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Stephen Sondheim: 'My ideal collaborator is me'
With A Little Night Music back in the West End, the master of music theatre gives a rare interview
Stephen Sondheim
He’s
one of those world-dividers, is Stephen Sondheim. His admirers say he
is responsible for the finest works in the history of musical theatre.
His detractors say he is either too clever by half or else too
sentimental. This has been going on for an awfully long time, ever
since his first fame as Leonard Bernstein’s lyricist on West Side Story in 1957. Both the worship and the distaste are strangely powerful, as
if your view on Sondheim is the true index of your cultural position.
He’s
not bad for a man pushing 80, a little paunchier and shorter, but still
as quick and canny as they come. We meet in the library of a discreetly
swanky hotel in Covent Garden, where countless great-and-goods from
American showbiz hole up in the English panelling. It’s perfect for
him, being a couple of streets away from two of his shows. At the
Garrick Theatre is one of his five or six most successful ones, A Little Night Music.Spamalot, as the daughter who sings one of his genuine hit numbers, Send in the Clowns. First performed in 1973, it is part Midsummer Night’s Dream, part Manhattan, as three sets of couples muddle, flirt and bitch their way to happiness, and its humour and lyricism, as in numbers such as You Must Meet My Wife, have lost none of their freshness.And at the Arts Theatre there is Saturday Night,
his first, written in 1954, though it took 40 years to premiere. Many
things have happened fast in his life, but not this. Like the West End
production of his Sunday in the Park with George three years ago, Night Music has come from the acclaimed Menier Chocolate Factory in Southwark. He
caught it before the transfer and says with brusque but genuine
enthusiasm: “I enjoyed it.” Directed by Trevor Nunn it has won effusive reviews and stars Maureen
Lipman as the seen-it-all grandmother, and Hannah Waddingham, ex-Lady
in the Lake from
Sondheim rarely seems to give
interviews and has gained a reputation for being prickly and reclusive.
Like many reputations of the famous, it’s wrong. The reason he does not
do interviews is not misanthropy; once he gets started he turns genial
and expansive. No, it’s a question of time. So, one interview per show,
and this is it.
Is there a work in progress keeping him busy? He
says not; at least not a specific show. He feels his energy levels are
down and he may never write another. Not that he wouldn’t like to, but
for the moment he is busy rounding up his lyrics for a book. It is
going to be a long job because it’s a Collected rather than a Selected,
which means hundreds and hundreds of them. He’s a one-off all right, a
Colossus bestriding the second half of the 20th century, starting as
Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hammerstein were stopping.
If the
world is divided over his work, it turns out to be in good company —
him. He doesn’t like it when he’s just done it. That’s when he’s at his
most savage and self-lacerating. “In the immediacy, and afterwards,” he
says, “I see and hear only the flaws in the lyrics, and they make me
shudder and blush.” But then he comes to his rescue like a fair parent,
saying that “when I come to listen to what I’ve written, many years
later, it strikes me as good. I can’t say I enjoy writing [lyrics]. I
find it extremely difficult, but then I can’t think of a lyric writer
I’d rather work with than myself!”
This is his conversational
mode, justifiable pride shot through with darts to pierce the tiniest
swellings of complacency. A survivor of the psychiatric couch in his
youth, he sees himself coming a mile off. He may be his sternest critic
but he’s had some competition. Even West Side StorySweeney Todd in 1980. He describes
the work as his loveletter to London, but it was returned to sender. “I
don’t know how you’d print this in your newspaper, but, well, when the
critics s*** all over it . . . oh, that was dreadful, because, you
know, I’m an Anglophile, I love coming here.” didn’t do
that well until the Robert Wise film in 1961, he notes. One of the
greatest disappointments of his life was the critical mauling he got
for the British opening of
Contradictions and
anomalies wherever you look. On the stage the highbrow and the populist
lock into the distinctive dance that is Sondheim; operatic snatches,
vernacular words; form and content, head and heart, all taking turns in
the driver’s seat of a complicated vehicle. So, too, in person. Highly
articulate, a deeply cultured New York intellectual, swinging from
Brahms to Fitzgerald to Merman — but the body language. He keeps
rubbing deeply at his eyes as he speaks.He understandably hates the old
Scott Fitzgerald chestnut about American lives having no second acts,
and says he doesn’t know what it means. “I thought maybe he was talking
about lack of fulfilment, and if that’s so, I wonder whether American
lives are any different from Chinese or European ones.” In Sunday in the Park with George,
which is widely considered his masterpiece, there is a haunting song
through which drifts the refrain “Children and Art”, extolled by the
singer as her mother’s view on what wasimportant in life. Many hear the
author’s voice in the manifesto. When it comes to what will survive
him, Sondheim has an abundance of one, but nothing of the other; no
children.
“Ah, well, now,” he says with great feeling, “if I had
to live my life over again, I would have children. That’s the great
mistake I made. It’s too late now. The idea of being a homosexual and
raising children was one that was just not acceptable until, my
goodness, I’d say the 1970s or 1980s. You want to live long enough to
see your children grow up, they’re not puppies. The joy is not just to
have them, but to watch them change and grow. So, yes, that is a great
regret.”
