SONDHEIM, SONDHEIM, & SONDHEIM

Or, THE WORLD ROLLS UNMERRILY ALONG

(Above: Sondheim photographed by Yousuf Karsh. 1986)

Culture is not a cudgel. It just might be the only thing that is not used as one in the world right now. Or is it? Is it instead exactly the conceptual cudgel we need to fight back in this cudgel-connected world with its warring factions hurling weapons back and forth or those warring on social media as they weaponize invective, all sides confusing virtue with justification as our sufferings become comparative? Even atrocities are now just tropes in political arguments steeped in tribalism and the distrust - even dismissals - of each other’s histories. I turn more and more to theatre and ballet and opera and museums in such a world, not to calm myself exactly but to remind myself that humans are capable of artful endeavors not just nihilistic and destructive ones and that beauty can be transcendent not just the vengeful anger so often on display that seems to arouse a transgressive transcendence in those who display it, a frenzy that replaces the freedom that was once sought. These days we humans just seem so low in our argumentative lowing like nothing but cattle with cuds of those justifications in our jaws.

And yet, my jaw set in an unaccustomed clench, I also can feel guilty - a new emotion that overtakes me in my culturally engaged life - when sitting inside the splendor of a theatre when so much ugliness is going on all around me in the world, so much death, so much despair. I don’t leave my own despair at the theatre door. I never have. I carry it now with me as I always have. Personal despair has always been my theatre date; it is why I go so diligently to the theatre, to seduce that despair into becoming for a couple of hours endurable. Such despair was always more personal based on my own specific history of emotional traumas yet lately it has taken on a more generalized anxiety engendered by the severity of the current ferity in the Middle East and the sides being taken and all nuance being annihilated along with lives and villages and even, alas it seems, hope.

I hunger for hope as the characters in Sondheim’s new musical Here We Are do without even knowing that it is its elusiveness that leaves them so hungrily empty. They are adrift even when they are trapped - as they are in its second act - distrusting, disturbed, and deadeningly bored when their lyrical bonhomie gets lost along their wayward way. An existential dread settles in like a prissy Catholic bishop, starting at an ending, slumped upon a piano stool (all mitre, no meter) slowly playing an etude-like bar or two, an interlude of self-loathing made too severely lovely for what it is underscoring, as he tries to find the rhythmic two-part harmony needed for an amen when an ecumenical prayer is what is first needed but is unable to be conjured. Ah … men, mankind, our atonal need to be attuned, that incongruity, that grief that lies at our collective heart.

Is there hope after all in that very concept: the collective heart? That is a question that Sondheim and book writer David Ives seem to be asking us in Here We Are, their half a musical concoction being staged with such sophisticated flair at The Shed in New York by director Joe Mantello. I saw the first preview back on September 29th so I am not sure how much it has changed and morphed and been streamlined, focused. Inspired by two films by Luis Buñuel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie for its musical first act and The Exterminating Angel for its discursive ennui-laden second one, it melds a surreally unsuccessful excursion of rich expat American vulgarians and a friend of theirs, a diplomat who happens to be a Lothario and drug lord, to find some European brunch to eat with a decision finally to head to the diplomat’s ornate embassy in order to gorge themselves with whatever is in its kitchen. But, more surreally, they are unable to leave as they become walled off in a pointillist existentialism - think Seurat instead of Magritte painting Sartre’s sighs - that becomes overlaid alas with a rather plastered pretentiousness, the ornery ornateness of the room bedeviling them and locking them within their clueless - even cloying - privilege.

(Above: the cast of Here We Are at The Shed in New York. Photo by Emilio Madrid.)

