Sondheim, Fantasticks, and "Chamber Musicals"

(Responding to "Chamber Musicals: Perhaps smaller is better when it comes to Sondheim shows," an article by British journalist Norman Lebrecht in a Canadian arts magazine, reprinted in The Sondheim Review, summer 2006, and to a June 2006 production of The Fantasticks by the Atlanta Lyric Theatre.)

Before I get to the subject of "chamber musicals," let's set the record straight about ALL musicals, starting with a canard that I hear every time I mention my love for musical theatre:

I once heard it from actor Tom Hanks in an interview. He was asked if he'd seen the then-current staging of the musical Big, based on his movie of the same name. He dismissed it out of hand: "I don't like musicals. I mean, come on, no one in real life just starts singing. . ." (and here he launched into over-ripe baritone singing words like this) "Good morning, I want some coffee. . . ." He laughed, the audience laughed, and that seemed to be the last word. I once heard an English teacher say, "People in real life don't sing. End of story."

Of course, Mr. Hanks, you don't suppose movies are any more real? I mean, come on, no one gets made up and back lit for a twenty-by-fifteen foot close-up view, and no one running through the Vatican at night has an orchestra playing music to add some tension to a widely ridiculed dull movie. And of course, Mr. Professor, no one in real life speaks regular lines in iambic pentameter or sits down to tell a story uninterrupted for 265 pages -- yet you spend your life teaching how we can connect our real lives to Shakespeare and Huckleberry Finn.

So, let's get over the idea that any art at all is ever "real life." Art is ALWAYS a distillation of experience in some kind of framework. Television and movies have their own frames that Americans take for granted; they've lost the habit of going to live theatre, and no longer accept the conventions of musical theatre so easily.

The Fantasticks: Concentrated Reality
The key, of course, is to draw the audience into the frame, as Sondheim's Seurat tells of "entering the world of the hat" that he's painting. For him, the frame becomes a window "back to this world from that," revealing beauty even of mundane things (e.g., a factory, a garbage scow).

Big budgeted shows on stages now use machinery to convince audiences of the reality of their fantasy worlds, as cars, nannies, and ape men fly out over the audiences, or cartoon-like costumes duplicate live what audiences already know from animated musicals. If art is a distillation, focusing us on something real, then these shows just aren't doing that: the audience is focused on the machinery and scenery, not on the story that those things are supposedly telling.

Last week I was drawn in by a show at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, engaged much to my surprise - because I thought I'd outgrown the show. It was written by a couple of Texan undergraduates in 1957. They revised it a bit and it turned into the longest-running off-Broadway show The Fantasticks. They had in mind Thornton Wilder's Our Town and the much older tradition of street actors in Italy (and England, and - if we can believe Hamlet, in Denmark) who set up stages anywhere and performed anything.

Usually, the play is performed on a plain wooden platform, but this production decorated a tiny space as a public square in some small town on the occasion of some double wedding at midsummer. The action, then, was a play within a play (and some of it a play within a play within a play). The music is rich with dancing rhythms, jazzy dissonance, melodic lines that lilt and grow -- lots of play with dynamics and counterpoint. The dialogue sometimes rhymes, the music accompanies spoken monologues, the similes are famously quirky ("you are the inside of a leaf").

This is art that keeps saying, "This is all a frame -- look at the story!"

The story is about as distilled as you can get: this is what it's like to grow from a childish fantasy-world to the shared fantasy of adolescence (when teenagers are each others' mirrors, seeing what they want to see) to adulthood. When the Boy and the Girl encounter the world outside the Garden (Eden, anyone?), pain and failure are represented totally artificially: live actors don masks and costumes, performing violence like Punch and Judy puppets. There's a waltz playing. At the same time that it's so artificial, the actors are totally "in" that world, and there's an element here of virtuosity as they stay "in" it while also coordinating dance moves, spitting out rapid-fire lyrics, and singing perfectly.

As a middle school teacher, I live with this story every day, and last week, I was feeling pretty tired of it. Seeing it raised up, framed so beautifully, distilled to its essence, presented joyfully with care and inventiveness - I felt refreshed.

That's what musical theatre can do.

Sondheim's Big Shows on Small Stages

The article in Sondheim Review reports on an apparent trend of re-imagining Sondheim's musicals to tiny stages. Huge Merrily We Roll Along, panoramic Pacific Overtures, grand operatic Sweeney Todd, and Sunday in the Park with George, the show that's literally "wide canvas" -- these have all been squeezed into tiny spaces for audiences of 300 or fewer in recent productions that have had more impact critically and popularly than the originals, which were called "cold," "remote," or even "dull."

More recently than this article was written, Sondheim's Company which was always a chamber show, more like a revue than a big-stage play, has been whittled down even more in Cincinnati. There, as in the recent hit Sweeney Todd, the actors are also musicians. The ingenuity and team spirit it takes to sing, act, and play all at once evidently wins the audience over.

The article might have included the work of Eric Shaeffer at the tiny Signature Theatre in Virginia, where he's staged all of these and more for over ten years, gaining a reputation that led Kennedy Center to name him the executive artistic director of their acclaimed Sondheim Celebration in 2002 which drew me and fans from all fifty states and dozens of nations world-wide.

The author writes that shrinking the shows "alters every other dimension, accentuating beauty and accuity." He observes in the "teeny" Todd that the voices "sustain a tense equality within the musical texture" instead of having to be "over-projected foreground against a heavy band."

The author notes that Sondheim always thought of Sweeney as playing in the small theatre where he first saw the play on which he based it. He wanted the action to be right there in the aisle, up-close and gross and scary. (Sondheim told me in June 1977, before he wrote it, "I want to have this really elegant show where the audience laughs their heads off and then throw up in the lobby during intermission.")

Merrily is another version of the Fantasticks story, showing the trajectory from dreamy adolescence to jaded maturity backwards. Ironically, its creators originally aimed for a "Fantasticks"-styled production, as if performed by high school students with a low budget on the floor of their gym. Its grandfather was, perhaps, the Rodgers and Hammerstein's flop Allegro. Several commentators have theorized that Sondheim, Hammerstein's protege and assistant during the development of that flop, has always been trying to "fix" it.

Must it Be Small to be Good?

Of course, we wouldn't know Sondheim's name today if there hadn't always been those of us who let ourselves be drawn in by the music, the inventiveness of the staging, the seamlessness of lyric and dialogue. I saw Sweeney in its original cast productions on mammoth stages in NYC and London, but also in a tiny basement in Atlanta - loved it always.

Small may alter audience expectations to a musical's benefit. Audiences that despise musical theatre are the same people who easily accept emotional material performed with music by a cabaret performer or a band in a small rock club. Presenting musicals in that way instead of pretending they're live-action movies is a way to keep this repertoire alive.

So, perhaps it must be small to be.

Sondheim, Fantasticks, and "Chamber Musicals" | Category: Music, Drama