A Sad Day for Sondheim

Spent much of yesterday thinking of Stephen Sondheim, as I do every year when when September 25 rolls around. For on that date in 1965, Sondheim saw Do I Hear a Waltz? — the musical he wrote with Richard Rodgers — close after 220 performances at a near-total loss of its investment. Think how down he must have been.

Rodgers’s previous show, No Strings, had been a hit in 1962. Not a smash, mind you, but a hit in the days when 580 performances was a nice run and everybody made money. Better still, No Strings was a personal triumph for Rodgers: For the first time in his career, he’d written lyrics as well as music — Oscar Hammerstein had died in 1960 — and those lyrics were very good. Maybe not great, but good enough and set to a superb, surprisingly jazzy score, the kind Rodgers used to write with Lorenz Hart. The composer hadn’t sounded so youthful in 30 years; now he was pushing 60, yet he showed no signs of slowing down. Rodgers immediately started collaborating with Alan Jay Lerner on an original musical called I Picked a Daisy, then abandoned it because he felt Lerner wasn’t working quickly enough. That’s how young he felt.

Time for a new show, but with or without a lyricist? With or without Sondheim? Hammerstein had told Rodgers that he’d like him to work with his protégé, but how much did Rodgers need him? Sure, Sondheim was a known quantity as a lyricist. He’d had a stage success and movie smash with West Side Story, yet that show wasn’t known as Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story; sometimes Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, Arthur Laurents’ or Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story, but never Sondheim’s. Next was Gypsy, another household-name musical, but it still wasn’t Stephen Sondheim’s Gypsy. Sometimes Jule Styne’s Gypsy, or (again) Arthur Laurents’ or Jerome Robbins’ Gypsy, but never Sondheim’s. As for Rodgers, throughout his career, he was always top-billed over Hart and Hammerstein.

When Sondheim made the leap to composer-lyricist (in the same season that Rodgers did No Strings), he had a bigger hit — but A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was then said to have succeeded in spite of him, not because of him. Forum has arguably the largest number of genuine laughs in any Broadway musical, not counting the loathsome “improvements” that have sadly become its trademark. It got Tonys for Best Book and Best Musical in 1963. Sondheim didn’t win for Best Score, nor was he even nominated; Lionel Bart won for Oliver! over Coleman and Leigh’s Little Me and Newley and
Bricusse’s Stop the World-I Want to Get Off. Excellent work by all. But try to find someone today who’ll support Milton Schafer and Ronny Graham’s Bravo, Giovanni over Forum‘s now much-admired score. For the show, Sondheim wrote one of musical theater’s best opening numbers, one of its best show-stopping vaudeville turns (“Everybody Ought to Have a Maid”), and one of its most deft lyrics: “Today, I woke too weak to walk.”

Still, the Tony committee wasn’t impressed. As for Rodgers’s Tony fate with No Strings, he was nominated and he won, albeit a year earlier. (The show opened in March 1962; the Tony deadline in those days was April and Forum opened in May, thus making it eligible for the ’62-’63 ceremonies.) To further stack the deck against Sondheim: Just before commencing work on Waltz, he wrote the score for Anyone Can Whistle (1964), which would last 1/35th as long as No Strings — a humiliating nine performances, beginning and ending on successive April Saturdays.

So here was Rodgers, happily wondering what he’d next write and produce (don’t forget that fact). Here was Sondheim, hoping someone would encourage him to write both music and lyrics and produce the show for which he’d written them. Of course, most every other wordsmith in the business would have been thrilled and honored to be anointed by the one, the only Richard Rodgers. In the previous three-plus decades, Rodgers had had great success in two completely different styles with two lyricists. Get this: By the time Sondheim was born in 1930, Rodgers had already provided music for 18 Broadway productions and three London shows. He’d already composed “Manhattan,” “Mountain Greenery,” “My Heart Stood Still,” “Thou Swell,” “You Took Advantage of Me,” “With a Song in My Heart,” “Dancing on the Ceiling,” and “Ten Cents a Dance” before Foxy Sondheim delivered a baby boy to husband Herbert.

Anyway, Rodgers met with Sondheim, and the latter was definitely getting the bigger break — the musical theater’s greatest possible opportunity. I often picture Sondheim entering Rodgers’s office and The Man curtly saying, “Hey, you! Wipe your feet before you come in here.” Sondheim must have felt terrible about considering a lyrics-only position; he’d almost walked from Gypsy because Ethel Merman had insisted that Styne do the music. Returning to lyrics only had to feel like a big step backwards, but Sondheim also knew that Hammerstein had wanted him to work with Rodgers, so that was that. Sondheim now had the added pressure of having to do better than Lerner. Perhaps one reason why Rodgers didn’t abandon Waltz when it wasn’t going well was that he’d just had one aborted project and didn’t want the stigma of another.

And so it went. Rodgers and Sondheim didn’t like each other; Rodgers the producer was in control and Sondheim was a hired hand, so that may be part of the reason why. Whenever I’ve seen Sondheim speak and he’s inevitably asked “What’s your favorite show?” he always answers that he doesn’t really know, but he does know that Do I Hear a Waltz? is his least favorite. To exacerbate Sondheim’s September 25, 1965 pain: By then, Rodgers’s The Sound of Music movie was en route to becoming the highest grossing film up to that time. Rodgers had written two new songs for the smash — music and lyrics. Now, was there any doubt that he was the master and that the Sondheim boy had been overrated?

By September 25, 1966, Sondheim was working in television, waiting for his Evening Primrose to air on ABC, then the runt of the three networks. Never mind how Sondheim felt on September 25, 1965; how did he feel on November 17, 1966, after Evening Primrose received lackluster reviews? And how did he feel from 1967 through 1969, when he had not a single show on Broadway? But, deep down inside, Sondheim still knew that he could show the world a thing or two — and, of course, he did. In 1970, he had Company on Broadway. In 1971, he’d won two Tonys for that show and had Follies on Broadway, too. And then the deluge. By 1973, Sondheim had won Tonys in three consecutive years and was the reigning king — nay, god — of the American musical theater.

Yet Sondheim could have been pardoned if, on September 25, 1965, he woke too weak to walk and wondered if he was down and out, now and forever. That’s something to remember the next time we become discouraged and think our lives are over, and it’s something that I hope Sondheim himself is remembering now. How ironic that I was just mailed The Sondheim Review, which includes mixed-to-negative reviews of Bounce by critics and letters-to-the-editor writers. Granted, Stephen Sondheim is much older than he was in 1965, but I wouldn’t bet against his being wiser, too. And I hope that his talent and diligence will pay off again in Bounce.

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]