INTRODUCED AND COMPILED BY

SHERIDAN MORLEY

I A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE

WAY TOTHE FORUM \

)This is a celebration and a songbook of the man who has been hailed as the greatest lyric poet of the postwar theatre and the only heir apparent to Cole Porter and Noel Coward. A fully illustrated and extensive critical preface by Sheridan Morley details Sondheim's early life and then gives a chronological account of the writing of the songs for such shows as, among others, the phenomenally successful West Side Story, Gypsy, Follies, Company and his latest musical, Sweeney Todd, which won eight Tony Awards this spring on Broadway.

The second half of the book is made up of the songs themselves - a representative selection from all the songs which Sondheim has written are reproduced here - completc nith their music. Edited by one of our best-known current theatre critics, this book - with its combination of biography, show history, critical analysis and an abundance of Sondheim's supremely distinctive lyrics and music - is

I

an essential companion for both Sondheim enthusiasts and musical theatre addicts in general.

Jacket design by Ken Reilly based on a photograph courtesy Cameron Mackintosh Productions Limited Photograph on back of iacket courtesy Martha Swope

The Sfevhen Sondheim

By the same Author

A Talent to Amuse (1669) Review Copies (1975)

Marlene Dietrich (1976) Oscar Wilde (1976)

Sybil Thorndike (1977) Gladys Cooper (1979)

The Skuhen Sondheim

lntvoduced and-compiled

Order From CHAPPELL 8 MUSIC EXCHANGE :EE

151 W. 46 Street New York, NY 10036

First published in Great Britain 1979 by Elm Tree Books/Hamish Hamilton Ltd Garden House 57-59 Long Acre London WC2E 9JZ and Chappell & Company Ltd 50 New Bond Street London W1A 2BR

Introduction copyright O 1979 by Sheridan Morley

Book design by Norman Reynolds

ISBN 0 241 10176 X

Printed in Great Britain by Symphon Reproductions 60-70 ~ o $ n Steet Ilford Essex IGI 2AQ A Polygram Company

Introduction by Sheridan Morley

THE SONGS

WEST SIDE STORY

Something's Coming Maria Tonight Somewhere

GYPSY

Let Me Entertain You Some People If Momma Was Married

DO I HEAR A WALTZ?

Do I Hear A Waltz? Thank You So Much

A FLINNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM

Comedy Tonight Love I Hear Everybody Ought To Have A Maid Impossible Lovely

ANYONE CAN WHISTLE

Anyone Can Whistle Everybody Says Don't

Page

44 5 2 5 7 60

64 67 7 1

COMPANY

Little Things You Do Together Another Hundred People Barcelona Being Alive Sorry-Grateful

FOLLIES

Broadway'Baby I'm,Still Here Could I Leave You The 'God-Why-Don't-You-Love Me' Blues

Page

116 121 126 130 133

13 7 140 147 153

76 A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC 81

You Must Meet My Wife 158 Liaisons 162 Every Day A Little Death 172 The Miller's Son 179

85 Send In The Clowns 185

88 9 1 95

PACIFIC OVERTURES

99 Pretty Lady 189

The author and publisher wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce photographs in this volume: Mary Bryant, Chappell & Co., Clifford Studios, Donald Cooper, Zoe Dominic, National Film Archives, New York Public Library, Martha Swope and Syndication International.

SONG BY SONG by Sondheim, this book will celebrate. document and comment on what I believe to be the most remarkable and distinguished songwriting career in the postwar English-speaking theatre. Stephen Sondheim is, a t the time of this 1979 writing, a year away from his fiftieth birthday and has just seven complete Broadway scores to his credit: Sweeney Todd, Pacific Overtures, A Little Night Music, Follies, Company. Anyone Can Whistle and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. He also has to his credit the lyrics for West Side Story (written when he was twenty-six), Gypsy, Do I Hpar A Waltz? and some for a 1974 revision of Bernstein's Candide, as well as an entire musical for television (Eopning Pr imros~) , an adaptation of Aristophanes' The Frogs. once staged in the pool at Yale, and the script for a non-musical movie thriller (The Last of Sheila). in addition to the background score for Resnais' Sta~lisky. In an eclectic and sometimes eccentric fashion, i t all adds up to the portfolio of the man who is in my view the only true heir to Noel Coward, with whom he has privately and professionally more in common than just confirmed bachelorhood.

Yet as late as 1976 it was possible for the drama critic of the London Daily Telegraph to object to the title of Ned Sherrin's anthology show, Side By Side By Sondh~im. on the grounds that far too many of its potential audiences in Britain would have not the remotest idea who Sondheim was; and he had a point. Of Sondheim's last four show scores only one (A L i t t l~ Night Musir) has so far reached this side of the Atlantic, and even Gypsy took nearly fifteen years to make the journey and then without its original star: of the four films made from his shows, one has never been shown in Britain and all the other three suffered from horrendous mishandling and miscasting. But to Stephen Sondheim almost alone goes the credit for dragging the Broadway musical often unwillingly into the second half of the twentieth century. Hrllo Dolly! and Annie could have been, and for all I know were, written in about 1932; Company is utterly, quintessentially and unmistakably of and for the

1970s. You don't come out of a Sondheim show humming the sets o r the costumes or the first-half finale: you come out humming the Divorce Act. He is the master poet and lyricist of a disenchanted. high- rise urban culture, the nearest the theatre has ever got to a Nrw Yorkcr cartoon. Cornpati>/ (based on a series of one-act plays by George Furth) had no hi t song, no happy ending, no message of good cheer for the world at large or the matinee crowds from Des Moines. Rather was it a bitter, cynical and deeply unsentimental look at the state of matrimony in New York ('Marriage may be where it's been, but it's not where it's at') which resolutely refused to tug a t any heartstrings. I t had all the warmth of an electric carving-knife and all the cosy charm of a crossword

puzzle. Technically it was as flawless as a Manhattan skyscraper: a brisk, glittering show which was in its own icily acid way as brilliant a dissection of marital bliss as Albee's Virginia Woolf.

A look at the Sondheim scores since Company indicates however an absolute refusal to be typecast in the role of New York's divorce guidance counsellor: Follies was an ambitious and nostalgic show about old Ziegfeld girls in the ruins of their former theatre and their former lives; A Little Night Music was a lyrical operetta derived from Bergman's film, Smiles of a Summer Night; Pacific Overtures was about the opening up of Japan in the nineteenth century by Commodore Perry; and Sweeney Todd is a ninety-per- cent operatic version of the old Victorian melodrama about the demon barber. Theatregoers in search of some common factor to trace through the vast range of Sondheim's stage work over the last decade may have to settle for an increasing inclination towards opera and the fact that he works almost invariably with the same producer-director, Harold Prince.

They met, suitably enough, in the stalls of a theatre on the first night of South Pacific: 'It was 1949,' recalls Hal Prince, 'and he was there with the Hammersteins and I was there with the Rodgerses and we very soon became friends and used to talk about changing the theatre and saving the theatre and controlling the theatre and lots of power stuft like that.' Thirty years later, they seem to have achieved those earIy ambitions: if you add Prince's credits (from Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret all the way through to E~lita) to Sondheim's, it's hard to think of any two men since Rodgers and Hammerstein who have been so influential ' in the musical theatre. Of the two, Sondheim is perhaps the less overtly commercial: when things were going not too well during the early previews for Sweeney Todd one of his many critics noted that 'the ideal audience for a Sondheim show is two people sitting in their own living-room - and one of them would leave before the interval', but that is both to underestimate and to misunderstand Sondheim's current position in the theatre. It is not that he is writing purely for himself or a small Clite; he's merely waiting there for the rest of us to catch him UP.

To go back to the very beginning, Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born in New York City on 22 March 1930. His father, Herbert Sondheim, was a succ~sdu l dress manufacturer and his mother, Janet (Fox) Sondheim, known as 'Foxy', was first a fashion designer and then took to interior decorating. Sondheim was by all accounts (including his own) a precocious child in a family where money was never a problem. His mother, now Mrs Janet Leshin, once told

Newsweek that, 'When Steve was only four he was already picking out tunes on the piano; Aaron Copland said that he obviously had tremendous talent.' Sondheim added, 'My upbringing was typical upper-middle class. I guess words came before music, and before I could read I could recognize the titles of songs on Red Seal record labels from the shapes of the words. My parents liked me to do that for company. I skipped kindergarten, and in first grade the teacher would show me off by asking me to read the New York Times. I liked it, but I was also self-conscious about being the smartest kid in the class. I used to deliberately drop my g's because I spoke English too well.'

Things weren't too easy at home either: by the time Sondheim was nine his parents had separated, and by the time he was eleven they were divorced: 'My mother didn't know what to do with me, so she sent me off to a military school. I loved it because of all the rules and order, and because the school had a huge organ with lots of buttons. I played things like "To A Wild Rose" standing up, since my feet couldn't hit the pedals.'

What happened next was the'one single event of his childhood which was to inform and condition the whole of the adult life of Stephen Sondheim: his mother decided to leave New York and settle on a farm at Doylestown in Pennsylvania. Living nearby was a friend of hers, Dorothy Hammerstein; the two women now had sons, of similar ages (Jimmy Hammerstein is exactly one year and one day younger than Sondheim) and it was natural that they should spend a good deal of their time together, more often at the Hammersteins' place t h ~ n at the Sondheims'. And there was another thing: Jimmy's father had just written the book and lyrics for a show called Oklahoma!

Slowly but very surely, Oscar Hammerstein I1 became a kind of surrogate father to Sondheim: 'He was everything to me and I wanted to be exactly like him, and in a way I still do: most people think of him as a kind of affable, idealistic lunkhead. Instead he was a very sophisticated, sharp-tongued, articulate man who did indeed have an idealistic philosophy which prompted him to be attracted to a certain kind of material.' Though Sondheim has sometimes been critical of his 'father' ('He was I think a limited talent'), he has also been the first to acknowledge his considerable debt to the Hammersteins; as his own family life with his mother grew increasingly difficult, he took to staying more and more frequently at their Highland Farm: 'Oscar and Dorothy saved my life on a personal leyel, and Oscar lat'er set m y life on a professional level. It's as simple as that. I don't know

where I would be today if I hadn't met them.' At first it was the games: Sondheim has all his life

been a compulsive gamesman and puzzle addict, finding a kind of relaxation from Broadway in entering the most complex of the word-ga~es set by the Listener and the Observer, and filling his house with one of the best collections of games and puzzles in the world - one so good that it .inspired Anthony Shaffer's thriller Sleuth.

