, most recently, of the memoir Ghost Light (Random House).