This was Stephen Sondheim, then 63, to aspiring composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown, then in his early 20s. In 1993, Sondheim was treating Brown and a friend to dinner following the premiere of a new Sondheim show.
Twenty minutes into the dinner, the fact that Sondheim had to ask was itself an answer. Brown's babbling about everything but the show couldn't hide that he was disappointed by it. Sondheim, his hero, was hurt.
When Brown was nearly 40, he reflected on the experience in The Sondheim Review (summer 2010). For creative artists, "The generations coming next are the ones whose approval we need if our lives are to mean anything."
When Brown apologized by phone the next day, Sondheim admitted that he would have done "that kind of stupid thing" at the same age. Then he told Brown, just be supportive. "Say only this: I loved it."
In that spirit, I'm responding to what I've heard since the release of the original cast album of Here We Are, Sondheim's collaboration with playwright David Ives and director Joe Mantello.
[PHOTO: When the CD arrived, I paused for a selfie with it still in its shrink-wrap: this would be my last time to hear a Sondheim score for the first time. As my friend Susan observed, I was sorry-grateful. ]
So, Mr. Sondheim, right away I LOVE the music we hear in the Overture. It's catchy, chipper, playful -- even though we come to associate the first theme with words about "the end of the world." The texture is transparent, the interplay of independent lines delightful, the harmony crunchy. I know how you like Stravinsky and Ravel: In instrumentals and underscoring throughout the show, you have equaled their most fun chamber pieces. Kudos to orchestrator Jonathan Tunick for punching up that connection.
The character Marianne sings "Are we not blessed?" and draws her companions into a little psalm about joys in life such as birdsong, friendship, and Shakespeare. Same here. She sings, "I'm completely undone / by the endless abundance of life." (Love the emphasis of that internal rhyme abundance). She urges her husband to "buy this perfect day / Let it stay just this way / forever." I love how that foreshadows (causes?) the story of friends who do magically get stuck in one day. I love that you and David Ives make Marianne so shallow and yet so joyful. I love how you go deeper into her shallowness in the second act when she sings,
I like things to shine...
I like things to glow.
Why can't I be free
to like what I see
and not what I know?
Can she be superficial and self-aware at the same time? What a pleasure to know her.
I love that you balance all the positive things you write for Marianne with pronouncements of judgment on the world from her grown child Fritz (formerly "Frances"), "Only just the End of the World" for
power brokers, and chiropractors,
and underpaid teachers,
and overpaid actors.
So many things on (his/her/their) list are on mine, too, but mine don't rhyme so neatly and go by so quickly. It's the kind of patter we Sondheim fans have always loved.
I love how Fritz falls in love with a soldier at first sight, and spends the rest of the show in a state of wonder about her sudden uncertainty. Does Fritz -- "gay since I was three" -- really love this man? Now that she has experienced love, does Fritz really want to abet a terrorist plot to bring on the Apocalypse? I love the soldier's voice and his dogged devotion to Fritz.
I love the kind Bishop with a thing for slippers. I love that the music you write for him is an easy two-step that used to be referred to as "old soft shoe."
Tell your collaborator David Ives that the dialogue between the Bishop and Marianne is funny and real, gentle and thought-provoking. Also, tell Ives I love the greeting of the waiter at the first of three unbearably pretentious restaurants: "Good morning, adventurers. I'll be enabling your table."
Mr. Sondheim, I love what you said to me when we met just once 47 years ago. That was the year after your Kabuki musical had flopped, and you were planning a show about a barber who chops his customers into meat pies. I asked, why not try to appeal more to the public? You wanted to write shows unlike anything else you've seen.
I love the fact that you knew full well the limitations of this material and adapted it anyway. Your collaborators write in the liner notes how surrealism "resists" the logic of a story and undercuts the "deep feeling" so important to musical theatre.
Given that they are so right about surrealism, I love that you took for your final work the greatest challenge of your career.
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