Vol. 6, No. 4, Spring 2000
Sondheim at 70
A concert of Sweeney Todd in New York and a program at the Library of Congress highlight tributes on Sondheim's 70th birthday
A Unitarian church has a Sondheim service
Performers sing Sondheim in the "Lyrics and Lyricists" series
A concert in Los Angeles links Sondheim and jazz
Len Cariou returns as Sweeney in a London concert
With Sondheim in the cast, the rare June Moon is part of a museum showing

News & Notes
Hal Prince to direct Wise Guys
As it closes, Putting It Together is taped for pay-per-view television
Sunday in the Park songs are part of a Sondheim tribute; a major production of Passion is planned for Columbus, Ohio

Saturday Night
Saturday Night finally opens in New York
What critics had to say about the production

National Report
Merrily We Roll Along revived in Los Angeles
Company presented by Theatre Three in Dallas
The Boston Conservatory tackles Anyone Can Whistle

International Report
Sweeney Todd is a rare Sondheim production in Germany
A director's journal takes us behind the scenes of A Little Night Music in Hungary

The Scrapbook
Side by Side by Sondheim

Bonus Article
At Harvard, Hal Prince talks about working with Sondheim

The Interview
Ira Weitzman is a guiding force behind the productions of Sondheim shows

The Essay
Noted author Alfie Kohn describes Sondheim as an existentialist

Review
Academics look at Sondheim in a new collection of essays

For Your Amusement
A quiz connected to Sondheim's 70th

Looking Ahead
Upcoming Sondheim shows in the U.S. and elsewhere

SAMPLE ARTICLE

"We're talking about working together," Prince says.

When Stephen Sondheim's longtime collaborator Hal Prince took part in a Learning from Performers program at Harvard University on December 15, he talked about everything from the dearth of plays on Broadway to the Tony Awards. He also talked about his work with Sondheim, and made the intriguing statement that "we're talking about working together right now, and I think we will." (This was months before the announcement that he would direct Wise Guys.)

Here are his responses to a couple of Sondheim-related questions:

Q: Can you contrast the process of creating a musical with Stephen Sondheim with that of creating a musical with Andrew Lloyd Webber?

A: You start with what are their strengths. Steve is an astonishing composer. There's a tendency always to think of him as lyricist/composer. He's an astonishing composer and a great lyricist. Quite thoughtful and a self-critical artist.

Lloyd Webber is not a lyricist, and as far as I'm concerned, the British have not been able to come up with first-rate lyricists. I would appear to be damning some of my collaborators on the shows I did. I think Tim Rice is very good, and what he did for Evita was really strong because that was agitprop theater and he really knew what he was doing. But by and large, the British musical hasn't equaled the composing of Lloyd Webber with lyrics of the same high order--in my opinion.

Lloyd Webber is a romantic. He's very much a theater man. Both he and Steve share one very strong characteristic. They both understand that
empty space. And they understand what makes material exciting in the theater, what sets the theater apart from film and television. But he's not
a lyricist and depends more proportionately than Steve on music and on melody and on that romantic nature which he prefers. I think Evita's probably the best work that Webber and Rice have ever done. It was sure a tough but extraordinarily invigorating experience to put that show on the stage. This is the way Andrew works: "These are themes. I have this theme. It sounds like the show to me. It sounds like the subject matter." And then, largely, generally, the lyrics follow.

Steve has no pattern about it. But more often than not, it seems to me, he's sitting with the yellow pad and a pencil, never a pen, because a pencil has an eraser, writing lyrics in a tiny hand and talking a lot.

Steve and I talk a lot--I mean months. With Andrew, there's not that talk. But the shows are broader, bolder. You know, it's not even fair to talk about Evita that way because Evita was a record and it came to me as a record with a slip in it of lyrics. And they said, "Want to do it as a musical?" And I said, "It doesn't have a book." "Well, what do you want to do?" And I said, "All right, let's do it." And then what I did was sit in my office and dictate each number to my assistant. I dictated a scene which was suggested, undoubtedly, by what Tim Rice had written lyrically. And this happens here and this is what happens. And I'd ad lib a scene, and the next one and then the next one. I got it all on paper.