With the Hammersteins it was chess, then anagrams, and then the beginning of a remarkable kind of apprenticeship described here by Hammer- stein's biographer Hugh Fordin:

In 1946 Steve and three classmates at George School wrote a musical about campus life called By George [Sondheim was by now all of sixteen] and Steve thought it was terrific and wanted Oscar to read it. He sent it to him with a note saying, 'Please don't treat it as if you knew me. Treat it as if i t were just a

,script that crossed your desk.' Delusions of grandeur danced in his head that night: R and H would produce it, he would be the youngest composer on Broadway; By George would make theatre history. The next day they met and Oscar reiterated Steve's stipulation: 'You asked me to treat this as if I'd never heard of the author?' 'Yes,' Steve said. 'In that case it's the worst thing I've ever read.' As Steve's lower lip trembled, Oscar went on, 'I didn't say it doesn't show talent. But it's just terrible. If you want to know why it's terrible, I'll tell you.' 'Yes,' said Steve, 'tell me.' So Oscar started with the very first line, the very first stage direction, and pointed out how untheatrical it was and then proceeded to go through every scene, every song, every line of dialogue. He treated the libretto as if it were a mature work, not the school show that it was . . . and he was dead serious about everything in it. The big shaggy man and the boy sat for hours in the study and pored over the script.

'At the risk of hyperbole,' said Sondheim later, 'I'd say that in that one afternoon I learned more about songwriting and the musical theatre than most people learn in a lifetime . . . he taught me how to build songs, how to introduce characters, how to make songs relate to characters, how to tell a story, how not to tell a story, the interrelationships between lyric and music - all, of course, from his own point of view.'

That point of view was never to be one totally shared by Sondheim; indeed it's hard to think of anyone who has pulled the musical theatre further away from Carousel and The Sound o f Music, though interestingly Sondheim has never actually allowed

himself to parody Rodgers-Hammerstein the way that he (in Follies) parodies Porter, Kern, Gershwin and Irving Berlin. There's no law that says teacher and pupil have to share the same tastes, but there is something marvellously anachronistic about the author of I Whistle A Happy Tune tutoring the author of Every Day A Little Death.

But Hammerstein did more than just talk Sondheim4 through the mechanics of the stage musical: recognizing in the sixteen-year-old an already highly developed passion for the theatre (one which his own son was not to acquire until he turned to directing several years later) Hammerstein found Sondheim a job as a 'gofer', going for the coffee during the rehearsals and out-of-town tour for one of the least successful Rodgers-Hammerstein musicals, Allegro (1947). This was in fact their first joint failure, one which found Hammerstein way off his usual territory writing about wealth and power in a big-city hospital. 'Why,' Sondheim had once asked him, 'don't you ever write a sophisticated musical?' 'By sophisticated,' Hammerstein had replied, 'do you mean one that takes place in a New York penthouse?' Yet here he was trying to do just that, and it didn't work; i t was his pupil who was to make i t work, twenty years later, in Company.

For now, however, Sondheim was getting his first glimpse of the practical theatre working backstage on Allegro, and Hammerstein was continuing the seminar

-which had started with the notes on By George as Sondheim recalls:

He outlined a kind of study course for me, one which I followed right through college. He said, 'Write four musicals. For the first one, take a play you admire and turn it into a musical.' I admired a play called Beggar on Horseback by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, and we actually got permission to do it for three performances at college. Next, Oscar said to me: 'Take a play that you don't think is very good, or that you liked but think can be improved, and make a musical out of it.' I chose a play called High Tor by Maxwell Anderson . . . it taught me something about play- writing, about structure, about how to take out fat and how to make points. Then Oscar said, 'For your third effort, take something that is non-dramatic: a novel, a short story.' I landed on Mary Poppins and spent about a year writing a musical version. That's where I first encountered the real difficulties of play- writing, which is one of the reasons I am not a play- wright. It was very hard to structure a group of short stories and make a play out of them, and I wasn't able to accomplish it. Finally Oscar said, 'For

your fourth, do an original.' So right after I got out of college I wrote an original musical [called Climb High, above an aspiring Broadway actor] whose first act was ninety-nine pages long and the second act sixty-odd. Oscar had recently given me a copy of South Pacific to read and the entire show was ninety pages long, so when I sent him my script I got it back from him with a circle around ninety-nine and just a 'Wow!' written on to it.

But by now it was 1951, Sondheim was twenty-one and more or less certain of what he wanted to do for a living; he had already been through a unique apprenticeship, indeed it is hard to think of any song- writer this century who spent as much time on one pupil as did Hammerstein on Sondheim, treating the latter's earliest efforts with all the serious attention due to a new Long Day's Journey lnto Night. But the theory and the practice were different problems, and in 1951 (the year of The King and 1 and Paint Your Wagon and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) you did not go into scoring your first Broadway show at twenty-one. Sondheim had in fact been a music major at Williams College (after briefly considering English or mathe- matics) and on graduation he won a two-year fellow- ship called the Hutchinson Prize which gave him the chance to study under the celebrated avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt, who happened to have a passion for the Broadway song form, specifically that of De Sylva, Brown and Henderson: 'We'd have four- hour sessions going note by note through their work aod Kern's,' said Sondheim, 'then we got on to Beethoven .'

'steve was terribly bright, ambitious, and could Kave been good as any sort of composer,' recalled Babbitt later, 'but there was no question that Broadway was where he wanted to be.' Sondheim was in fact the last pupil Babbitt taught privately, and later he told Craig Zadan:

We had one compositional lesson a week, and Steve made it clear immediately that he wasn't interested in becoming what you would call a serious composer, but he wanted to know a great deal more about so-called serious music because he thought it would be suggestive and useful . . . he came as a sort of Ivy League young man, who had decided to go intc music after having thought about other alternatives. He learned very quickly, he had a very nimble mind and he was very musical. He worked slowly, even on what might seem to be simple material. He claimed that he was lazy, which he could afford to be . . . he was also constantly being diverted with parties. He spent a great deal of time

designing games and solving puzzles with recondite Show Biz references . . . he was terribly bright and one could only wonder how serious he could afford to be. He had money, he was accustomed to the best things in life, he was accustomed to frivolity, he was not accustomed to working terribly hard in the serious cumposer's sense . . . but he had this great insatiable desire to make it big . . . it was perfectly obvious that he had grown up in a society of celebrities and he wanted to be a fellow celebrity.

Though he lived at home (on a bed in the dining- room) to save rent during his two Hutchinson Prize years, Sondheim never took money from his family and was independent from the age of twenty. In fact he started his working life far away from the piano and from Broadway, though the job came up as a direct result of Oscar Hammerstein's continuing interest in his career. One night there was a dinner party to which the Hammersteins took Sondheim; another guest was George Oppenheimer, who had just signed a long-term contract to write the television 'Topper' series and was desperately in search of another writer to help him out with the weekly half-hours. Hammerstein suggested Sondheim, Sondheim next morning took some of his student writing round to Oppenheimer, and within days they were both on the way to California.

The series earned Sondheim the $3,000 he needed to lease a flat: it ran three years (one on each of the major networks) but he spent considerably less time on the project than that. 'I just found him to be the most incredibly amusing guy,' said Oppenheimer later, 'and one of the most incredibly loyal kids I've ever met . . . we had to get out about twenty-nine segments in six months. He did about ten, I did about ten with him, and I did the rest .'

But within a year Sondheim was back in New York and already at work on the first of his non-college musicals:

I happened to meet Lemuel Ayers, one of the best set designers ever, who had produced a number of shows including Kiss Me Kate. Lem had a property called Front Porch in Flatbush by two Hollywood screen writers, Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein, twin brothers who won an Academy Award for Casablanca. Phil had died but !his, their last play together, was about their third brother and a group of kids in Flatbush in 1928 all investing in the stock- market. Lem wanted to make a musical out of it. He had approached Frank Loesser because it was very New York, but Loesser had turned it down because he was busy OD something else, arid Lem heard some of my stuff from those four apprentice musicals and

hired me on spec to write three songs - which I did, and which he and Julie Epstein liked. We went into supposed production on this show, which was now retitled Saturday Night; this was the first professional work I had done, and I was prepared to do professional work only becauze of what Oscar had made me go through.

Saturday Night was however never to see the light of Broadway: Lem Ayers died while they were still trying to raise the money for it, and the show died with him, though there was one attempt to revive it - in 1959, just after Gypsy had opened on Broadway, Jule Styne announced that he would present it in a production by the young Bob Fosse. But once into the auditions Sondheim realized it was already too late to go back, and the production was again abandoned.

By 1955, therefore, Sondheim had a total of five completed but unproduced scores of which only the last (Saturday Night) had been* written on a

' professional basis; this was however enough of a beginning. Thanks to Hammerstein, thanks to Lem Ayers, thanks to the beginnings of a friendship with Hal Prince (then still working out his own apprentice- ship with George Abbott) and thanks to his many other social and semi-professional contacts, Sondheim was already becoming a faintly familiar name around town. This was not, after all, yet an age in which there were many boy wonders and there were few other 25- year-olds hovering around Broadway with five complete scores under their belts.

What happened next is already a kind of history and it all started at a party. Burt Shevelove, the writer and director, had a friend who was with Sondheim at Williams College and their own friendship, based on a mutual addiction to musicals and the crossword of the London Times, grew fast and firm. Sometime in late 1955, Shevelove suggested that Sondheim should join him at a Broadway first-night party being given by Ruth Ford and Zachary Scott; arriving early, and recognizing nobody else in the room, Sondheim went over to talk to Arthur Laurents, the award-winning playwright and screenwriter whose credits already included Home of the Brave, Time o f the Cuckoo, Rope and The Snake Pit. Laurents, it transpired, was now in New York to work with Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins on the book for a musical version of Romeo and Juliet, and had heard some of the Saturday Night score about six months earlier when he'd been

casting around for a lyricist to work on his musical version of Serenade, a project abandoned when Warners announced they were filming i t with Mario Lanza.

Recalls Sondheim:

I asked who was doing the lyrics, just idly because I didn't think of myself as a lyric writer, I thoughtof myself as a songwriter, I was composing all the time. Arthur literally smote his forehead ( I think it's the only time I have ever seen anybody literally smite his forehead). He said, ' I never thought of you and I like your lyrics very much. I didn't like your music very much, but I did like your lyrics a lot.' Arthur is nothing if not frank. He invited me to meet Leonard Bernstein and play for him. Lenny liked what he heard and asked me if I would do the lyrics for the show. I didn't want to do just lyrics, but I went to have a talk with Oscar who was my guide and mentor all through my career. He said, ' I think it will be very valuable for you to work with profes- sionals of this calibre. The project sounds very exciting so I think you ought to do it.'

The project was of course West Side,, Story: with music by Leonard Bernstein, a book by Arthur Laurents and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim it opened in a production by Jerome Robbins at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York on 26 September 1957. But it didn't get there without a struggle; from the very first Sondheim had his doubts about his own lyrics which he considered 'bloodless', though he was glad to be working in such exalted company:

I remember I played 'Maria' for Jerome Robbins and he liked the song fine but got very angry about the pauses. He said, 'Maria, I've just met a girl named Maria, and suddenly that name will never be the same to me - and then there's this bar-and-a-half pause. What am I supposed to do there?' I said, 'Well, I mean he's just standing there on the stage.' Jerry said, 'But how am I supposed to direct him?' I said, 'Well, can't he just stand there?' Jerry said, 'You've got to give me something for him to do, or do you want to stage it?' Choreographers and many directors don't like pauses, but he had a point there that's very important. You should stage your numbers when you are writing them. Never just write a love song and give it to the director and the choreographer expecting them to invent. That's only their job after you've invented.