It is odd that the second act based on The Exterminating Angel’s plot is so lacking in music - Sondheim died before he could unlock the key to finding his way into The Room where it happens - because one of the greatest modern operas of recent years is composer Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel based on the same Buñuel film, which captured so stunningly and musically what the film so pointedly depicted, the willful lack of will and the frozen moral stance that results. Adès is attuned to man’s atonal need to connect in a way that Sondheim and his innate sense of the melodic - yes, you can hum his music - could not locate in this musical for all his noted navigations of the human condition. Sondheim, who famously was not an opera fan, possessed a brilliance instead which did not browbeat the middlebrow from the Broadway musical but brushed it aside in a way the minute fleshy bits of eraser are bushed aside when a penciled-in wrong note is rubbed out yet is still a shadowy presence beneath the one which replaces it and is considered to be more right if not yet quite correct - thus the need for that firmly gripped pencil that helps one grapple. There is a not-quite correctness to Here We Are that matches its narrative in a meta sense and yet you do feel sadly that Sondheim died still grappling with its pencil still in his hand.

Once the characters in Here We Are do find a way out of The Room - that is the way the setting for the second act is described in the program - by discovering that surrender is an act of will without its being willful, they realize that the sustenance they were always looking for was not dietary but spiritual - just not the spurious sort spawned by religion. The gloom in the second act then turns too suddenly into glee. But it is that suddenness - the needy readiness to be gleeful at yet another outset (another ending that is a beginning) that gives the evening finally the bittersweet swagger for which a Sondheim show is beloved - or which becomes so in later years when it is given a newly conceived revival. I’m not sure if this show will be beloved in the future but I am deeply grateful for its having been produced so lovingly and expertly right now because it is the memory of him as much as his work that is beloved in this present moment when the world needs some sweetness added to its increasingly embittered swagger. Sondheim showed us how to be complicatedly cynical without being simply bitter.

In the Here We Are cast, I quite enjoyed Rachel Bay Jones as a ditzy doyenne of privilege and once again was mightily impressed with Micaela Diamond, who was so remarkable in the revival of Parade as Lucille Frank. Diamond portrays Fritz whom I presumed was a transgender revolutionary inculcated with a need for the comforts of privilege more than the one to express a truer gender since Fritz shucks it all the first time a hot soldier - gloriously sung by Jin Ha- makes eyes at her -or is it them? - and offers her - him? - a chance to sing a soaring, heart-stopping, ear-splitting duet. I found it troubling that the book to the musical made “Fritz” a gender ditz. Or maybe Fritz is nonbinary, unlike this production which is a binary one more than any I have ever seen with its first act speeding along with Sondheim almost at his musically mischievous best - trippy and tricked out with puzzling plot twists and giggly rhymes - and the second act abruptly ceasing its musical liveliness, a glumfest that seems to be sitting shiva for the man who wrote the songs in the first. My favorite member of the cast was Tracie Bennett, the British actress, who portrays a potpourri of characters - or smorgasbord, to use a more appropriate term. I saw her as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow and was bowled over by her in that. I will also never forget her rendition of “I’m Still Here” in the revival of Sondheim’s Follies at The National Theatre in which she played Carlotta Campion. Now here she is in Here We Are. Don’t miss this chance to witness her artistry.

In the photo above, I am getting a hug from my friend Jonathan Groff in his dressing room at the Hudson Theatre on September 28th after his deeply moving and keenly observed performance in Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. He reminded me that it was 17 years ago when I was hanging out in his dressing room at Spring Awakening, a look back at the past that did not curdle this present moment as so many do in the show. Daniel Radcliffe, also brilliant in Merrily, dropped by for a visit and I reminded him that I had interviewed him for The Daily Beast when he was on Broadway in Equus after my having been up all night having done meth. Merrily We Roll Along inspires one to look back on one's own narrative in such a way. I even saw the original production of Merrily when I was 25 and couldn't really understand its cynicism seeping into its heart as if a kind of psychological sepsis had set in. I can certainly understand it now and was awash in tears at the incongruity of its heartbreakingly hopeful ending that night in September - an ending, yes, that was yet again a beginning. I am lucky to have gotten past that curdling sepsis setting in of addiction and hopelessness and the sadness in my life to the blessing of this hug after one of the show’s early Broadway previews.

