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Sondheim's intellectuality is reflected in his choice of subjects, far weightier than the heft of the average straight play on Broadway, let alone the merry moonshine of past musicals: the birth of pointillist painting (Sunday in the Park); Commodore Perry's opening of Japan to the West (Pacific Overtures, 1977); a murderous barber with a Marxist-sounding class grievance and a woman companion who cooks his victims in pies (Sweeney Todd, 1979); the impossibility of marriage (Company, 1970); and the decline of the chorus-girl kick line as a metaphor for the loss of American innocence (Follies, 1971). Like Picasso, who painted a few realistic canvases as if to demonstrate he could, or Eugene O'Neill, who leavened his epic tragedies with one comedy of formula perfection, Ah, Wilderness, Sondheim proved in his lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy and his words and music for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum that he could work within the conventions as adeptly as anyone. But he perceived, earlier than almost any of his contemporaries, that the old style of musical was dying. That was the message of Follies, a fond but firm farewell to feather boas, torch songs, showstoppers and Busby Berkeley-like production numbers. When a much revamped version opened in London last July, audiences had long since come to share the show's judgment and were able to see it as nostalgic rather than dismissive.
Follies is now the West End's most profitable show and appears to be headed back to Broadway. Combined with the 3 million-copy sales of Barbra Streisand's 1985Broadway Album, featuring Sondheim songs, and the annuity represented by his copyrights, notably West Side Story and Forum, the new hits yield fortune as well as fame. Money does not seem to mean much to Sondheim -- "I turn it over to my accountants and do what they tell me to" -- and, for a man who acknowledges he sometimes makes more than $1 million a year, he does not seem to believe he has much. After writing Sunday in the Park about Painter Georges Seurat, he went to a show of Seurat drawings, which sell in the low six figures. "I can't tell you how much I wanted one," he recalls, "but, of course, I couldn't afford it."
What does matter to Sondheim is work. Says he: "The point of being in the theater is to try one idea after another, maybe realize your first was the best, but be able to know -- which just about no other art form can allow." For Woods -- a sort of Fractured Fairy Tales in which Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack of Beanstalk fame and other beloved characters all meet in the same forest at the same time and blunder into one another's stories -- Sondheim and Director-Librettist James Lapine started sketching ideas soon after the premiere of their first collaboration, Sunday in the Park. Through three workshop productions, a regional tryout at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego and five weeks of Broadway previews, they kept making fundamental changes almost daily, even in the basic plot. Quips Woods Co-Producer Rocco Landesman: "Opening night is a formality to these guys. I wouldn't be surprised if they put in new stuff the week it closes." Indeed, Sondheim has persuaded his Follies collaborators to gather in London in January to revise the show yet again.