Overlooking some background music for a short- lived play called The Girls of Summer and a Christmas

carol for a 1951 Lunts' vehicle called I Know My Love, Pretty",' he said. Now, I had thought 'I Feel Pretty' West Side Story was Sondheim's Broadway debut and was just terrific. 1 had spent the previous year of my it taught him a lot: life rhyming 'day' and 'way' and 'me' and 'be' and

There's a song in it called 'America' and thank God it's a spectacular dance because it wouldn't get a hand otherwise. It has twenty-seven words to the square inch. 1 had this 'wonderful' quatrain that went: 'I like to be in America. OK by me in America. Everything free in America. For a small fee in America!' The 'for a small fee' was my little zinger - except that the 'for ' i s accented and the 'sm' impossible to say that fast, so it went. 'For a smafee in America'. Nobody knew what it meant, and I learned my lesson: you have to consider an actor's tongue and teeth.

In the summer of 1957. just before the show went to try out in Washington and Philadelphia, there was a 'gypsy' run through to which composers and cast invited friends and colleagues:

It was [recalls Sondheiml one of the most embarras- sing moments of m y life as a lyric writer . . . after- Lards 1 asked m y friend Sheldon Harnick lhimself soon to be the lyricist of Fiorello! and She Loires Me and Fiddler- on the Roof] 'What do you think?' knowing he was going to fall on his knees and lick the sidewalk. But he didn't, and I asked him to tell me what was wrong. 'There's that lyric "I Feel

The Jets and tho Sl;arks in tlzc NP;L~ Y L ~ ctaye produrtion of West Side Story 11957)

with 'I Feel Pretty' I wanted to show that I could d o inner rhymes too. So 1 had this uneducated Puerto Rican girl singing 'It's alarming how charming I feel'. You know, she would not have been unwelcome in Noel Coward's living-room.

Sheldon was very gentle but oh! did it hurt. I immediately went back to the drawing-board and wrote a simplified version of the lyric, which nobody connected with the show would accept: so there i t is, embarrassing me every time it's sung because it's full of mistakes like that.

But Sondheim's own doubts about West Side Story ('It had one very unfortunate consequence: 1 got typed as a lyric writer which 1 didn't want') shouldn't blind the rest of us to his very considerable achievements on that score. Not only does it contain in 'Gee. Officer Krupke' perhaps the best 'point' number ot the 505:

My father is a bastard. My ma's an SOB. My grandpa's always plastered. My grandma pushes tea. My sister wears a moustache, My brother wears a dress. Goodness gracious. that's why I'm a mess!

but also contains, in the very second number oi the show (sung originally by Larry Kert. who was to reappear in Sondheim's Coiwpa~i:~ fifteen years later) an indicatinn of the staccato urgency that was to hallmark the very best of his later work:

Could i t be? Yes, i t could. Something's coming, Something good, If I can wait. Something's coming, I don't know What it is, But itis Gonna be great! With a click, With a shock, '

Phone'll jingle, Door'll knock, Open the latch! Something's coming, Don't know when But it's soon - Catch the moon, One-handed catch!

In fact the origins of West Side Story went back another eight years to 1948 when Jerome Robbins had been given a copy of Romeo and Iuliet by his friend Montgomery Clift who was debating whether or not

' to play in i t . Robbins began to think of i t as a musical; originally Bernstein was to do the lyrics himself, then there were thoughts of Comden and Green doing them, but by the time Sondheim joined the project they still hadn't got a title (his own suggestion was reputed to be Shut Up and Dance). The original producers were to be Roger Stevens and Cheryl Craw- ford, but other investors had to be attracted to what seemed a 'difficult' show, and a theatre had to be found. 'Who the hell says the book isn't any good?' screamed Stevens at one recalcitrant Broadway theatre owner who'd turned them down. 'How many plots are there, for heaven's sake?'

Stevens had already advanced a few thousand dollars to the three writers; now, in the spring of 1957, he arranged a backers' audition to raise the rest of the capital. 'They met,' relates Kenneth Pearson, 'in an East Side apartment before about thirty men and women. It was a hot night. The sound of riverboat hooters floated up through the open windows . . . Laurents described the narrative and Robbins, sensing the lack of sympathy in his audience, acted out the ballets with a growing abandon. It was no use, not a penny was forthcoming. Laurents felt their failure keenly, more particularly as he was embroiled in a long and fruitless correspondence with Cheryl Crawford. She wanted to endow the project with a greater social significance, to broaden its scope, to have it explained on the way why the Puerto Rican

problem had arisen' (for the purposes of the musical, 'Romeo' was to be a street-corner New Yorker and 'Juliet' a Puerto Rican immigrant).

Laurents took the (understandable) view that Miss Crawford's kind of reportage was best left to journalism or the cinema: 'This is a poetic conception . . . let us use our imaginations. We don't want to go down to the West Side and listen to the gangs.' Miss, Crawford disagreed, and relationships deteriorated to the point where, on 22 April, she announced she would be resigning as producer. A project which had been six years in the making now looked abortive.

Robbins phoned the bad news to their co-producer Roger Stevens in London, who took a less gloomy view and told him to carry on with the production while they searched around for another guardian angel. At that point, Sondheim remembered his friend Harold Prince, now already in a production partner- ship with Robert Griffith: they'd staged two Broadway hits in a row (Pajama Game and Damn Yankees) and were now in Boston with a musical adaptation of an O'Neill play which they were calling New Girl In Town:

We were going into our last tryour week there [recalls Prince], Gwen Verdon was out of the show ill, rehearsals were stymied and I was on the phone to Steve. It was three a.m. and I had documented our woes to the last detail. Eventually i t occurred to me only politely to ask Steve how things were going with West Side. With six weeks left before scheduled rehearsals, Cheryl Crawford had called the whole thing off. I sympathized. What else could I do? I had my own problems.

I said good night, lay awake a few hours, then phoned him back . . . We flew into New York, had a marvellous meeting with them. Sondheim and Bernstein played the score and soon I was singing along with them, and Bernstein would look up and say, 'My God, he's so musical! A musical producer!' I simply grinned, stopped singing temporarily, forgot again, and got complimented again.

By the end of that morning it was agreed that once New Girl In Town was safely on to Broadway, Prince and Griffith would set about presenting West Side Story with Roger Stevens keeping a 'by arrangement with' credit. Prince had them cut an unsatisfactory opening number ('Mix') but from there on, in Kenneth Pearson's report :

'The threads of the production came together like cars on an assembly line. Sondheim and Bernstein were working night and day. Sondheim sat in his

apartment, a wad of notepaper on hislap, scribbling down swift phrases, feeling his way towards the climax of a song. That done, he would race round to the composer's flat where words and music were married. On many occasions Bernstein improvized a few additional notes to cover an extended lyric; on others he cut his score to pieces. Sondheim's speed of creation varied from song to song. With 'Cool' the lyric came quickly, a single idea with variations on the theme. 'Maria' he found more difficult to complete. He wanted the lovers to convey their feeling without either of them ever saying 'I love you'. It took him five months to find the key. Otherwise, he was ruthless in his search for words. He was raiding Laurents' lines like an enemy patrol The phrase 'whistling down the river' disappeared from the book only to reappear in thc song 'Something's coming'. The first duologue between the two lovers was cut to a sentence o r two and the gap filled with the duet 'Tonight'.

Certain of Sondheim's lyrics for Wesf Side Story still seem to haunt him: the Lovers' 'Today the world was just an address' (in 'Tonight') is guaranteed to produce a recurrent shiver down his spine, though in the context of the song and the show i t struck most other critics as acceptable. Sondheim himself has, however, always been the toughest of Wcst Side Story critics: though they hardly had to change a single bar of the score during the tryout, and though Bernstein took his name off the posters as co-lyricist out of

' respect for all Sondheim had done, leaving him with sole lyrical credit, he has always had certain reservations about their remarkable joint achievement:

West Side is about the theatre [Sondheim once said] it's not about people. It's a way to tell a story. What was best was its theatricality and its approach to telling a story in musical terms. I had always claimed that it would date vcry quickly. Not because of the subiect-matter, but because of the lack of characters . . . in terms of individual ingredients the show has a lot of very severe flaws: overwriting, purpleness in the writing and in the songs, and because the characters are necessarily one-dimensional.

%at u,as not however the general critical consensus in 1957: West Side Story was hailed as one of the 'crowning masterworks' of the American musical. True, plans for it to be staged at the World's Fair in Brussels, and in the Soviet Union, were abandoned when the American government decided it represented an 'unsuitable' picture of modern Neu. York life, but it entered the repertoire of the Vienna Volksoper in 1968 and is now generally accepted as a classic o f its time. Of the first London production in 1958 Kenneth Tynan wrote:

The score is as smooth and savage as a cobra: it sounds as it Puccini and Stravinsky had gone on a roller-coaster ride into the precincts of modern jazz. Jerome Robbins, the director-zhoreographer. projects the show as a rampaging ballet. with bodies flying through the air as i f shot from guns, leaping, shrieking and somersaulting; yet he finds room for a peaceful dream-sequence, full of that hankering for a golden age that runs right through American

musicals, in which both gangs imagine a paradise where they can touch hands in love, without fear or loss of face . . . Mr Robbins has probably over- stylized a situation too fresh and bloody to respond to such treatment . . . yet the show compromises only on the brink of greatness, and that, surely, is triumph enough

Not all critics, either in London or New York, were so enthusiastic: some thought the racial theme (originally Robbins and Bernstein had considered making the girl Jewish and the boy Catholic, as a sort of musical Abie's lrish Rose) was both wrong and tasteless, but the influential Brooks Atkinson wrote of 'a show which makes a valid and harrowing comment on the life of an American city . . . a superb music drama', and helped by such endorsements West Side Story achieved 732 performances on Broadway (plus an additional 249 after a cross-country tour); in London it did even better, 1,04C performances, before going on to become a six-million-dollar movie (bought for only $300,000) which won a near-record of ten Oscars. Not altogether bad, for a project about which there had been so much initial uncertainty.

But the triumph of West Side Story did not exactly make Sondheim's a household name overnight; despite Bernstein's determination to give him a sole credit line

for the lyrics, most reviews referred to him only in passing, calling it either Bernstein's score or Robbins's show; indeed the greatest attention given to Sondheim was by a lengthy New York Times article just after the first night in which a doctor took him to task for rhyming 'island of tropical breezes' (Puerto Rico) with 'island of tropic diseases'. There had, insisted the doctor, been only one new case of leprosy reported in Puerto Rico that year.

