Frank Rich on His Friendship With Stephen Sondheim -- New York Magazine
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5/22/14, 8:33 AMFrank Rich on His Friendship With Stephen Sondheim -- New York Magazine
Page 1 of 2http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/stephen-sondheim-2013-12/index1.html
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The Sondheim Puzzle ShareThisWithin that emotional undertow is the essence of a man who can explain every note and word in everysong he wrote with meticulous authority and yet whose own feelings were so successfully barricaded thatby his own account he didnt give himself up to a serious romantic relationship until he turned 60. Andwhats remarkable is that the human watermark of his work has remained essentially the same from thestartas far back as Saturday Night, a show he wrote in the early fifties, based on a play by Julius andPhilip Epstein (best known as the screenwriters of Casablanca), that never made it to Broadway. Theopening number, sung by a bevy of young men searching in vain for dates in the Flatbush, Brooklyn, of1929, may be boisterously upbeat in the manner of Broadway shows of the Pajama Game era, but thewords, not so much: When youre alone on a Saturday night, you might as well be dead! Or as Bobby,the very different single New Yorker at the center of Company, would sing a couple of generations later:Alone is alone, not alive.
y own relationship with Sondheim began from afar when I was 10 years old and an unhappyproduct of what was then called a broken home. (Sondheims own parents had split up when he
was 10, Id later learn.) My mother had bought the original cast album of Gypsy. Fun as it was to listento, some of the numbers were as yet above my head (You Gotta Get a Gimmick). What grabbed mefrom the start was If Momma Was Married, sung by two sisters hoping against hope that their much-divorced mother would settle down with a nice man and give them the happy, stable home, as private asprivate can be, that they hungered for. This was in 1959, and in the middle-class suburbia I inhabited,divorce was still rare, was never discussed openly in my presence, and was nonexistent in my televisiondiet of the Father Knows Best epoch. So I was riveted. While the lyrics in If Momma Was Married (setto music by Jule Styne) were mostly comic, I intuitively identified with the desperation, isolation, andlonging beneath the siblings jokes. The song made me feel less alone, and not just on Saturday night, afeat no song had ever accomplished before.
Three years later, I saw a Sondheim musical onstage: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to theForum, the first Broadway show (following West Side Story and Gypsy) for which he wrote the music aswell as the lyrics. It was trying out for three weeks in my hometown of Washington, D.C., on its way toNew York. Its reviews were dreadful: The critic at the Post compared it unfavorably to an infinitelymore zestful varsity revue hed just seen at Georgetown University. I went to the last Saturday matineof the run at the National Theatre, where I was startled to discover a phenomenon I would later find atother Sondheim musicals now considered classicsan empty house. When I met Steve roughly a decadelater, I recounted the experience to make sure it wasnt an exaggeration of my 12-year-old imagination,and he verified my memory: In a theater that sat nearly 1,700, only some 50 people had turned up. Steverecalled that when he surveyed the scene at that final matinee, he joked to Prince, the producer, "Let'sinvite them all back to the hotel."*
I found Forum hilarious and magical and wished it would never end. But I figured I was too nave toknow any better. Relatives whod seen the show ahead of me disliked it as much as the critics did, andthe tiny audience at the National was apathetic no matter what Zero Mostel and his fellow clowns did tomake them laugh. When the show arrived on Broadway soon after, it got raves. Some months later, Ibought standing room to see it again while visiting New York, convinced that it must have beencompletely overhauled since I saw it. But though Forum had gained a legendary new opening number(Comedy Tonight), it otherwise was the same show that my hometown had unfairly dismissed. Thatrank injustice stayed with me, filed away under Sondheim.
When I first met Steve in 1971, it was because he actually did invite me to his hotel during the troubledBroadway tryout of one of his shows. This time the city was Boston. I was a college senior reviewingplays for my school paper, the Harvard Crimson, and had flipped for Follies, much as I had forCompany, which I had reviewed during its pre-Broadway run a year earlier. My amateur musings aboutthe theater were for campus consumption onlyif thatso it was startling to receive a letter fromSondheim himself, typed on Statler Hilton hotel stationery, seeking me out.
*The original version of this article mistakenly attributed a joke told at A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum's final matinee to Prince instead ofSondheim.
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5/22/14, 8:33 AMFrank Rich on His Friendship With Stephen Sondheim -- New York Magazine
Page 2 of 2http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/stephen-sondheim-2013-12/index1.html
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