There is the body of work though; about 20 major stage shows, including Gypsy, Company, Side by Side by Sondheim, and any amount of film work; for example, the songs in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy were his, as was the music for Alain Resnais’s 1974 movie, Stavisky.
“But
as Bach proved to a great degree, you can have both. It would be nice
to have both. But to have any outlet for creative energy is indeed a
very good emotional substitute for not being able to put that energy
into the raising of a family.”
Sondheim came out as gay only when
he was about 40, and did not live with a partner until he was 61. This
was Peter Jones, a dramatist; the two lived together for several years,
until 1999, at the Turtle Bay house that has been Sondheim’s home and
writing place since the early 1960s. It once belonged to Ernest
Hemingway’s editor, Maxwell Perkins. Katharine Hepburn used to live
next door and he has recounted how he was “up one night at about 3,
pounding on the piano, writing The Ladies Who Lunch for Company,
when I heard this banging on the door. There she was, in a babushka and
no shoes, saying, ‘Young man, I cannot sleep with the noise you’re
making’.”
There is an old line on Sondheim that although he can
do love in all its glory when it is in the theatre, he struggles when
it enters his own life. Even people who follow him closely have assumed
that he was single again. That’s why it comes as a surprise when he
says: “I have someone else now,” and points at the ceiling of the hotel
library. For the briefest of instants I wonder if he is talking of the
Lord. Nothing as alarming as that; his name is Jeff. “We celebrate our
fifth anniversary in one week. [He ]is a great joy in my life. Once I
had tasted the joys of living with someone, I wanted to live with
someone else when it broke up.”
Sondheim nearly became a
mathematician rather than a songwriter. He would have majored in the
subject if, during his freshman year at college, he had not taken an
elective course in music and been inspired by the teacher. He had the
good fortune of knowing the impresario and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein,
whose son Jimmy was a fellow pupil.
Sondheim was the only child
of a dress manufacturer, Herbert Sondheim, and Janet Fox, a fashion
designer. They had divorced acrimoniously when he was 10 and she took
him to Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She sounds like the last word in
overbearing mothers and he cut off contact with her in his late teens.
The Hammersteins became a surrogate family, with Sondheim virtually
Oscar’s apprentice. But for him, he might well have turned down West Side Story.
He has often been told that his mother crops up in his portrayals of women, in A Little Night Music,
the matriarch Madame Armfeldt is a dragon par excellence but he doesn’t
buy it. “I mean, nothing in my childhood prepared me for street gangs,
but there I was writing words for the Sharks and the Jets. All creative
art probably comes from a desire to align oneself with a world of
displacement and to bring a little order from the chaos. But I don’t
think my unhappy childhood is any different from anybody else’s unhappy
childhood.”
As he says, music and mathematics often go together.
Then there is his other great passion, crosswords. No wonder his
musicals can seem like beautifully formed puzzles in which rules,
measures and proportions are used to create the patterns of story and
character, and the relationship of the two. Solving is the key. Or
resolving, in the musical sense.
“Resolving is the right word,”
he says. “The Western scale is based on mathematical relationships.” At
the same time you find undertones of panic and — again — chaos in
Sondheim. They are there in A Little Night Music as the ground
of the various sets of lovers seems to slew beneath their feet. “Well,
you see,” he replies, “I also happen to be a great believer in
ambiguity, which is the lifeblood of theatrical interest. This is
something where I differ from Oscar. All really first-rate plays in the
end have something in them that is not resolved.” He says you have to
remember that he did not make these stories up, although he is often
credited for doing so. “So this is really Ingmar Bergman’s view of
human relationships.” (A Little Night Music was inspired by the film Smiles of a Summer Night.) This is his modesty kicking in, even as he is talking about his own work. “My father said you should never brag.”
He
obeys the instruction when he refuses to discuss his legacy, dismissing
it as “one of those overview questions . . . I am really not being coy.
I just have no answer. Nor do I know where the musical is going. You
only know where an art form is going after it has gone there.” Nor will
he express an opinion on any other living writer or composer. Since
President Obama is in a different field, there are no constraints. “Oh,
I think he’s a truly impressive man. The idea that in my lifetime a
black man gets to be president — that was an astonishing notion. As
recently as 20 years ago everyone would just have giggled.”
What
about a gay one? “Ah now. The racial revolution got going earlier. At
present I’d say it’s not possible. Much too much prejudice still. But
in a generation, yes, perfectly possible.” Shifting rather than
resolved.
And will there be a musical sucessor to Sondheim? Unlikely. Jonathan Larson, the composer of Rent, was tipped as a possible, but he died in 1996. Adam Guettel (Talkin’ Broadway, The Light in the Piazza), is another candidate. “The most provocative and promising of post-Sondheim theatrical songwriters,” says Time.
Anyone wanting his crown will need resolve in the other sense of the
word; plain old-fashioned determination. Decades of the stuff.