In London, one of the very first to recognize Sondheim's achievement was, predictably enough, Noel Coward; for The Sunday Times a few days after the first night, Harold Hobson reported:

At the end of West Side Story I had a brief encounter with the most comprehensive theatrical genius of our time. When the last of the enraptured audience had left the auditorium, he still remained in his stall overwhelmed in the vortex of his admiration for the vibrant, tingling and clever show we had just been cheering. Gripping me firmly by the hand. 'Harold', he said with a bitter-sweet smile, 'that was great theatre we've had tonight, wasn't i t ? ' 'No,' I replied. He looked at me in astonishment, as

Rita Moreno as Anita in t h e film of West Side Story (1961)

if he thought I had got hay fever at the wrong time of the year. Then so1ici:ude for me swept over him. 'Harold,' he exclaimed, 'do be careful; please, please be careful.' There are not many people whom I would be more loth to disappoint than Mr Noel Coward. So careful I will be. There are some things in West Side Story that are prodigiously skilful . . . but for me those things are not enough . . . West Side Story remains a staggering tour de force, like W a r and Peace translated into Zulu. It is Shakespeare pillaged in pidgin-English.

For the rival Observer, Angus Wilson couldn't decided whether the show was, 'an immensely vital, colourful spectacle of youth with really perceptive undertones of modern violence both horrifying and alluring; or a piece of super-sophisticated kitsch tricked out with vaguely symbolic ballet and pseudo- Menotti arias, the smartest line in pretension for years . . . but luckily the second half of the show is often so superlatively good that it is possible to forgive the genteel, smarty-arty bits of self-conscious "beauty" that make the first half, despite two superb ensemble scenes, drag at fifty miles an hour in a show whose success depends on never going at less than ninety'.

But for Sondheim's lyrics, not a single specific mention in any of the major British reviews; his passionate desire to be his own composer as well a s . lyricist becomes readily understandable when you consider how very little attention was given at that time to the men who 'just wrote the words' in musicals unless, like Hammerstein, they were already part of a well-established and successful team.

Early in 1958, with West Side Story well dug in at the Winter Garden, Sondheim went back to Burt Shevelove and together they started work on an idea of Shevelove's to turn the Roman comedies of Plautus into a musical with words and music by Sondheim, and a book by Shevelove and his television-scripting partner, Larry Gelbart. Sondheim was already three songs into this score (which eventually became A Funny Thing Happened O n The W a y T o The Forum) when news came that two of his old West Side Story partners (Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins) had . reconciled the differences that arose between them during rehearsals of the former show and were already at work on a musical version of the memoirs of the celebrated stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee.

This was in fact a project which had been around

Broadway for quite some months; Cole Porter had turned down an offer to do the score, as had Irving Berlin and, on the lyric front, the ubiquitous Betty Comden and Adolph Green who had also been in the running for West Side Story. Now at last it was agreed that Laurents would do the book and Robbins the pro- duction and choreography; all they needed was a composer. Hearing this, Sondheim presented Robbins with the first part of his score for Forum; impressed, Robbins agreed that he should also do the words and music for Gypsy .

They had however reckoned without Ethel Merman, a formidable Broadway star of the old school and one accustomed to having her say in every stage of a production with which she was to associate her name: this entire project had in fact grown up around her willingness to take the part of Rose, Gypsy's daunting stage mother, and as she put it 'really act for the first time in my career'. Miss Merman did not however plan to put all her eggs in the basket of a still comparatively unknown 28-year-old composer; she would, she said, have no objection to singing Sondheim's words, but for the actual music she'd prefer to rely on a trusted old pro like Jule Styne who already had the music for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Bells Are Ringing and High Button Shoes under his belt.

Sondheim was thus again faced with an unenviable choice: not to do the show at all (and it already had the makings of a smash hit) or to do it as lyricist only. Again he went to Hammerstein, and again it was Hammerstein who urged him into doing it, pointing out that it would mean at most a six-month delay to Forum but once again invaluable Broadway experience. Given the involvement of Merman and Styne, this was clearly going to be a rather less experimental project than West Side Story; Gypsy was in fact a straight-down-to-the-footlights backstage saga of the domineering Rose and her determination to keep her children on the stage. Conceived by Laurents as a kind of manic American Mrs Worthington, Rose finally climbs out of the wreckage of vaudeville to a sort of understanding of what she has done to her children - in real life Gypsy Rose Lee and the actress June Havoc - in the name of her own ambition ('Ready or not, here comes Mama' is the theme of her final number). In that sense, as Sondheim later explained to Craig Zadan, the show was not every Broadway addict's most reassuring evening at the theatre:

Gypsy is not a terribly likeable story. And what makes smash-hit musicals are staries that audiences want to hear " and it's always the same story. How everything turns out terrific in the end and the

audience goes out thinking, 'That's what life's all about'. In My Fair Lady they are told that you, too, can be the belle of the ball even i f you aren't educated - which can mean in your own terms ugly, ungainly, old, whatever. It's the Cinderella story. The Sound of Music says you can have your cake and eat it - you can get away from the Nazis, marry the man of your choice without comprom- ising your religious goodness. Hello Dolly! says that a loud, middle-aged lady can get the man she wants. Now that may sound cynical, but those are fairy stories and they are what make smash hits . . . Gypsy says something fairly hard to take: that every child has eventually to become responsible for his parents. That you outgrow your parents and then eventually they become your children. It's something that everybody knows but no one likes to think about a lot. And that's why Gypsy. at base, in spite of the terrific reviews, wasn't a smash hit.

Rosalind Russell, and finally reached London with Angela Lansbury in the lead exactly fourteen years after Broadway. The first of Sondheim's two 'backstage' scores (the second, with which it has almost nothing in common, was to be Follies), this contains in Merman's very first song a classic example of his ability to move a show along through a single lyric:

Some people can get a thrill Knitting sweaters and sitting still. That's okay for some people who don't know

they're alive. Some people can thrive and bloom Living life in a living-room. That's perfect for some people of one hundred and

five But I at least gotta try! When I think of all the sights that I gotta see yet, All the places I gotta play, All the things that I gotta be yet, Comeon. Poppa, whaddya say! Some people can be content

Gypsy, written in just over five weeks, nevertheless ran just over seven hundred performances on Broadway, was then catastrophically filmed with . .

Playing bingo and paying rent. That's peachy for some people, For some humdrum people to be, But some people ain't me!

Throughout this number Rose is in fact trying to get eighty-eight bucks out of her miserly father (on the original cast LP, Sondheim himself can be heard as the father snarling, 'You ain't getting eighty-eight cents out of me, Rose') so that she can get her girls on the road.

During the Philadelphia tryout, Sondheim, as was still his habit, called Oscar Hammerstein in for some advice as Hugh Fordin reports:

After the show Oscar said, 'I think you have two serious problems.' 'Arthur (Laurents) and I looked at each other.' says Steve, 'and thought, Thank God! Now we don't have to think any more and stay up all night.' 'First,' said Oscar, 'the doorknob to the kitchen keeps falling off all during the first act.' 'Is this the time to make a joke?' Steve retorted. 'No - that's a serious problem,' Oscar replied. 'It interrupts the concentration.' 'But, come on.' said Steve. 'Well, I think you've got to give Ethel a hand at the end of 'Rose's Turn',' Oscar continued. Steve had argued against giving her an applause-getting high note because the character was a woman having a breakdown. 'It seems dishonest to me.' Steve said. 'Yes, it's dishonest,' Oscar explained. 'and it's the kind of dishonesty that you have to take

into account in the theatre, particularly in the musical theatre. Don't forget: there's an audience out there, and they want to applaud. The result of your doing it honestly is that they don't listen to the last two minutes of the show, because they feel so frustrated and cheated. And if you want them to listen to those last two pages of dialogue, then you've got to give them their release at the end of that song. It's dishonest psychologically, but there's another kind of honesty and that has to do with theatre honesty .'

Sondheim and Laurents reluctantly did it Hammer- stein's way and it worked, though some critics thought they should have gone even further and ended the entire show on that number: Gypsy is infinitely better because they didn't.

Tynan, by now writing for the New Yorker, was in the vanguard of the enthusiasm for Gypsy:

Quite apart from considerations of subject-matter, perfection of style can be profoundly moving in its 'own right. If anyone doubts that, he had better rush and buy a ticket for Gypsy, the first half of which brings together in effortless coalition all the arts of the American musical stage at their highest point of development. So smooth is the blending of skills, so precise the interlocking of song, speech and dance, that the sheer contemplation of technique becomes a thrilling emotional experience. It is like being present at the triumphant solution of some harsh architectural problem; stone after massive stone is nudged and juggled into place, with a balance so nice that the finished structure seems as light as an exhalation, though in fact it is earthquake-proof. I have heard of mathematicians who broke down and wept at the sight of certain immaculately poised equations, and I have actually seen a motoring fanatic overcome with feeling when confronted with a vintage Rolls-Royce engine. Gypsy, Act I, confers the same intense pleasure translated into terms of theatre. Nothing about it is superfluous; there is no display of energy for energy's sake. No effort is spared, yet none is wasted. Book, lyrics, music, decor, choreography and cast seem not - as so often occurs - to have.been conscripted into uneasy and unconvinced alliance, but to have come together by irresistible mutual attraction, as if each could not live without the rest. With no strain or dissonance, a machine has been assembled that is ideally fitted to perform this task and no other. Since the task is worthwhile, the result is art.

Sondheim and Laurents, noted Tynan in passing,

'have both brought to their jobs an exemplary mixture of gaiety, warmth and critical intelligence', and if this was indeed a musical Sondheim didn't hugely enjoy working at , then it certainly didn't show from the front. His lyrics betray a marvellous love-hate relationship with the 'old Broadway', so that at any one time he is able to celebrate Rose's chutzpah and to underline the chaos and misery it creates for her family, as here in one of the first of his celebrated 'list' lyrics:

If Momma was married we'd live in a house, As private as private can be: Just Momma, three ducks, five canaries, a mouse, Two monkeys, one father, six turtles and me. If Momma was married . . .

Momma, get out your white dress! You've done it before (Without much success). Momma, God speed and God bless! We're not keeping score, What's one more or less?

But it is at the very end of the show, after the vaudeville soft-shoe nostalgia of Tulsa's 'All I Need Is The Girl' and the strip-tease burlesque of 'You Gotta Have A Gimmick' that Sondheim's lyrics finally turn true acid; by now the neon light reading Gypsy Rose Lee has only the middle word illuminated, and Momma is having her final say:

- Why did I do it? What did it get me? Scrapbooks full of me in the background. Give 'em love and what does it get you? What does it get you? One quick look as each of 'em leaves you. All your life and what does it get you? 'Thanks a lot' and out with the garbage. They take bows and you're battin' zero. I had a dream, I dreamed it for you, June. It wasn't for me, Herbie. And if it wasn't for me, Then where would you be, Miss Gypsy Rose Lee! Well, someone tell me, When is it my turn? Don't I get a dream for myself?

