slightly sour
by Douglas Messerli
Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics),
James Goldman (book), Follies / Los Angeles, Ahmanson Theatre, the
production I saw was on May 26, 2012
Let me begin by unequivocally
asserting that Stephen Sondheim is the greatest of living American musical
theater composers and lyricists. In dozens of musical comedies and dramas,
Sondheim has given us a long string of memorable songs, and notable lyrics in
works such as West Side Story and Gypsy before he even got a chance to
demonstrate his musical talents.
Let me also admit that after seeing the splendid revival of Sondheim's Follies yesterday at Los Angeles'
Ahmanson Theatre, I was sorely tempted to postpone writing about the
experience. I was afraid, however, if I didn't immediately take on the task
that I'd find myself in the same situation as I am with his Merrily We Roll Along, a production of
which I saw in 2010 and have as yet failed to express my thoughts! I know the
reasons for my reluctance; they are similar to those that I expressed about
Sondheim's Company of 2007 (see My Year 2007). But I find it almost
mean-spirited that I can't simply let well enough alone, that I can't just soak
myself in all those memorably lyrical and witty songs of desire and pluck—which
in Follies amounts almost to a
cornucopia of treasures: "Beautiful Girls," "Waiting for the
Girls Upstairs," "Broadway Baby," "In Buddy's Eyes,"
"Who's That Woman?" "I'm Still Here," "Could I Leave
You?" "The God-Why-Don't-You-Love-Me Blues," "The Story of
Lucy and Jessie," and "Live, Laugh, Love"—go home and report,
"What a great show." And yes, this loving and caring revival was a
great show, some of its praises which I'll sing shortly.
But—that terrible three letter word—let me just repeat: I have problems
with Sondheim's vision. After seeing ten works for which he has written lyrics,
music or both, and after having heard recordings of several others, I have to
conclude that Sondheim has one of the darkest visions of humankind of any
Broadway composer. In work after work, he and his librettists focus on
individuals living in unhappy marriages who cheat, lie, and delude themselves,
beings who hate the world, murder, and even consume their fellow beings—drunks,
vagrants, and evil-minded conmen and deviously manipulative women. In a
Sondheim musical hope and happiness are as rare as a full eclipse played out
against the Northern Lights.
Now I certainly do realize that all these subjects are far more
interesting as themes help to generate larger issues than do the everyday joys
and pleasures of life. For a writer who has titled one book of poetry Dark, has written a fiction about the
kidnapping of children and possible pedophilia, and whose plays, although
comic, often include arguing couples and dysfunctional families, my observation
may sound somewhat insincere. But even in my very darkest of works there is
always some sort of reaffirmation or possibility of real hope. Although my
companion and I, who have been in a mostly monogamous relationship now for 42
years, may argue daily, neither of us, we concur, has ever thought of leaving
one another for more than a few hours at a time. I have nothing against the
darkest of visions, but mightn't that dreary scowl be relaxed just once?
I also know, having now read both of Sondheim's volumes of
lyrics, with "attendant comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines
and anecdotes," that, although I often disagree with him, the composer is
quite brilliant and thoroughly knowledgeable about his art, able to cite the
songs of his predecessors, pointing to their successes and failures. Sondheim
himself claims Hammerstein as his mentor, and I take him at his word. But as
dark as are certain passages in Carousel,
Oklahoma! (see My Year 2003 for a
discussion of those darker themes), South
Pacific, and even The King and I—I
will pass on making any comments about his saccharine, sugar-coated Sound of Music—Hammerstein's lyrics and
librettos are joyful celebrations, for the most part, of love and life.
Follies, like so many of
Sondheim's works, is a kind of haunted castle of lost loves, dreams,
aspirations, and hopes, a testament to a world of deluded people who are
desperate to find love and meaning in a world that has failed them. Indeed, as
Sondheim tells it, his librettist and he first intended this musical to be
about a reunion in which, with its central characters plastered with equal
parts of nostalgia and alcohol, have motives to kill each other, and he and
Goldman originally set out to write a kind of murder mystery set at a party for
aged performers. While they eventually dropped that notion—thank God—the
sparsely told plot that remains is still about the four central character's
torturous marriages, their desires for their dreams of the past, and the
gradual stripping away of their delusions ending, at least in the revival
version, with the still angry but dependent Phyllis and her husband Ben leaving
without much hope of true reconciliation, followed by the newly rejected Sally
and her disappointed husband Buddy hoping to just get some rest before they
begin the next day of their lives.
