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At 27, Sondheim became co-author of West Side Story and an established Broadway lyricist. "Steve always wanted to be an American Noel Coward," Foxy recalls fondly. The lyrics for Sondheim's next show, Gypsy, with music by Jule Styne, revealed a Lorenz Hartfulness. He rhymed Mazeppa and schlepper, and the progression "he goes, she goes, egos, amigos" could have come from the master himself. Despite his growing reputation as a lyricist, Sondheim yearned to be recognized as a composer, although his credentials as a musician were skimpy. In 1962, though, he wrote the music as well as the words for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which Prince was persuaded to produce. Composer Sondheim has often been accused of writing dissonances that deliberately elude the listener's ear. But for that show he created a host of thumpingly singable tunes to match the simple-minded hilarity. Everybody Ought to Have a Maid, Comedy Tonight and Lovely could have been hummed by a stone. With Forum, Sondheim finally proved that he, like Noel Coward, could indeed go it alone.
In last year's musical hit Company, Composer Sondheim seemed cloned from Lyricist Sondheim. Indeed, the score packed so many syllables and notes into each bar that it gave the sensation of a double-crostic for the ear. As Pianist Artur Rubinstein observed: "A most brilliant score. I couldn't hear all the words, but then I don't hear all the words at the opera, either."
Rubinstein's observation has been echoed by many audiences, who find that the record of the score yields new rewards at each exposure. Far more than George Furth's book, Sondheim's lyrics express the hip, urbane tone of a play about an uncommitted bachelor who watches the games married people play. The songs are an ambush of witty skepticisms:
[It's the] concerts you enjoy together,
Neighbors you annoy together,
Children you destroy together,
That keep marriage intact.
and:
Good things get better,
Bad get worse.
Wait—I think I meant that in reverse.
As with Follies, Company audiences (and critics) were divided into those who felt it was a sociological musical, a comedic commentary on urban ills, and those who believed it only signified that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw parties. "It's the most pro-marriage show in the world," protests Sondheim, who has never been married himself. "It says, very clearly, that to be emotionally committed to somebody is very difficult, but to be alone is impossible."
Both Sondheim and Prince—and the women who star in Follies—vehemently deny that their musical has anything to do with Broadway's yearning to remember things past. Nonetheless, the success of Follies and Nanette has quickened the pulse of every Broadway grave robber who has read the grosses and misinterpreted them. Now on their way are musicals based on such memory-soaked epics as Come Back, Little Sheba, National Velvet, The Great Gatsby and Some Like It Hot—plus revivals of New Faces of 1952 and the 1944 hit On the Town.
Squeal of Approval