By that time E~hel Merman ('the most relaxed brass section on earth', Tynan called her) wasn't just whistling in the dark, she was positively bellowing in

it, 'a pioneer woman without a frontier', as another of the characters describes her. Tynan thought Gypsy tapered off 'from perfection in the first half to mere brilliance in the second', but neither he nor many other critics of the time seemed much worried by the fundamentally schizoid (Hammerstein would doubt- less have called it 'theatrically honest') nature of a show which holds up Rose for our simultaneous blame and admiration.

When Gypsy did at.last reach the suitably tacky confines of the Piccadilly Theatre in London in 1973, Angela Lansbury (a Sondheim regular who was also to turn up in his Sweeney Todd and had starred in his ill- fated Anyone Can Whistle) took on the numbers as if going into unarmed combat with them. Documentary fact and lyrical fiction go their separate ways during the show, and though the London production was by Arthur Laurents himself, it was bound to seem some- thing of a museum piece in a city which had by that time already suffered Hair and Godspell. But for 'Hold your hats and Hallelujah, Momma's gonna show it to ya!' Angela Lansbury was unbeatable: in an old and ugly red dress, an undeniably ageing and chubby little lady made you believe for the length of that one verse that she could have been the loveliest, sexiest and greatest star of them all - and that, gentle reader, is

what the theatre is all about. In its own way Gypsy is a valedictory, not only for

the old all-American days of burlesque and vaudeville, but also for the old 1950s Broadway: it was the last new show Merman originated along the Great White Way (it won her the New York Critics Award and she stayed with it on Broadway and on the road until the end of 1961). it represented the ending of her era and also Sondheim's only really successful attempt at an old-fashioned musical; by the time i t closed on Broadway, Oscar Hammerstein was dead.

Immediately after the first night of Gypsy, Sondheim went back to work on A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum; the first of his solo Broadway scores, it had arisen out of Burt Shevelove's notion, one he'd been cherishing since his student days at Yale. that there was a musical to be made out of Plautus. Sondheim was eager to work with Shevelove, eager to write a complete score, but increasingly uncertain

Angela Lanshury and friends in the West End i t n g e production of Gypsy (19731

about the project. The more he wrote, the more the songs seemed totally irrelevant to the complex little farces that Shevelove and Larry Gelbart had inter- woven around a stock company of Plautus 'types' - conniving slaves, over-amorous young lovers, grouchy old men, domineering wives, seductive courtesans and bragging soldiers.

Shevelove told him not to worry, remarking that songs like 'Everybody Ought To Have A Maid' didn't have to be viewed or heard as an integral part of the action: they could be interludes, chances for the audience to get its breath back in the midst of slapstick scenes. The result, though it's some way from being Sondheim's most important score, is an important key to all his subsequent work; from Forum onwards, Sondheim's songs tend to have an existence all their own. Printed, they could survive as tone poems or even short stories: the best have beginnings, middles and ends all their own and when they were put together fo r the Side By Side By Sondheim anthology, those of us who at various times narrated that show were intrigued to find that the songs needed very little 'setting up' in terms of the original plots that surrounded them.

Forum reached Broadway in the series of traumatic lurches which seems in retrospect to be an integral part of every successful musical's creative process. Producers, including Leland Hayward and David Merrick, dropped in and out again; finally the property reached Hal Prince's office and Prince persuaded his old mentor George Abbott to direct. Stars, including Phil Silvers, Milton Berle and Red Buttons were considered before the central role of Pseudolus fell to Zero Mostel - against the better judgement of the authors who feared, not without reason, that their carefully crafted musical would rapidly become 'An Evening With Zero'.

The final gypsy runthrough in New York (a chance for other Broadway professionals to have a look at a show before it starts life on tour) went spectacularly, but then Forum opened shakily in New Haven and it died a death in Washington where half a charity- preview audience had walked out before the end. Something was clearly wrong, as Sondheim relates:

We were all totally baffled. We knew we had a brilliant book by Shevelove and Gelbart, maybe the funniest musical ever written and certainly the best farce. I prefer it to Feydeau. But it was a disaster. Usually when you have a show in trouble you can sense what's wrong and why it's not working when you stand at the back. In this case we were totally baffled. Even George Abbott, who had been connected with more farces than anybody, said, 'I

don't know what to do. I like it. They don't like it. I don't know what to do.'

This was the point in the show's history when most producers would have called in George Abbott, a celebrated play doctor. With Abbott already there, they called in Jerome Robbins (of West Side Story and Gypsy) who immediately put his finger on a problem which had already cost a hundred thousand dollars in lost box-office receipts. The trouble, he said, was the opening song, written in response to George Abbott's demand for 'a song they can hum':

Love is in the air Quite clearly. People everywhere Act queerly. Some are hasty, some are halting, Some are simply somersaulting, Love is going around. Anyone exposed Can catch it. Keep your window closed And latch it. Leave your house and lose your reason, This is the contagious season: Love is going around.

Charming, said Robbins, but totally wrong for the low comedy that was to follow; no wonder the audience had seemed confused. Sondheim had another opener up his sleeve:

Gods of the theatre, smile on us, You who sit up there stern in judgement, smile on

us. You who look down on actors (and who doesn't.?) Bless our little company and smile on us.

Wrong again, said Robbins; what was needed was a song which would make the audience feel at home with the ensuing revels, and go some way towards explaining the mood of the evening. The solution was of course Sondheim's third try, 'Comedy Tonight':

Something familiar, something peculiar, Something for everyone, a co.medy tonight! Something appealing, Something appalling, Something for everyone, a comedy tonight! Nothing with kings, nothing with crowns. Bring on the lovers, liars and clowns! Old situatipns, new complicati'ons, Nothing portentous or polite; Tragedy tomorrow, Comedy tonight!

'We put that new opening in at the first New York preview,' said Sondheim later, 'and it was cheers and laughter throughout the entire evening at the same lines the audience had rece~ved in silence four days earlier in Washington. That's the difference an opening can make - of course. it's also an advantage to have one staged by lerry Robbins - but at least this one told the audience what the show was going to be about .'

Zero ?Lloitc! niidliirk Grltoiri i . :0 r . I I + : Funny Thing Happened On T ~ P \Yay To T ~ P Forum (19661

A Funny Thing Happened O n Tlie Way To The Forum opened at the Alvin Theatre on Broadway on 8 May 1962. and lasted for 964 New York performances. Then, following the immutable law of Sondheim shows, it was inadequately filmed (this time by Dick Lester) and eventually reached London where it gave Frankie Howerd the biggest success of his career and led him more or less directly to a seemingly endless BBC television half-hour comedy series called Up Pompeii, which bore to say the least a passing resemblance to the work he'd done in Forum.

The original show was not exactly ashamed of cheap laughs: 'Carry my bust with pride.' says a Roman matron to her slave, referring of course to a piece of sculpture, while a little later a cocrtesan tells a n angry eunuch, 'Don't you dare lower your voice to me:' but

it remained consistently true to the spirit if not the letter of Plautus, and its success even led to an off- Broadway revival of The Boys From Syracuse. another musical indirectly derived from Plautus, this time by way of the Shakespeare Coinedy of Errors.

Reviews were generally very good, though Howard Taubman noted with a slight sense of deprivation that nobody even started on his way to the Forum, let alone had anything happen en route. But for the British press Barnard Levin wrote, characteristically eccentrically, of 'the best musical since Guys t~ Dolls', and when the show was revived on Broadway in 1972 Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Tbnes of 'the funniest, bawdiest and most enchanting Broadway musical that Plautus, with a little help from Stephen Sondheim, Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, ever wrote . . . Mr Sondheim's music is original and charming, with considerable musical subtlety but a regard for down-to-earth showbiz vigour that is precisely what is needed. And, as always, his lyrics are a joy to listen for. The American theatre has not had a lyricist like this since Hart or Porter'.

With another success behind him (for a man then just thirty-two to have as his first three Broadway shows. two which ran over 700 performances and one which ran over 900 must constitute some sort of a record) Sondheim then turned his attention to a still more ambitious project. Like Gypsy and West Side i t was to be written in partnership with Arthur Laurents; unlike them it was to be a total invention. based on no previously existing material. Originally announced as The Natives Are Restless in October 1961, i t had soon become Side Show and finally opened on Broadway on 4 April 1964 as Anyone Cari Whistle. It closed there on 11 April 1964 after a run of just nine performances to a total loss of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

But Anyone Can Whistle has become something of a cult since then: the original cast LP (made after the show had closed by Goddard Lieberson at Columbia Records, who felt obliged to have a permanent record of it despite the fact that his contract said it didn't have to be immortalized on disc i f it was a flop - and this was some flop) has now been reissued, and legend has it that those few, those happy few, who actually caught the show have annual reunion dinners at which they discuss what went wrong.

The easy answer is that it was ahead of its time: as David Smith once wrote:

It has had more influence on the development of the contemporary musical theatre than dozens of more commercially successful shows. It helped sow the seeds of discontent with a once fresh and vital art

form that had begun to atrophy with convention, to shine a light through a glut of tuneful but essentially mindless mediocrities that littered the musical stages of the 1960s. It posed new challenges to librettists who made money by stringing songs to one-liners and writing caricatures instead of characters. And it began to establish a criterion on which a musical score should be based: is a good score just some- thing you can hum on your way out of the theatre? Or shouldn't it accomplish some development of tone or characterization?

Anyone Can Whistle was the story of Cora (played by Angela Lansbury) mayoress of a corrupt and bank- rupt town where a tourist 'miracle' is created: water flows from a rock. To the rock comes Nurse Apple (Lee Remick) with her loonies from the town's mental asylum, known as the Cookie Jar. The loonies and the sane citizens then mix, a doctor thought to belong to the latter group turns out to have come from the former, another miracle is discovered in a nearby town, and the tourists then move on there.

So much for plot: synopses are almost always unfair, and clearly there was a great deal more to Anyone Can Whistle than the image of a rather fey whimsy that might be gathered by those of us who never saw it: how many other nine-night flops are still being discussed with such passion fifteen years later? Starting with a Hugh Martin-Kay Thompson pastiche ('Last week a flood, this week a drought/Even the locusts want to get out/But me and my town, we never pout/We just wanna be loved!') the first of several pastiches Sondheim was to write in shows thereafter, his score went on to better things:

Everybody says don't, Everybody says don't, Everybody says don't - it isn't right, Don't - it isn't nice!

Everybody says don't, Everybody says don't, Everybody says don't walk on the grass, Don't disturb the peace, Don't skate on the ice.

Well, I

Say Do. I say Walk on the grass, it was meant to feel! I Say Sail! Tilt at the windmill,

And if you fail, you fail

Everybody says don't, Everybody says don't, Everybody says don't get out of line.