Such empty relationships, as we know, certainly do exist. Possibly these
unhappy folk can all begin again, and they might even revitalize their
relationships—although given the dark songs they have just sung about not
getting what they want, losing their minds, and the desire to live life
"in arrears," it seems highly unlikely. This same ending faces the
characters of numerous Sondheim musicals, most notably in Company and Merrily We Roll
Along; while others end in far worse ways: murder, assignation, fiery
death, and even cannibalism. One might almost say that in Sondheim's world both
characters and audiences are eternally lost in the woods with the knowledge
that the wolf is following right behind.
So despite the medley of lovely and witty melodies with which the
composer has threaded his works, they are still quite deadly delicacies, laced
with heavy doubt and open cynicism.
Having said all that, we must also admit that nearly all of Sondheim's
unhappy figures are survivors. They've had their ups (although we rarely see
them) as well as their downs, as Sondheim's Carlotta (Elaine Paige) sings:
Good times and
bum times,
I've seen them
all and, my dear,
I'm still
here.
Or as Hattie expresses her pluck:
I'm just a
Broadway baby,
Walking off my
tired feet,
Pounding
forty-second Street
To be in a
show.
After hearing Elaine Stritch's
rhythmic rendition of this song, with the perfect timing the lines—
At
My tiny flat
There's just
my cat,
A bed and a
chair.—
for a few seconds I was uneasy with
Jayne Houdyshell's more lusty and less-nuanced version; but, in the end, her
zest of life nearly brought down the house.
Sondheim also ameliorates his dark themes somewhat through the clownish
behavior of his characters, revealing their own realization of their failures,
as in Buddy's (Danny Burstein's) manic "The God-Why-Don't-You-Love-Me
Blues" and the haunting "Live, Laugh, Love" song by Ron Raines
as Ben Stone, a song of escapism which turns, as in Cabaret, into an echo chamber-like house of horrors.
Sondheim's figures, moreover, often reveal joys that they do not even
recognize, or, as he suggests, express deep feelings that they themselves do
not recognize as pleasures. This is particularly true in both of Sally
Plummer's (Victoria Clark's) powerful ballads, "In Buddy's Eyes" and
"Losing My Mind." In the former, she expresses to her friends why she
should be happy with her husband without comprehending, so it seems, that she
actually might be happy for those very reasons:
Life is slow,
but it seems exciting
'Cause Buddy's
there.
..........................
In Buddy's
eyes,
I'm young, I'm
beautiful.
In Buddy's
arms.
On Buddy's
shoulder,
I won't get
older.
And similarly, in "In Losing My
Mind," Sondheim himself points to her use of the word "to"
instead of "and" revealing her
deepest problems are of her own making:
I dim the
lights
And think
about you,
Spend
sleepless nights
To think about
you.
Clark sang these with a full-bodied
voice that certainly did justice to the song, but after hearing Barbara Cook
and Bernadette Peters sing those same lines, it is perhaps impossible to accept
anything below their perfection.
Finally, Sondheim's comic wit, even if it is dripping with bitterness,
occasionally outweighs the despair of his characters. That is particularly true
in Phyllis' (Jan Maxwell's) paean to divorce, "Could I Leave You" in
which she poses alternatives to her unhappy marriage which she's already
embraced:
Could I bury my
rage
With a boy half
your age
In the grass?
Bet your ass.
But I've done
that already—
Or didn't you
know, love?
For Sondheim, apparently, these stories of survival, self-revelatory
slips of the tongue, patter pieces, and comic diatribes are all we have in a
world where everything is seen through a glass darkly. Perhaps it's as
ridiculous to ask such a dark-thinker to show us the sun, as asking Ingmar
Bergman—whose film Sondheim adapted in another recent revival, A Little Night Music—to show us a way
out of deep despair. But then, to my way of thinking, that is precisely what
Bergman does, whereas Sondheim entertains us grandly, but just as we begin to
have fun, puts out the light. And there is, finally, nowhere to go but back
home again, with the slightly sour after taste of too much gin in our mouths.
Los Angeles, May 27, 2012
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2012).
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