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Harold Prince was their schoolmate. Retired from Broadway for eight years, she was persuaded to stop playing grandmother and start playing Follies' superannuated swinger. "I don't think Ziegfeld had as many beautiful girls as we have in Prince's show," she says. "Of course, in Ziegfeld's time the girls were rounder. The men then liked a little more hip and a little more breast —thin at the waist, though."
With the kind of cast whose savvy spans a half-century of show business, Prince could do enough of what David Merrick calls "flimflam and legerdemain to cover an awful and gloomy book about nothing at all." Fortunately, the Prince and his Follies have that other talent: Stephen Sondheim. For the musical, he has written some of the glossiest, wittiest lyrics in Broadway history. His melodies gracefully genuflect to Kern and Gershwin, Berlin and Arlen. His words bow to no one. With Follies he has established himself, beyond doubt, as the theater's supreme lyricist.
An American Noel Coward
At 41, Sondheim is a spent youth. The son of a wealthy New York dress manufacturer, he literally learned his first lessons in the craft of songwriting at the feet of an old family friend, Oscar Hammerstein II. Stephen was then eleven; Oscar thought his first pubescent musical "terrible—although not without talent." Sondheim proved to be a good learner. He has written the lyrics (and often the music as well) for seven shows, five of which were hits. Only his 1966 musical, Anyone Can Whistle, a precious fable about a smalltown miracle, and 1965's Do I Hear a Waltz? (with music by Richard Rodgers) failed to pay box-office dividends. The rest of the time has been a steady climb, built on internal verse, infernal verse, trip-hammer rhyme schemes and time schemes, sublime schemes, which began their ascent at about the time South Pacific dominated Broadway.
After graduating magna cum laude from Williams (where he majored in music) and studying with Avant-Garde Composer Milton Babbitt, Stephen, at the age of 25, decided that Broadway was ready for him. Broadway decided otherwise. Through no fault of the author, his first effort (Saturday Night) expired along with its producer. For a time, Stephen knocked out scripts for the television sitcom Topper and honed his skills as an amateur gamesman. Sondheim is one of the world's fastest cutthroat anagram players, and the walls of his Manhattan town house are covered with antique game boards. (Between shows, he used to concoct the tantalizing puzzles on the back pages of New York magazine.) Thanks to the theatrical interests of his mother, an interior decorator known to friends as "Foxy," Stephen easily became a social caterpillar on the Manhattan show-biz party circuit. At one affair he met Playwright Arthur Laurents, who was reworking Romeo and Juliet in modern dress. Lenny Bernstein was doing the music, said Laurents. The lyricist? There was none at present, but . . .
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