When they say that, then, Lady, that's a sign:

Nine times out of ten, Lady, you are doing just fine.

Make just a ripple. Come on, be brave. This time a ripple, Next time a wave. Sometimes you have to start small, Climbing the tiniest wall, Maybe you're going to fall - But it's better than not starting at all . . .

Everybody says don't. Everybody says can't. Everybody says wait around for miracles, That's the way the world is made! I insist on Miracles, if you do them, Miracles - nothing to them! I say don't: Don't be afraid!

In 1964, the year of Hello Dolly! and Funny Girl (which at one point Sondheim had been asked to write for Mary Martin) and Fiddler on the Roof, it's easy to see that musical and lyrical innovation wasn't exactly what the customers were demanding along Broadway. Some critics, it's true, were ecstatic: 'It's not simply,' wrote Martin Gottfried, then of Women's Wear Daily, 'that Anyone Can Whistle is a brilliantly inventive musical . . . it is a ringingly bright shout for individuality and, because it is so individual itself, it is whole, it is fresh, it is new and it is perfectly wonderful.' 'If Anyone Can Whistle is a success,' wrote another Broadway critic, 'the American musical theatre will have advanced itself and prepared the way for further breakdown of now old and worn techniques and points of yiew. If it is not a success, we sink back into the old formula method and must wait for the breakthrough.'

Intriguingly, some of the backing for Anyone Can Whistle had come from four of the pillars of the old- style Broadway musical: Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser and Jule Styne. Their faith was however not shared by the major Broadway reviewers: 'An exasperating musical comedy,' wrote Walter Kerr, 'wh9ch is neither very musical nor very comical.' So much for the influential New York Times;

for the mass-circulation Post, Richard Watts said the show was 'ponderously heavy-handed and clumsily vague in its presentation of a somewhat obscure thesis'.

Things might have worked out a little better if Arthur Laurents (who was directing his own book) had been granted the extra rehearsal time he'd asked for before the official first night; despite a fist-fight in Shubert Alley between him and the producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, this was not forthcoming. But not even all of Sondheim's greatest supporters are convinced of the show's merits: .Hal Prince, producer of West Side Story and Forum and the man who was to produce and direct all of Sondheim's major shows from Company onwards, stayed far away from this one, reckoning that the songs needed to be 'more accessible' to an audience and that the book was 'a little too cerebral and a trifle smart-ass'.

Sondheim's fourth Broadway show, and so far his only total commercial disaster (several other shows have cost a great deal more, but even those which have not yet totally recouped stand a better chance of doing so in the end) did not harm his alliance with Arthur Laurents; indeed as soon as Anyone Can Whistle closed they went to work again. This time it was to be a mistake artistically as well as commercially.

Do 1 Hear A Waltz?, unkindly nicknamed by at least one critic 'Dearth in Venice', was a show on which Sondheim worked against his own better judgement and as the repayment for a series of debts. The script had started out in 1952 as a successful Arthur Laurents straight play called The Time of The Cuckoo; three years later Katharine Hepburn and the then newly discovered Rossano Brazzi filmed it as, variously, Summertime and Summertime in Venice. It was the one about the frigid American lady unable to accept an Italian lover, and its continued success on stage and screen led inevitably to the suggestion of a musical at a time when Broadway was still crammed with such conversion jobs.

So far, so fairly good; except that Richard Rodgers had agreed to write the music and was in need of a lyricist. Sondheim had vowed never again to go back to doing just lyrics; on the other hand, he had reason to believe that i t was the dying Oscar Hammerstein who had planted in Rodgers' mind the idea of a joint Rodgers-Sondheim venture, and in that sense there was obviously an obligation of sorts. Moreover it had been through Arthur Laurents that Sondheim had got

his job on West Side Story and therefore on Gypsy. too: now Laurents and Rodgers were asking for his lyrics, there was not a lot Sondheim could do but supply them as requested.

For the central role (one created on stage by Shirley Booth and on film by Hepburn) there was talk of Anne Bancroft and Mary Martin, but it ultimately fell to the somewhat less starry Elizabeth Allen; for the director, John Dexter of the National Theatre was selected. The result was, as Frederick Nolan reports, a fair old shambles:

Insecurities lurking just beneath the skin erupted; cracks which had been papered over reappeared. The show was in a mess because it had no real raison d'etre. By the time they opened in New Haven for the tryout on 1 February 1965, they knew they had to do something drastic. Herbert Ross was brought in to assist in the enormous job of putting some dances into a danceless show, but he found he could make little headway. The factions had polarized. Rodgers was insisting that the roles be played sentimentally; Laurents and Sondheim wanted a tough, dry interpretation. Liz Allen was in shreds, Sergio Franchi (as the Italian lover) sterile: they had nothing to work with. When Rodgers would come into the theatre, everyone would say, 'Here comes Godzilla.' Rodgers himself hated the whole in-crowd atmosphere and was scathing about many of Sondheim's offerings. One day, out of town, Sondheim came in with a new lyric. In front of the entire company Rodgers said, 'This is shit!' Since he was the producer as well as the composer, what he said was law, so many of the faults of Do I Hear A Waltz? must be laid at his door . . . Rodgers and Hammerstein were sensational producers. Rodgers alone appears to have been less sensational.

Traditionally, Sondheim supporters therefore ignore his work on Do I Hear A Waltz? ('streetwalking', said Burt Shevelove) which is a pity, as there are one or two vintage lyrics including this, on the subject of airline food:

The shiny stuff is tomatoes, The salad lies in a group, The curly stuff is potatoes, The stuff that moves is soup

Anything that is white is sweet, Anything that is brown is meat, Anything that is grey - don't eat!

This score also contains the much-cut version of a

Sondheim lyric which would not have looked out O F place in his subsequent Company, one indeed that I believe Coward himself would have been thoroughly proud OF; called 'We're Gonna Be All Right', it ended originally:

She once was quite well read, He once was intellectual, No one's suspicious - they're gonna be all right. She's nice and sweet and dead, He's tall and ineffectual, They look delicious - they're gonna be all right. Who's on the skids? She goes to night school, If it's the right school He'll permit her. They love their kids, They love their friends too, Lately he tends to Hit her. Sometimes she drinks in bed, Sometimes he's homosexual, But why be vicious? They keep it out of sight. Good show - they're gonna be all right. And so - they're gonna be all right. Hi ho - we're gonna be all right.

In fact, Do I Hear A Waltz? survived six months on Broadway and recouped at . least part of its 450- thousand dollar costs thanks to hefty advance bookings on the strength of the Rodgers' name. Sadly, it put an end to whatever friendship there had once been between Rodgers and Sondheim; the latter recently explained the magical R and H partnership by noting that 'where Hammerstein was a man of limited talent but infinite soul, Rodgers is a man of infinite talent and limited soul'. Rodgers, in his autobiography, gives a scant two of three hundred pages to Do I Hear A Waltz? noting sadly: 'The more we worked on the show, the more estranged I became from Sondheim and Laurents. Any suggestions I made were promptly rejected, as if by prearrangement. I can't say that all this tension was to blame for the production being less than the acclaimed triumph we had hoped for, but it certainly didn't help. Do I Hear A Waltz? was not a satisfying experience.' Just before its Broadway opening, he went a little further, noting, 'The first time I saw Stephen Sondheim was when I was working on Oklahoma! in 1942 . . . I watched him grow From an attractive little boy into a monster.' So much for the Rodgers and Sondheim partnership: Do I Hear A Waltz? had the shortest Broadway run of any Richard Rodgers musical in a quarter of a century,

and has never been seen in London. It was now 1965: Sondheim, just thirty-Five, had in

the past decade seen five of his shows on Broadway - three big hits Followed by two big Flops. For his next project, one not in fact destined to reach the stage until after Company six years later (and then in a radically different form), he turned to an idea by his friend the playwright James Goldnan. Goldman had read, in the New York Times, of the existence of an old Ziegfeld Girls reunion club, and it struck him as the basis for a show. He and Sondheim went to work on i t , and had by the end of 1965 got a draft together for a musical to be called The Girls Upstairs - book by James Goldman, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. At that point the project came to an almost total standstill due at first to a lack of producers. Sondheim's first thought had of course been Hal Prince, but Prince by now wished to direct as well as produce and that did not at the time suit Sondheim; the show was then offered to David Merrick and Leland Hayward as a team. Merrick said he wouldn't work with Hayward, Hayward said he couldn't raise the money alone, and there The Girls Upstairs rested for the next two years.

Meanwhile, ABC Television had started an unusual and somewhat untypical series of tape telecasts called Stage 67 for which they invited well-known Broadway composers to come up with original television musitals. The one that Sondheim and Goldman came up. with was nothing if not unusual'. It was called .

Evening Primrose: . 'ABC Television will captivate you tonight,' said an

ad in the New York. Times for 16 November 1966, :Anthony Perkins stars in a musical play 'about a mystical night society . . . Inside a department store, fleeing from the pressures of the outside world, an unhappy poet is at last alone. But not quite. In his new-found sanctuary, he suddenly comes across a group of hermits who've been hiding there for years. Among them, a young girl with whom he falls in love . . . an eerie and charming story.'

Not .everybody agreed: 'Richer in promise than. realization,' said the New York Times, while the Daily News thought that Sondheim's score 'lacked the bounce of Forum . . . Evening Primrose was-a flower . that withered before it could bloom.'

Nevertheless, as the first-ever musical horror story to be shot in a department store (and quite possibly also the last) Evening Primrose did have its addicts; it also allowed Sondheim to write some of his most haunting lyrics for one of the girl 'hermits' trying to recall the sights and sounds of the outside world:

I remember sky, It was blue as ink

O r at least I think I remember sky. I remember snow, Soft as feathers, Sharp as thumb tacks, cbming down like lint, And it made you squint When the wind would blow. And ice, like vinyl, on the streets, Cold as silver, White as sheets. Rain like strings And changing things like leaves. I remember leaves, Green as spearmint, Crisp as paper. I remember trees, Bare as coat racks, Spread like broken umbrellas.

And parks and bridges, Ponds and zoos, Ruddy faces, Muddy shoes,

. Light and noise . And bees and boys Anddays. I remember days, Or at-least I try. But as years gb by . They're a sort of haze. And the bluest ink . Isn't really sky, And at times I think I would gladly die For a day of sky.

Sondheim's next project cost him three months and came to nothing, but has a certain fascination and a guaranteed place in the annals of intriguing shows that never were: for the Jerome Robbins American Theatre

. Lab, Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein and the playwright 'John Guare were to cojlaborate on a musical version of Brecht's The ~xcep t ion and the Rule. .Sondheimls loathing for Brecht was overcome by the enthusiasm

, of John Guare for the project, and the New York Times announced that it would open on Broadway in early 1969 'with a chamber orchestra positioned around the stage in groups, lots of amplification and some electronic music: Zero Mostel will star'.

