
During my recent trip to London, I attended a conversation between Stephen Sondheim and director Dominic Cooke, the director of the revival of Sondheim’s Follies, from the stage of the Olivier Theatre at The National where Follies was playing. Cooke, an Oliver Award winner and past Artistic Director of the Royal Court, is an Associate Director at The National. We in the audience were not told we could not record the conversation, so I recorded it for the readers of sessumsMagazine.com. Here is an excerpt of that conversation.
DOMINIC COOKE: What are the differences between American and British audiences?
STEPHEN SONDHEIM: The British theatre is so much about language. And since language is, shall I say, a passion of mine that is, I think, the central difference about British audiences. The other important thing about British audiences is that they are becoming more like Americans. There are standing ovations for every kind of show. The audiences remind themselves of themselves, which is what that is about. That used not to be true in British theatre. But I just find the reception is more condign over here generally. That’s not to mean not that the notices are better. I can feel it in the house. I really can. So that’s the essential difference.
DC: As I began work on Follies, I became really interested in the tension in your work – not only in this show, but across a lot of your work – between the context of the Broadway musical and your work as an innovator. Because, for me, you are always pushing forward and exploring new forms. Have you felt that tension – especially in the early days when trying to get the work on?
SS: I never really felt the tension because I was lucky enough to have been mentored by Oscar Hammerstein, who was an experimental playwright. People think of him as sort of a cliché. But quite the reverse. He was an experimental playwright. So I grew up with that as a …. ah … as a work ethic. And then the first professional show I did was West Side Story which, in its own way, was experimental. So I am used to that. I never occurs to me to be experimental. I have never been in the middle of writing a show when I felt, “Oooooo … wow … I don’t if they’ll … oooo …you know, get this .. ooo …wow …” I am a firm believer in the process dictating and if a form requires curlycues, then that’s what it does. If it requires straight-form, that’s what it does. It never occurs to me. Therefore, from my point of view, there is no tension at all. It’s just going at it.
DC: Is it primarily from Hammerstein that you learned that idea?
SS: Absolutely. Absolutely. He articulated a lot of things, but he didn’t articulate that. I don’t think he thought of himself as an experiment playwright. But Oklahoma! in its day was a shocker. And yet I don’t think he thought that. He just thought, “This is the way we’ll open the show. We won’t have a chorus. We’ll just have a guy come on singing a cappella.” And everyone was “Ooooooo!!!!!” It was easy, in a way, for him. Showboat was the first of his experimental shows. Now it seems like someone that’s just been there all the time in an old chair. But not when it was done. It was really a starburst.
DC: Regarding material, what is it that draws you to something to make you think you can make a show out of it?
SS: A librettist. Someone calls me and says, “How about? How about?” I rarely start a show by myself. I think the only show I started entirely by myself was Sweeney Todd. But almost every show I’ve ever done was either brought to me by a writer or, in a couple of cases, by Hal Prince as a producer and director. I rarely start something by myself. Sometimes if there is a writer I want to work with, I ask if there is something they might like to work on, have you got any ideas. That’s how Follies started. I went to Jim Goldman, who was a friend. He’d actually written a play which Joan Littlewood directed here, called They Might Be Giants which I always thought would make a wonderful musical. It’s a fantasy set in contemporary times about Sherlock Holmes and psychiatrist who’s a lady named Dr. Watson – because he’s crazy. I wanted to do that, but he said, no, because Joan was involved with it. So I said, “Let’s find something.” He then said, “Well, I saw this clipping in the newspaper the other day about this reunion of the Ziegfeld Girls. Did you know they get together every year and it’s been 75 years? And I’ve always wanted to do a piece about a reunion. What would you think about that?” So I said, “Let’s try,” because I wanted to work with him. That was true of James Lapine as well when we did Sunday in the Park with George. I had seen a play that he’d done and thought it was terrific and thought: I have to meet him. And he was thinking the same thing about me. So sometimes it just starts with the person. Other times, as with Sweeney Todd, you just suddenly see something or read something …
DC: It’s just a kind of a moment …
SS: I can’t do a kind of college thesis on the themes of Stephen Sondheim shows. I’m sure there is some psychoanalyst would say, “Aahhh … yes … you see, all his shows are about …” . I have discovered recently that most of the shows I have written are about friendships. There is a production of Merrily We Roll Along in New York now which emphasizes that and I thought, “You know, that’s true of a lot of stuff I’ve written.” But I don’t know if that’s a theme or not. Since I don’t read a lot, I don’t get a lot of ideas that way. But I do turn to writers whose work I have seen and I say, “You’re somebody I’d like to work with.”
DC: I had an interesting conversation recently with a playwright who’d done his first musical. He’d had quite a a lot of plays on. And he said he struggled for the first two years – it took a while for him to create the show – and he said the hardest thing was realizing that the best moments had to go to the composer.
SS: That’s true and not true. I tried to get Peter Shaffer to write with me quite often because I really liked his work and I really liked him, and he said that same thing to me. He said, “You’ll get all the fun.” To a degree that’s true. But people who aren’t as musical as Peter was – but who are musical like Arthur Laurent who wrote West Side Story and Anyone Can Whistle and Gypsy – they enjoy writing into music. It never occurred to Arthur that I got all “the fun” with “Rose’s Turn,” but some playwrights do feel that, that they’re writing to the big moment and then the composer comes in. So I can understand that. Now this fellow who was having trouble writing – I assume it was a man …
DC: It was a man, yes.
SS: I assume he was working without a composer/lyricist.
DC: No. He was with a composer/lyricist. But I think it was just hard for him to let go of those moments of change because quite often those are the moments when a song or music is required.
SS: Sure. Sure. It’s all about that moment of moving from point A to point B. That’s one thing that Oscar laid out for me in a song, that the characters in the scene should be different at the end of the song than they were at the beginning. Not a big difference. Just that they are learning something about him-or-herself or the other characters. Yes, it is about points of change. And actually music can speed up those points of change. One of the things that music does in a musical is it speeds things up. What might take a whole scene can be done because of the power of music in four quatrains. That’s because of the magic of music. But I can understand why a librettist would say, “I’d like to have a long scene.”
DC: Once this playwright realized all that, I think he actually enjoyed surrendering to that and finding a real synergy there.
SS: Yes. Yes. It’s quite remarkable because so many playwrights want to write musicals. And I’m always astonished for just that reason. Why do they want to surrender to that? But if you love music, you love music.
DC: It’s markedly different for each show, but does that division with those moments happen organically with each show?
SS: It happens with endless amounts of talk. Every show I’ve ever done, you sit with a librettist over a period of two or three months, at least, with what I contribute to the plotting of the play and the way the librettist contributes to the writing of the lyrics. That synergy, that is what collaboration is – when you are feeding each other and feeding off of each other at the same time. That’s what makes a good collaboration – very much an analogy to a good marriage. You supply something and you receive something that you wouldn’t ordinarily get if you were doing it alone. And when you have a writer that you work with – which is why I very often work with the same writers – it’s a wonderful process, and the playwright enjoys it too. I never sensed any resentment from Lapine or Jim Goldman about any moment being taken away from them.

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