Archives for 2010

“The best comedy is always heartless, an alternative to rational emotion.”
Wilfrid Sheed, “The Wit of George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker”

I’ve written so much about Stephen Sondheim over the years that I can’t do better on his eightieth birthday than to quote myself. Here’s part of an essay I wrote about him for Commentary in 2003:

Unlike most of the American songwriters who preceded him, he had extensive classical training–he studied with the avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt–and was strongly influenced by the harmonic usages of the French impressionists. As a result, his songs are typically based on undulating chordal figurations over which he superimposes melodies painstakingly built up out of short, angular motivic fragments. Listeners familiar with the music of Debussy and Ravel (or with modern jazz) will hear nothing abstruse or elusive in this approach, but anyone whose knowledge of music is limited to the ballads of such Broadway composers as Berlin or Richard Rodgers, with their long, seemingly self-generated melodic lines, will likely find Sondheim’s songs to be insufficiently tuneful.
No less individual are his lyrics–and the sentiments they express. Though Sondheim’s virtuosity is not without precedent (few of his elaborate rhymes would sound out of place in a lyric by Ira Gershwin or Cole Porter), Sondheim’s ambivalence toward love is all but unique in American songwriting. Ambivalence, he has said, is his “favorite thing to write about, because it’s the way I feel, and I think the way most people feel.” Perhaps, but it is also arguably the main reason why his work has never become popular. Even Lorenz Hart, that most disillusioned of American lyricists, left no doubt of his fervent, even desperate longing for the state about which he wrote with such self-lacerating wit. Not so Sondheim, whose best songs are more often than not written from the point of view of an inhibited, alienated man unable to open himself up to the prospect of romantic love….
Sondheim’s perspective on love, which is as distinctively “modern” as is his musical language, constitutes a near-complete break with the romantic optimism of the American musical-comedy tradition….

So distinctive an approach will never be everyone’s cup of tea, and to this day theatrical producers continue to grapple with the problem of how to present Sondheim’s musicals in a way that is commercially viable. At one time I felt that he had made a potentially fatal mistake by choosing to write musicals instead of operas (though Sweeney Todd, his masterpiece, comes as close to being an opera as doesn’t matter). I still think it likely that the appeal of his work will always be narrowly limited.
Yet Sondheim is without doubt the most gifted songwriter to work on Broadway in the second half of the twentieth century, and I admire him as much as any creative artist who has been active in my lifetime. His best songs, among which I number “Another Hundred People,” “Anyone Can Whistle,” “Every Day a Little Death,” “Finishing the Hat,” “Good Thing Going,” “I Remember,” “Loving You,” “The Miller’s Son,” “Not a Day Goes By,” “Take Me to the World,” and the life-enhancing “Comedy Tonight,” are a permanent part of the soundtrack of my life. May he live long and prosper greatly!

“All professions are conspiracies against the laity.”
George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma

Strikeout: I pan three plays, Looped, Zero Hour, and When the Rain Stops Falling, in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column. Here’s an excerpt.
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Broadway being what it is these days, I can’t help but wonder exactly what the producers of “Looped” see as their target market. Tallulah Bankhead, the whiskey-voiced, omnivorously promiscuous subject of Matthew Lombardo’s new play, used to be something of a theatrical icon, though she was always better known for her one-liners (some of which she actually said) than her stage performances. But Bankhead’s failure to make any first-rate films means that she is now known to few people under the age of 40–better make that 60–and it’s hard to see why anyone who doesn’t know who she was would pay to see an unfunny dramedy that seeks to exploit her faded fame.
“Looped” is loosely based on a real-life occurrence in the pitiful second half of Bankhead’s career. In 1965 she supposedly spent eight hours attempting to overdub a single line of dialogue in her last feature film, a bottom-of-the-bottom-of-the-barrel camp horror “classic” called “Die! Die! My Darling!” Out of that ignominous episode, Mr. Lombardo has woven a three-person play in which Bankhead (Valerie Harper) bumps up against a Hollywood film editor (Brian Hutchison) and sound engineer (Michael Mulheren) who attempt with minimal success to get her to speak her line coherently. In between takes she gets plastered, foams at the mouth with prefab wisecracks, tells the story of her life and induces the film editor to confess his Deep Dark Secret. Yes, he’s gay, and believe me, I’m not telling you anything that you won’t figure out several weeks before Mr. Lombardo spills the beans….
Unlike Tallulah Bankhead, Zero Mostel is reasonably well remembered, if not in the way he would have preferred. His much-larger-than-life performance in Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” a movie that he claimed to loathe, has kept his memory green, and a fair amount of his essence also comes through on the original-cast album of “Fiddler on the Roof” and in the uneven film version of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” But while “Zero Hour,” written and performed by Jim Brochu and staged by none other than Piper Laurie, is a highly effective evocation of the public Mostel–Mr. Brochu looks and acts just like an Al Hirschfeld caricature–it doesn’t add up to a full-fledged play….
I’m not quite sure that I’d pay to see David Cromer direct the Manhattan phone book, but I’d give it serious thought. Alas, “When the Rain Stops Falling,” Andrew Bovell’s droningly drab multigenerational saga of a comprehensively unhappy Anglo-Australian family, is more than a little bit phone-booky, Mr. Cromer’s best efforts notwithstanding. This is the kind of show whose program includes a family tree–the action bounces back and forth between 1959 and 2039–and you don’t get extra credit for guessing that somebody got molested somewhere up the line….
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Read the whole thing here.

Paula Kerger, the president and CEO of PBS, gave a litle-noticed speech to Town Hall Los Angeles in January in which she acknowledged what everybody already knows, which is that fine-arts programming on public TV is–to put it mildly–in decline. She also announced plans to beef it up, none of which struck me as particularly impressive, so I decided to get into the act by making a few pointed suggestions of my own. That’s the subject of my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, in which, among other things, I tell what I’d do if I were (A) put in charge of arts programming at PBS and (B) given a pile of money to spend as I saw fit.
If you want to know more, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

I’ll be appearing today on Soundcheck, WNYC’s daily music series, to talk with John Schaefer about “The Unsure Artist,” my recent Wall Street Journal column about the uncertainties and anxieties of gifted artists. The show starts at two p.m. ET.
Listen live in the New York area by tuning to 93.9 FM, or go here to listen on your computer via streaming audio. As usual, the program will also be archived and can be downloaded as a podcast.