He has published his memoir Lord Knows, at Least I was There: Working with Stephen Sondheim. Foreword by Mandy Patinkin. New York: Moreclacke Publishing, 2022. [Photo Collage: Paul with his book and the Sondheim scores I own thanks to Paul's influence.]
Ford's memoir gives us the backstory to his time at Northside, including a lip-synched production of Oklahoma in his family's garage, his realization that he was gay, and his introduction to alcohol. He admits that he played through most of his career with a hangover, but he's been sober now for many years, thanks in part to a miraculous coincidence involving a haunted house, a film made there, and that film's leading actress. It makes a good story.
There are so many good stories in this memoir that I read it through in a day. He has fond and funny memories of stars whose first names are enough for any Sondheim fan: Ethel, Julie, Mandy, Bernadette, Patti, Donna, Marin, Lonny, Jim, Lauren, and even Madonna. For memories funny but cringey from work with other composers there are Chita and Liza in Kander and Ebb's dismal musical The Rink, and his bête noire Teresa Stratas, opera diva, who assaulted him during a rehearsal for Rags by Charles Strouse and Stephen Schwartz.
My favorite story may be the one about Elaine taking Ford to see a show for which she had no tickets: "I am Elaine Stritch," she thundered at the box office, she wanted seats front row center, and she didn't expect to pay. When he asked if she'd ever been refused, she said, "F***ing Mamma Mia."
Many of the stories are about hi-jinx backstage and during rehearsals, when theatre was fun, Ford says, before everyone retreated to dark corners with their phones to "text, text, text." He tells how he played snippets of songs from the early careers of performers when they entered the rehearsal hall. For Sondheim, he played the disturbing opening bars of Psycho by the composer's favorite film composer Bernard Herrmann.
(When Paul saw me from the pit of Into the Woods in 1987, he warmed up the band with "Georgy Girl," the only sheet music I'd been able to find to fit my narrow range in 9th grade. Throughout that summer program, he embarrassed me with that tacky song whenever he could. I was delighted that he remembered.)
Writers and directors are more of a mixed bag. As often as Ford mentions Sondheim, he thanks him for being a real composer who actually wrote down the notes for his songs and knew what he was doing. Not so, many other so-called composers who left it to Ford and the music director Paul Gemignani to make real songs out of little tunes they hummed into tape recorders. No thanks to many directors who had no musical theatre experience, no musical knowledge, and no clue, who mounted revivals ("revisals," Paul calls them) of musicals with their "improvements."
When the story takes him to the marquee for Cats, Ford pauses for a moment of silence to remember the Broadway musical, killed by Andrew "Void" Webber and his ilk, abetted by the producers who have kept the shows running for generations of tourists. The further into the book we go, the more pointed Paul gets on this subject. So far as I've seen in published reports, Sondheim was diplomatic about Webber, but in one story Sondheim and Ford are waiting in a studio where Phantom star Michael Crawford was recording a song that Paul calls "Muzak of the Night." As Crawford asked to try it again slower, slower, and slower still, Sondheim retreated further behind his newspaper, which trembled -- from laughter.
Sondheim fans know what we're in for when Ford asks rhetorically, "Why did I do it? What did it get me?" In Ford's favorite show Gypsy, those are the questions of the main character Rose in a bitter survey of her disappointments in life, when she declares "now it's gonna be my turn." Like that number, Ford's rant pulls in themes from all the preceding material to indict the current lack of sophistication or joy on Broadway.
But the sun comes out when Paul Ford writes about what he loves:
That is why I like overtures and show music so much. The variety! Film music with its combination of source music and dramatic scoring is equally satisfying. Dance music in films and Broadway shows used to be done with great, if not inspired, imagination. Give some expert arranger a little song and let him go to town on it. I love big band and swing music because of the inventiveness and pure joy and humor in the arrangements. I even love jazz because of its harmonic intricacies (220).
Those are loves he passed on to me. I'm about six years younger, so I was very excited at age 15 to have this sophisticated musical genius pay attention to me during breaks in rehearsals. Knowing that I loved comic books, he gave me a cassette recording to the wonderful 1960s musical It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman (songs I still know by heart) and xeroxed copies of Bernstein's Overture to Candide which I still have, which I used to be able to play, and the Weill-Gershwin song "The Saga of Jenny" from his then-favorite musical Lady in the Dark. His parting gift to me was to insist that I look into the works of Stephen Sondheim. [For the rest of that story, all five decades of it, see my Sondheim page.]
If Paul gets to read this review, I hope he'll be gratified to know that I emulated him by playing piano for rehearsals and performances for school productions of Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, Little Shop of Horrors, Damn Yankees, Joseph... and Big, and that I introduced generations of students to Sondheim. Some of them are now directors and teachers, doing the same.
Also, he and I are evidently the only two people alive who treasure the totally-overlooked song "Poems" from Sondheim's much-overlooked Pacific Overtures.
[See earlier tributes to Paul that are integrated with blogposts about Sondheim as teacher and Sondheim's Tribute to Leonard Bernstein.]
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