losing my mind
by Douglas Messerli
Stephen Sondheim, with additional music by Leonard Bernstein, Mary Rodgers, Richard Rodgers, and Jule Styne Side by Side by Sondheim / directed by Dan Fishbach at Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble / the performance I saw with Howard Fox was the matinee on July 29, 2018
Yesterday, my husband Howard and I attended a
performance at Los Angeles’ famed Odyssey Theatre of the 1976 Ned Sherrin
musical revue (directed this time around by Dan Fishbach), featuring Stephen
Sondheim’s lyrics and music, that started out in London and later transferred,
with the same British cast, to Broadway, toting up, between the two, rather
long runs.
This small-theater production—produced in a theater that for 49 years
has been known for its far more adventurous plays (everything from Beckett to
Max Frisch and younger playwrights such as the American John O’Keefe)—did not
disappoint. Despite the fact that I might also have attended the surely far
more innovative version of Eduardo Machado’s
Lyistrata Unbound, being performed in another of the Odyssey mini-theaters
at the same hour, I felt that after the slog of daily political news, it might
be nice to simply go back in time to Sondheim’s early career, covering the
periods when he composed lyrics for other musicians (in this production
represented by Leonard Bernstein, Mary Rodgers, her father Richard Rodgers, and
Jule Styne) as well as several numbers from Company,
Anyone Can Whistle, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum, A Little Night Music, and Follies, as well as lesser known works
such as the lovely piece from his television musical, Primrose Evening, Pacific
Overtures, and The Seven-Per-Cent
Solution.
Of
course, when younger singers take on songs interpreted by some of the greatest
of Broadway legends, even singers of talent—and these performers, Sarah Busic,
Chris Kerrigan, and Rachel McLaughlan are definitely singers of talent—there
will be, even if unspoken, the inevitable comparisons to Barbara Cook, Elaine
Stritch, Dorothy Collins, Alexis Smith, Larry Kert, Chita Rivera—the list goes
on.
These younger stage folk have good voices and great theater pizazz, so
why bother to compare them with legends? And they have the advantage in simply
being fresh and young, and the ability to express Sondheim masterworks
intimately in a new manner. I’ve seen most of Sondheim’s musicals on stage, but
this was the first time that I could truly hear all the lyrics, which made
pieces like the daffy analysis of the hero of Company by three Andrews Sister’s-like disappointed lovers, belting
out “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” legible; no saxophones here, as in the
2006 Broadway revival I saw, to distract you from their piercing criticisms of
Bobby.
I
believe Chris Kerrigan’s beautiful rendition of “Marry Me a Little” from Company easily matches Raul Esparza’s
2006 version; and who might have thought of a brawny fellow like Kerrigan
singing the naughty husband-wife “splitting up” story, “Could I Leave You,” or
replacing Charmian Karr’s wistful TV version of “I Remember” (sung late at
night in a department store to Anthony Perkins) with a tenor-baritone voice.
Both of these and other songs point up what Sondheim usually shoved under the
rug, particularly given his remarkable ballads of heterosexual desire and
compulsion, that he was gay man—much like the lyricist he often dismissed,
Lorenz Hart—who was hiding his own attractions within various heterosexual
narrative scenarios. Both these female-based songs make good sense sung by a
male, as do some of the gay and lesbian suggestions played out in a quick
summary of 27 other Sondheim songs near the end of the show.
Although it might be stunning to hear the last recording of the operatic
star Licia Albanese, known for her Puccini interpretations sing “Ah, Paree!” in
Sondheim’s Follies in Concert, for
the first time ever I comprehended the lyrics as sung by McLaughlan, who also
sang a solid rendition of Follies’
“I’m Still Here” that certainly matches and, perhaps, surpasses Carol Burnett’s
rather literal rendition on the DVD we own.
I
know, I promised that I was not going to compare. I’d just say, hey, these kids
are “Broadway Babies,” even though they’re performing today in LA, who ought to
see their names “all over Times Square.”
I’d
go back to this musical revue any day, except I can’t bear to think about
hearing their wonderful singing all night long, as I did last night. I need my
sleep. But you should go—and often. I will probably return as well, as soon as
I can once again “lose my mind.”
Los Angeles, July 30, 2018
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (July 2018).
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