It never happened: eight or nine songs into the score Sondheim grew discouraged and went back to work with Goldman on their everlasting Girls Upstairs. Then, as Hal Prince reports, something else came up:

George Furth, the actor, had written eleven one-act plays. Under the title Company they were to be presented by another management in New York starring Kim Stanley, as an evening of straight plays. There was nothing connective about tl-\em except the presence of this one glorious lady. Sondheim, a friend of Furth's, felt there was some- thing wrong with the scheme and asked whether Furth would object to sending the plays to me for advice. I was knocked out by them, seeing a potential musical which could examine attitudes towards marriage, the influence upon it of life in the cities, and collateral problems of especial interest to those of us in our forties. I suggested this much to Steve over the telephone and he agreed to do it. Just like that.

With The Girls Upstairs still in a state of only near- readiness, Sondheim went to work on Company - the show that I believe still represents his greatest claim to fame. Since they had last worked together on Forum, Prince had taken to directing'as well as producing (he had done She ~ o v e ; Me, Baker Street, Zorba and 'above all Cabaret) and he had certain.very clear ideas about what he wanted here:,

' 'Company was the'first musical I had done without conventional plot or subject structure. The first .without hero or heroine, without the comic-relief .couple' . . . we constructed a .framework of. gatherings .for Robert's fhirty-fifth birthday, each appearing to be'the same but dynamically different . from the others. Pinteresque in feeling, the first was giddy, somewhat hysterical; t'he second (at the end of Act I) an abbreviated version of the first; the third hostile and staccato; and the final one, the end of the show, warm, loving, mature. Since Robert never arrives for the final celebration, there was some question whether they represented one birthday o r a succession of them. I am certain they were one. I wouldn't be surprised if George Furth believes there were four. It doesn't matter.

With .choreography, by Michael Bennett (who went on to direct.A Chorus Line and Ballroom) and a cast headed by Elaine Stritch and Dean Jones (Anthony Perkins had first been announced for this role, and Jones was replaced at his own request very soon after the first night by Larry Kert), Company opened on Broadway, 26 April 1970 and ran there for 706 perfor- mances, turning in a final profit of 56 thousand dollars. By way of comparison, West Side Story had made just over a million dollars and Forum had made just over 370,000. So, financially, it was no

blockbuster; but, to go back to the distinctions Sondheim drew at the time of Gypsy, Company is not one of your 'reassuring' shows.

Conlpany tried out in Boston to a distinctly mixed reception: Kevin Kelly for the Globe recognized i t immediately for what it was. 'a classic of the American theatre' but the Variety critic felt 'the songs are for the most part undistinguished and it is obvious that the author. George Furth, hates fenlmes and makes them all out to beconniving, cunning, cantankerous and cute . . . as it stands now it's for ladies' matinees, homos and mysogynists'. But then again Variety has never been the best or most accurate guide to Sondheim: West Side Story, they forecast, 'seems a doubtful prospect for record-album popularity. It would need considerable revision as film material. At a guess, it might be a sensation in London'. Well, they got the last bit right anyway.

No one has ever really been sure whether, in the end. Company is pro- or anti-marriage: Prince swears that the intention was 'a fervent plea for marriage' but Robert is still a bachelor at the final curtain and of the married friends that he visits in the course of the action.

'L, comes Company': Broadioay and Lotiiioti (1970-721

one couple are hooked on pot, another are frenetic dieters and the third can only find themselves in discotheques. To Clive Barnes, Company was 'a very New York show which will be particularly popular with tourists . . . who will get a kind of insight into New York's jungle'. 'As a work of art,' added Henry Hewes. 'it has remarkably distilled the essence of today's middle-generation New York life.'

But Company was even more than that: it contained, for instance, the best song about the reality of the urban jungle I've yet encountered:

Another hundred people just got off of the train And came up through the ground, While another hundred people just got off of the bus And are looking around At another hundred people who got off of the plane And are looking at us Who got off of the train And the plane and the bus Maybe yesterday. It's a city of strangers, Some come to work, some to play, A city of strangers, Some come to stare, some to stay; And every day The ones who stay

Can find each other in the crowded streets and the guarded parks,

By the rusty fountains and the dusty trees with the battered barks;

And they walk together past the postered walls with the crude remarks.

And they meet at parties through the friends of friends who they never know;

Will you pick me up, or shall I meet you there, or do we let it go?

Did you get my message, 'Cause I looked in vain? Can we see each other Tuesday, if it doesn't rain? Look, 1'11 call you in the morning, or my service will

explain. And another hundred people just got off of the train.

When the show opened in London in January 1972, John Higgins for The Times found it 'as Manhattan in flavour as Sardi's on a Friday night or the bullet-proof partition of a Yellow Cab', and other critics, there more than on Broadway, revelled in the Andrews Sisters as tic he ('You Could Drive A Person Crazy') and the indirect tribute to Coward in Stritch's 'The Ladies Who Lunch'. Michael Billington for the Guardian saw Company as the dawn of a new era and, thankfully, the end of 'superannuated star ladies swanning down spectacular staircases round about 9.32'.

But nothing is ever that simple, and less than a decade later one of the alibis being put forward for the success of the schmaltz-nostalgia show Annie was that it represented 'a welcome break' from the 'too clever by half' shows of Prince and Sondheim. Even in its own time, Company drew forth some hostility, and not only from Variety: Barnes, having raved about Sondheim's lyrics, went on, 'Yet the result is slick, clever, and eclectic rather than exciting. It's the kind of musical that makes me say "Oh Yeah?" rather than "Gee Whiz!".' The following Sunday, again in The Times, Walter Kerr did much the same review: raves for Sondheim and Prince followed by a killing last line: 'Now ask me if I liked the show. I didn't like the show. I admired it . . . Personally, I'm sorry - grateful.' As a result, Company played to half-empty houses for some of its twenty-month Broadway run, recouping its costs with a profit but never becoming the sell-out smash that it so richly deserved to have been.

Perhaps it was the ambiguity over Bobby himself (many came out of the theatre convinced he had to be homosexual) or over the show's attitudes to marriage, nowhere better expressed than in 'Sorry-Grateful':

You're always sorry, You're always grateful,

You're always wondering what might have been, Then she walks in . . . Everything's different, Nothing's changed, Only maybe slightly Rearranged. You're sorry-grateful, Regretful-happy, Why look for answers where none occur? You always are what you always were, Which has nothing to do with, All to do with her.

There is of course no answer to that, nor is there a resolution; but the show had to reach one (and it couldn't just be 'Here is the church and here is the steeple/Open the door and see all the crazy married people'). Sondheim found himself working through three complete drafts of the final number:

Out of town with Company we had a lot of trouble with the ending, and there was a song called 'Happily Ever After' that Robert sang - it was the character's climactic self-discovery. It struck a number of people as being too bitter, and Hal Prince kept using the word 'negative' to me all the time.

Other possible endings they tried out included one number called 'Marry Me A Little', which ended 'I'm ready, I'm ready/I1m ready now', but the one they finished up with was the classic 'Being Alive':

Somebody hold me too close, Somebody hurt me too deep, Somebody sit in my chair And ruin my sleep And make me aware Of being alive, being alive. Somebody need me too much, Somebody know me too well, Somebody pull me up short And put me through hell And give me support For being alive, Make me alive, Make me alive. Make me confused, Mock me with praise, Let me be used, Vary my days. But alone is alone, not alive. Somebody crowd me with love, Somebody force me to care, Somebody let me come through, I'll always be there

As frightened as you, To help us survive Being alive, being alive, being alive!

And that wasn't all: the Company score also included 'Barcelona', not so much a song as a short story about an airline hostess and her eventual decision to stay with Bobby rather than go fly a plane, one he then views with a mixture of horror and terror. For Company, the score was the show, which is not to denigrate either Hal Prince's production or Boris Aronson's all-steel-and-Plexiglas settings, but merely to suggest that here was the Sondheim-Prince philosophy of 'the new musical' made flesh.

With Company off and running, Sondheim and Prince were able to turn back to The Girls Upstairs; Prince had by now agreed to take over both the production and the direction, and set about a few radical alterations:

I suddenly realized that the characters had to be made big . . . I mean, the Ben and Phyllis characters are the Kennedy fellow and the Kennedy wife. They're a king and queen. Well, if Goldman could write that king and queen in Lion in Winter, he could write these characters for me. This show is not The Girls Upstairs, this show is Follies.

And from that realization, Follies took off: Prince brought in Michael Bennett, his choreographer on c o m p a n y , as co-director and set about turning what had been a small-scale naturalistic play into something altogether more surreal. An original murder plot was dropped, but the characters and four of Sondheim's original songs were kept to form the basis for the new show. A press photograph of Gloria Swanson standing in the rubble of the Roxy Theatre she had herself opened back in the twenties became the 'image' of the show and from there through the summer of 1970 was constructed an extraordinary epitaph for a public and private era.

Even the title, Follies, was deliberately ambiguous and multi-resonant: To American audiences it meant of course Ziegfeld, to the English (those lucky enough to get to Broadway at any rate) it meant a kind of grandeur, and to the French it meant a kind of lunacy. 'Welcome,' said the Ziegfeld figure as the show started, 'to our first - and last - reunion: a final chance before my theatre comes down to stumble through a song or two and lie about ourselves a little.'

From there on in Sondheim's score was a mixture of private-relationship songs and showbiz pastiches: within the course of this one single evening he managed to parody Irving Berlin ('Beautiful Girls'), Mistinguette ('Ah, Paree!'), vaudeville ('Buddy's Blues') and de Sylva, Brown and Henderson ('Broadway Baby'). But there was more to Follies than conscious nostalgia: there was a very real attempt to explore memory, to look through the distorting mirrors of time present and time past. It was about illusion and reality: the only wonder is that nobody led them to Pirandello, though Sondheim does acknowledge a 'Pirandellian effect' in the climax of Follies.

The casting of Follies was also a work of art: the company included Ethel Barrymore Colt (no, no, the daughter), Alexis Smith, Gene Nelson, Yvonne de Carlo and Fifi d'Orsay from vintage Hollywood movies, Dorothy Collins who'd been a lead singer on The Hit Parade, Mary McCarthy from Miss Liberty and Ethel Shutta who had once been Eddie Cantor's leading lady. To add a touch of classical class there was also the veteran Shakespearian, Arnold Moss.

The whole show was set out on the bare stage of the theatre in demolition, its four principal characters were all ageing and the victims of crumbling marriages. But gradually, as the play progressed, they were depicted as they once were by four younger people: the 'memory' characters were dressed only in black and white, as in old movies on television, and after a lavish showgirl sequence the four principals were left alone to face their own realities in the empty theatre.