You looked at it as you would a blueprint and I said, "There's a song missing. We're telling this in such Piscator terms, not so much Brecht, but Piscator--living newspaper stuff." Then I said, "We don't have the moment where we're introduced to Juan Peron separate and apart from Evita, and I think we need that." And I said to them, "I have an idea. There are five colonels and generals and they're on big rocking chairs, way outsized rocking chairs, and they're playing that old game we used to play as kids where you pull away a chair and one person is left standing until finally the last person standing is Peron. What a neat way, cabaret-type way, it would be to do that number." And they went away and wrote "The Art of the Possible." And we went into the theater and did it the first time exactly the way it was for the next six years. So they really served the material.

That process would not be so different from Steve. I'll give you a Steve example. We haven't worked together, it's nineteen years, but we're talking about working together right now, and I think we will. So the nineteen years suddenly seem like yesterday. Plus, our friendship existed through those nineteen years and we saw each other regularly. So taking a vacation was a good idea.

I was doing A Little Night Music, and Steve was hard put to come up with the end of the first act. I kept saying, "But it needs to do this. We need to tie in all these threads." And he said, "Will you do it? Can you show me?" And, I said, "Sure! It will be just wickedly tenth rate, but come in in an hour." So in an hour we have the actors and somebody says, "Look what I've got here? An invitation to the country. At the countess'." "Well, are you going?" "Well, of course we're going." And then, "Look what I've got here." "What have you got?" "An invitation to the countess'." And then each person, "Well, are you going?" "No, we're not going, absolutely not going." That banal and that oafish talk was the dialogue, and these poor actors were made to say these things and circle each other and walk around and then they all came down stage and said, "Well, I guess we'll go to the countesses' this weekend" or whatever. And I said, "That's it, Steve." And he went home and he wrote "A Weekend in the Country," and you know what? It was exactly every move everyone had made and all you did is give them the text and the same things happened. And then Pat Birch took the last chorus and turned it into something very deft and artful. But the stories have a certain similarity.

I think the experience of working with them is not all that different, but I certainly know that there is not on the face of the earth a greater composer or lyricist than Steve Sondheim. There isn't.

Q: What show gave you the greatest joy and which one gave you the most trouble?

A: That's easy. The greatest joy is like postpartum. In other words, doing Follies was damned hard, but enjoying what Follies became was the most pleasure I've ever experienced. The show that gave me the most trouble, because I failed it, was Merrily We Roll Along. I could never--Steve wrote the best score he's ever written. It's a great, great score. He provided that show with ten or twelve of the best songs anyone's ever handed me. It's an interesting project. I couldn't get a visual on it. One of my strengths as a director is how things look. Not just because they look good--I'm not an interior decorator--but because that's how I motorize them. In other words, if I can figure out where the levels are and how it's going to move, then I get a rhythm into the show that is, hopefully, unique. That's why with so many of the shows with Lloyd Webber, with Sondheim and with Kander and Ebb (we've had a hell of a good history together). I start working at the beginning with them. As they start writing, I'm working. And then I bring the designer in, probably when we know it's going to happen, which is half a first act--this is going to be all right. And then the designer comes in so everybody's in there contributing from the get-go.

With Merrily , I never figured it out. And the only solace I take from any of this, because I gummed it up, is that it's never been done since so that it worked either. And that's not a cop-out because the music always works and individual scenes always work, but the totality doesn't. And it may be because we were telling a story in reverse order, starting at the end and going back to the beginning. And then telling it about kids with kids playing themselves as older, drunken, disillusioned people and then ending up graduating. That's certainly part of it. The other part is, it's now nineteen years later and I still don't know what it should look like. So I haven't solved it. Of all the shows I did, the one that I think probably was the most of a watershed was Company. Who'd ever seen anything like Company? We certainly hadn't. We were able to create an atmosphere, on a stage, in a
way that was somewhat different from what people were used to. But we were able to talk to a certain time, our time. And it was our time. It was 1970, and we were right in the middle of our lives, and these were our marriages, our fights, our careers, our politics, our frustrations. Put them all into a show. I long for more of that.

Transcribed by Suzanne Bixby and David Bickman.

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