#BornThisDay: Composer / Lyricist, Stephen Sondheim

Screen-shot from “Charlie Rose” (2015), PBS

March 22, 1930– Stephen Sondheim:

The outsider feeling, somebody who people want to both kiss and kill, occurred quite early in my life.

Today we celebrate the birthday of Stephen Sondheim, my favorite theatre composer and lyricist, and a major figure of inspiration.

Yesterday, I gathered on my desk, a bunch of Sondheim materials, intending to start research for this post. The Husband said: “You’ve really reads all of this, haven’t you?”, referring to the coffee-table sized volume, Finishing The Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, GrudgesWhines And Anecdotes, or its companion, Look, I Made A Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) With Attendant Comments, AmplificationsDogmas, HaranguesDigressions, Anecdotes And Miscellany. I have. They are perfect for opening to a random page on a rainy day.

Sondheim and I have some history together. In the spring of 1973, I saw A Little Night Music in its pre-Broadway tryout in Boston. I was in my late teens and 2500 miles from home. I sat in the darkened, half-filled theatre and let the magic and enchantment wash over me. This was not my first Sondheim musical. By this time in my life I had seen, of course, West Side Story and Gypsy on screen and stage. When I was just 17-years-old, I had talked the parental units into letting me fly to San Francisco all by myself to see the original cast (minus Dean Jones) of Company (I had more than just a little fun freely footloose in San Francisco in 1971). I had worn out the Original Cast Album of Follies earlier that year.

Just five years later, I played Henrik in A Little Night Music. It’s a terrific role and the closest I ever came to playing an ingénue. This character plays the cello. Traditionally, the pit orchestra’s cello plays the music while the actor mimes the cello. Because I actually can play the cello, I was able to do my own playing. I thought this gave my performance a bit more authenticity, although I had to practice for hours and hours to be able to play the cello and sing at the same time… in character. I played Hysterium in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum on two occasions, including a long, extended run at Seattle Civic Light Opera in the late 1980s.

I was in a sold out, extended-run production of Side By Side By Sondheim, a musical revue of collected songs from several produced and un-produced Sondheim musicals. Among the songs I was so lucky to perform in that show, is my favorite Sondheim tune, Anyone Can Whistle. Via the wonders of The Facebook, the director of Side by Side and I reconnected and he sent me a DVD of the show. I am not all that keen on watching myself on screen, but I was pleasantly surprised at how good the show was, how very young I looked, how much hair I had, plus what a captivating, compelling, curious, and clever vocalist I was 30-years ago. I was also sort of attractive, with single digit body fat, curly red hair, and discreet, risqué deportment.

I sang Sondheim’s Not A Day Goes By from Merrily We Roll Along for auditions for a few years in the 1980s, until I decided that singing Sondheim for auditions was cliché and too gay even for me.

In 1974, “Masterworks” via YouTube

Early on, I was somehow aware that Sondheim was gay. It did give some solace when I was grappling with coming out of the closet. Sondheim waited to come out as gay until he was 40-years-old, and he did not live with a partner until he was 61-years-old. He shared his life with writer, Peter Jones, until 1999, living at Sondheim’s Turtle Bay house that has been his home and writing place since the early 1960s. Katharine Hepburn used to be his next door neighbor. Sondheim:

 … up one night at about 3, pounding on the piano, writing The Ladies Who Lunch, when I heard this banging on the door. There was Hepburn, in a babushka and no shoes, saying, ‘Young man, I cannot sleep with the noise you’re making’.

A decade ago, Sondheim wrote:

If I had to live my life over again, I would have children. That’s the great mistake I made. It’s too late now. The idea of being a homosexual and raising children was one that was just not acceptable until, my goodness, I’d say the 1980s or 1990s. You want to live long enough to see your children grow up, they’re not puppies. The joy is not just to have them, but to watch them change and grow. So, yes, that is a great regret. But as Bach proved to a great degree, you can have both. It would be nice to have both. But to have any outlet for creative energy is indeed a very good emotional substitute for not being able to put that energy into the raising of a family.

There is common thought on Sondheim: he can do LOVE in a theatre piece, but he struggled with it in in his own life. Even people who follow him closely assumed that he was single. It came as a surprise when in 2006 he announced:

I have someone else now, his name is Jeff. Jeff is a great joy in my life and once I had tasted the joys of living with someone, I wanted to live with someone else when it broke up.

Jeff is Jeff Romley, a cute, youngish photographer.

Sondheim has been awarded the 2017 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award, making him the first composer/lyricist to win it. The prize is given annually to a critically acclaimed writer whose body of work helps us understand and interpret the human condition. While the prize has mostly gone to novelists, including Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, PEN has stated that Sondheim has made an undeniable impact on the last 60 years of culture by writing his musicals. The precedent for giving a Literary award to a musical artist gained some traction in 2016, when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Andrew Solomon, president of PEN America, said:

Sondheim has really given voice to complex aspects of the human spirit: to nuance, to psychology, to inner voices. His work points to the significance of living a moral life, and that’s never felt more urgent than right now.

Meryl Streep presented his prize. Streep starred in the film adaptation of Sondheim’s Into The Woods (2014) and received an Academy Award nomination for her role.

Sondheim has promised a new musical inspired by the works of Luis Buñuel, that has had several workshops, but no production plans, yet. A new staging of Sondheim and John Weidman‘s 1990 musical Assassins has been announced for Off-Broadway at Classic Stage as part of the company’s 2019-2020 season.

Here he is looking all “daddy” in 1967, photo in public domain

Until then, there are the over 20 major stage shows with both Sondheim music and lyrics available on OBC albums or playing at a school, community or regional theatre near you:

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Form (1962)

Anyone Can Whistle (1964)

Company (1970)

Follies (1971)

A Little Night Music (1973)

The Frogs (1974)

Pacific Overtures (1976)

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (1979)

Merrily We Roll Along (1981)

Sunday In The Park With George (1984)

Into The Woods (1987)

Assassins (1991)

Passion (1994)

Bounce (2003), which later became Road Show (2008)

Plus, Sondheim provided the lyrics for West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), Do I Hear A Waltz? (1965), and Candide (1973).

For films, he composed the scores of Stavisky (1974) and Reds (1981), plus he contributed songs for The Seven Percent Solution (1976) and Dick Tracy (1990). He also wrote the songs for the television production Evening Primrose (1966), co-authored the terrific film The Last Of Sheila (1973) and the play Getting Away With Murder (1996). In total, his works have accumulated more than 70 individual and collaborative Tony Awards and an Oscar.

Sondheim created cryptic crosswords for New York Magazine in the late 1960s.

I feel so damned old. During the Company/Follies era, Sondheim appeared on the cover of Time Magazine with the caption: “The Boy Wonder Of The Theatre”. That boy went on to win more Tony Awards than any other composer, including his Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, multiple Grammy Awards including Song Of The Year for Send In The Clowns in 1974, plus that Pulitzer Prize. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 1993, and in 2015, he was awarded the Presidential Medal Of Freedom by Barack Obama.

In March 2008, Sondheim and writer Frank Rich, then of the NY Times, appeared in an interview/conversation here in Portland, titled A Little Night Conversation With Stephen Sondheim. I was fortunate enough to attend. One of my revered revelations from that evening was that Sondheim and I share a favorite non-Sondheim musical in She Loves Me. He was very funny and charming that evening.

Sondheim celebrates his 88th birthday today. We both got old and we both got lucky. Oddly enough, he shares this birthday with the British composer of that weird musical with the singing, dancing Cats. Go figure.

“I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not. You have to move on.”

Read More on The WOW Report
By Stephen Rutledge

5 years ago

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