When Merrily first opened and closed after its run of 16 performances and 44 previews in 1981, it was held at arm’s link by the critics but now it has been enveloped in a loving critical hug because its director, Maria Friedman, understood that the show itself needed a more loving one. She envelopes it with an empathy and understanding not only of her dear friend Sondheim but of their dearly shared friend, show business. The cast could not be bettered. Along with Jonathan and Daniel, Lindsay Mendez sculpts with them through their nimble, sensitive, brilliantly calibrated performances what friendships can mean, heartbreak can, and how success can sew discord and discomfort even as it can offer succor to its suckers who refuse to see themselves as such. Jonathan as Franklin Shepard allows Lindsay as Mary Flynn and Daniel as Charley Kringas to display their deep talents in showy ways by being the stilled - not cold - heart at the center of this remarkably realized production. I told him in the dressing room that night that his stillness had an eery quality to it; it is as if he were encased by his success and his need not to reflect the resentment and hurt his friends have at his leaving them behind, but to absorb it. He is encased in the amber not of ambition but of his ambivalence about being so imbued by it. This is a musical about three gypsy-like souls - a playwright, a director, a novelist and critic - whose artistic pilgrimages converge with hope when they are setting out in life then diverge with that heartbreak and different sorts of brokenness when settling into it. It is a later I-have-lived-this-life musical written by the now fabled man who wrote the lyrics to a musical fable earlier in his career which included the song “Together, Wherever We Go.” He might have brushed the middlebrow aside but he never erased himself from our theatrical consciousness nor us, his audience, from his. Stephen Sondheim was the most gifted composer and lyricist the musical theatre was lucky enough to engage, encourage and embolden. This production of Merrily is a gift to us itself. Go hug it to your hearts - even your brokenness - and let it hug you back.

(Above: Mendez, Radcliffe, and Goff in the rehearsal studio for Merrily We Roll Along)

On my second night in London - October 2 - during this latest yearly six-month sojourn here I went to see another preview, this one of Sondheim’s Old Friends, at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End. It is a revue produced by his own old friend, Cameron Mackintosh, based on the composer’s shows, many of which Mackintosh presented here in London. Matthew Bourne directed it “side by side” Julia McKenzie, per its credits. Bernadette Peters is making her West End debut in the show but it is Lea Salonga, a better belter these days, who gets the big show-stopping numbers and longer scenes. Peters gets the elegiac “Send in the Clowns” and “Losing My Mind” but overcompensates a bit for her lack now of vocal dexterity. She digs deeper as an actress to deliver them and yet it is her nonchalance - a diva of detachment - in her role as the trumpet strumpet in “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” from Gypsy where she so brilliantly shines. The evening is overwhelmingly professional yet I felt as if I were on a very expensive cruise ship - not a bad feeling but an odd one to have felt sitting in a theatre in London.

(Above; Bernadette Peters in Sondheim’s Old Friends at London’s Gielgud Theater)

I saw all these Sondheim productions before October 7th, the day that Israel suffered the evil of its terrorist attack from Hamas and in return began to bombard Gaza with an overarching vengeful fury. Since then the odd feeling - guilt amidst the gilt - I have sitting inside of theatres and the Royal Opera House has nothing to do with cruise ships, but cruise missiles. I have thought often of how London experienced its own bombardments during World War II because it stood against the anti-Semitic evil of Hitler and why so many of these theatres are built underground, like shelters against any future bombing that might occur here. The past rolls unmerrily into the present, the present back into the past. And yet time is not backward or forward or even linear but increasingly seems simultaneous. This thought just keeps repeating itself: how can I experience such artistry and beauty in these bomb-shelter-like theatres here in London when such ugliness is being unleashed so dangerously in the world and so safely and smugly on social media? Yet how can I not? Sondheim taught us that the deepness of one’s art and its daring to celebrate beauty of which we humans are capable - aural and narrative and witty and wondrous - is not a denial of the dark complexities of the human condition but a part of its complicated darkness. It limns it with illuminations.

Many have turned to silence to deal with navigating this present moment because many are culturally being cancelled for not being silent. Silence was never an answer for Sondheim. His artistry was a turn away from it, an act of will that was not willful, a surrender, a willing leap of faith to the next needed note, word, bit of aural wonder. Silence = Death. Even in death, he refuses to be. There is despair in his refusal. There always was. But there is also hope. There always is.

He always finally left The Room.