Follies opened on 4 April 1971 after an uneasy tryout in Boston; Variety as usual hated it: 'Too many characters, too many leading players, too many scenes and the most bewildering plot-line in years,' and even the more thoughtful Elliot Norton had his doubts: 'Harold Prince's new Follies is, when it sings and dances, generally exuberant and exhilarating and ingenious and extraordinary entertainment. When it talks, however, when its four principals thrash out the follies of their love lives, it is bitter and shallow.'

On the way to Broadway a number of good songs got slung out of Follies which was clearly suffering an embarrassment of some kind of riches; among the cuts was this one:

I know this grocery clerk, Unprepossessing. Some think the boy's a jerk, They have my blessing. But when he starts to move, He aims to please,

Which only goes to prove That sometimes in a clerk you find a Hercules. He hasn't much that's plus, You might describe him thus: A false alarm, A broken arm, An imitation Hitler and with littler charm, But oh, can that boy fox trot! His mouth is mean, He's not too clean. What makes him look reptilian is the brilliantine, But oh, can that boy fox trot! Who knows what I saw in him? 1 took a chance. Oh yes, one more flaw in him: He can't dance. As dumbbells go, He's rather slow, And as for being saintly, even faintly, no, But who needs Albert Schweitzer when the lights are

low? And oh boy, oh boy, Can that boy fox trot!

There are those of us who, after careful consideration, have reached the conclusion that this in fact is not a song about the ability to fox trot at all.

Because Yvonne de Carlo found it an impossible number to manage, Sondheim slung it out and wrote her another; this one perhaps the best in the whole score, managing as it does to encapsulate one entire Hollywood career in the space of a few lines:

Good times and bum times, I've seen them all and, my dear, I'm still here . . . I got through A bie's Irish Rose, Five Dionne babies, Major Bowes . . . I've gotten through Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover, Gee, that was fun and a half. When you've been through Herbert and J. Edgar

Hoover, Anything else is a laugh. I've been through Reno, I've been through Beverly Hills, And I'm here. Reefers and vino, Rest cures, religion and pills, But I'm here. Been called a pinko Commie tool, Got through it stinko By my pool.

I should have gone to an acting school, That seems clear. Still someone said, 'She's sincere,' So I'm here . . . First you're another Sloe-eyed vamp, Then someone's mother, Then you're camp . . .

'Brilliant and breathtaking,' said the Daily News when Follies reached New York, 'it is unlikely that the tools and resources of the Broadway musical theatre have ever been used to more cunning effect than in this richly imaginative score.' Walter Kerr for The Sunday Times disagreed: 'Follies is intermissionless and exhausting, an extravaganza that becomes tedious.' John Simon, writing in New York (ironically the magazine for which Sondheim used to construct devilish crossword puzzles, and the magazine which might in its urban and urbane literacy have been expected to be most symphathetic to what he was up to) went straight for the jugular:

The concocters of Follies and the champions of the show vie with one another in denying its basis in camp and nostalgia. Instead, we are told about Proustian overtones, the New Plotless Musical, time as the sole subject matter, the Past as a metaphor for . . . 1 forget what, a Fellini phantasmagoria translated to the musical stage, and more such pion- eering palaver. The truth, as I see it, is that some eight hundred thousand dollars were spent on visual opulence, the digging up of old favourites of stage, screen and television, and a large cast of oldsters and youngsters whooping it up with agility or endearing arthritis all over an immense stage. The music and lyrics tend, however remotely, and distortingly, to sound like the good (i.e. bad) old stuff; and to see venerable crones capering about and hear them belting out numbers announcing they have survived everything from Franz Lehar to J. Edgar Hoover is agelessness equally irresistible to ageing burghers and to pederasts clinging desperately to their youth. So, despite some up-to- date inventiveness, Follies reeks with nostalgia, and the epochal innovations claimed for it ring in my ears like the sound of protesting too much.

All of which is to ignore, or at least sidestep, the ice- cold brilliance of a lyric like:

Leave you? Leave you? How could I leave you?

How could I go i t alone? Could I wave the years away with a quick

goodbye? How do you wipe tears away when your eyes are

dry? Sweetheart, lover, could I recover, Give up the joys I have known? Not to fetch your pills again Every day at five? Not to give those dinners for ten Elderly men from the U.N. - How could I survive? . . . Leave you? Leave you? How could 1 leave you? What would I do on my own? Putting thoughts of you aside In the South of France, Would I think of suicide? Darling, shall we dance? Could I live through the pain On a terrace in Spain? Would it pass? It would pass. Could I bury my rage With a boy half your age In the grass? Bet your ass. But I've done that already, O r didn't you know, love? Tell me, how could I leave When I left long ago, love? . . . I'll take the grand, sugar, you keep the spinet And all of our friends and . . . just wait a goddam

minute! Oh, leave you? Leave you? How could I leave you? Sweetheart, I have to confess: Could I leave you? Yes. Will I leave you? Will I leave you? Guess!

Follies won a total of 8 Tony Awards, ran 521 performances on Broadway and lost its backers something in the region of 665 thousand dollars, that is to say only 100 thousand dollars less than its total capital cost. It was, to put i t mildly, a phenomemally costly show to run: the weekly budget came in at 80 thousand dollars, even with the authors on voluntary cuts. Hal Prince: 'I am happy that I did Follies. I could not do i t again because I could not in all conscience raise the money for it.' A writer on the Harvard Crimson added: 'Follies is a musical about the death of the musical . . . its creators are in essence

presenting their own funeral.' Not quite: with Follies still running on Broadway

(though seldom to capacity) Prince and Sondheim remembered an early idea they'd once wanted to do with Arthur Laurents - the musicalization of Anouilh's Ring Round The Moon. Prince was parti- cularly keen to do a romantic musical and, when the Anouilh rights proved unavailable, they all began to think about other scripts involving a weekend, a summer house, a play within the play, an old lady in a wheelchair and lovers 'in varying degrees of frus- tration'. Surprisingly, there are two others which f i t precisely those demands: Pirandello's Rules of the Gan~e, and Ingmar Bergman's Svziles of a Summer Night. They settled for the latter. Ingmar Bergman, who had made his film in 1955, agreed on condition that their musical was to be 'suggested by' rather than strictly 'based on' his original. The show that emerged was A Little Night Music. Hal Prince:

Our initial plan was to tell the story of a group of diverse people converging for a weekend in the country. The first act was to introduce the characters and many subplots and was to end with their arrival at an elegant country house. In the second, we were to see three different solutions to the tangled relationships: one melodramatic, the second farcical and the third (the real one) consistent with the style of the first act. A Little Night Music suggested a Magritte painting to me. Figures ,. . . anomalies in a landscape . . . Steve talked of waltzes, the entire score in three-quarter time . . . We wanted to do a hind of Chekhovian musical, realizing that would mean considerable exposition in the beginning, moving slowly, no big opening number, but we hoped in time we would draw our audience into i t .

And they did: by way of Bergman, Magritte and Chekhov A Little Night Music took shape through 1972. It was budgeted at 650 thousand dollars, almost exactly the amount the Prince office had lost on Follies and not therefore money that came to them easily: Sondheim and Prince were no longer the golden Broadway boys but a couple of 'risk-takers' at a time when the rest of Broadway was in headlong flight back to the safety of revamped 1950s revivals. But A Little Night Music had a lot going for i t : one of Sondheim's most lyrical and at the same time operatic scores and a strong cast headed by Glynis Johns and Hermione Gingold; Miss Johns was replaced for London by Jean Simmons and for the - still largely unseen - film by Elizabeth Taylor, but the redoubtable Miss Gingold (in the role originally offered to Edith Evans) remained a

constant fixture on stage and screen, making of Madame Armfeldt an unforgettable grande dame, singer of perhaps the best lyric in the show:

At the villa of the Baron de Signac; ' Where 1 spent a somewhat infamous year, At the villa of the Baron de Signac I had ladies in attendance, Fire-opal pendants . . . Liaisons! What's happened to them, Liaisons today? Disgraceful! What's become of them? Some of them Hardly pay their shoddy way. What once was a rare champagne is now just an amiable hock, What once was a villa, at least, Is 'digs' . . . What once was a gown with train

. Is now just a simple little frock, What once was a sumptuous feast Is figs. No, not even figs - raisins. Ah, liaisons! Where was I? . . . oh, yes . . . At the palace of the Duke of Ferrara, Who was prematurely deaf but a dear, At the palace of the Duke of Ferrara I acquired some position Plus a tiny Titian . . . Liaisons! What's happened to them, Liaisons today? To see them - indiscriminate Women, it Pains me more than I can say, The lack of taste that they display. Where is style? Where is skill? Where is forethought? Where's discretion of the heart, Where's passion in the art, Where's craft? With a smile And a will But with more thought, I acquired a chateau Extravagantly o- verstaffed . . .

'I can't wait to sing that song in London,' Miss Gingold told me soon after the Broadway opening of A Little Night Music; 'there, you see, they'll know what liaisons are.'

But i t wasn't in fact that song which made the

fortunes of the show: the song which did that is, to date, Sondheim's only-ever entry into the inter- national hit parades. He has never been a 'popular' composer in that sense, nor has he often written songs which could have any life outside the original scores for which they were conceived. Once, during the writing of Gypsy , he came up with a lyric which ran' 'Funny - I'm a woman with children', and patiently Jule Styne tried to explain to him the laws of the commercial song-writing world: you never wrote a line like that, because, if you did, a male singer couldn't ever sing it and there were half of all your recording chances blown. The line stayed as Sondheim wrote it, and Sondheim's one big commercial hit arose almost accidentally out of a feeling by Hal Prince that for A Little Night Music the star role, DesirCe, originally conceived as virtually non-singing, might be helped by a single song in the second act.

'So', says Sondheim 'that night, after rehearsal, I went home and wrote her a little throwaway song.' It started:

Isn't i t rich? Are we a pair? Me here at last on the ground, You in midair. Send in the clowns.

There are, I believe, better songs than that in A Little Night Music, but none so famous, and at least a part of the 97-thousand-dollar profit made by the show must be laid at its feet. This whole score can, in fact, be regarded as Sondheim at the very top of his considerable range. Consider for instance the icy undercutting two-word way we are introduced to ~esirke 's profession by her daughter:

Ordinary mothers lead ordinary lives: Keep the house and sweep the parlour, Cook the meals and look exhausted. Ordinary mothers, like ordinary wives, Fry the eggs and dry the sheets and Try to deal with facts. Mine acts.

After the highly successful New York shows he'd just done (Follies and Company) A Little Night Music was a brave departure and one which paid off. Sondheim may not have been much of an expert at what a weekend in the country in turn-of-the-century Sweden sounded like, but as John Simon pointed out for New York (after a scathing attack on Hugh Wheeler's book):

Yet all is not lost. If you can forget Bergman, which

is hard, and Wheeler, which is impossible, there is still Sondheim. And Sondheim hascomposed, to his customarily polished, easefully and richly rhyming lyrics, some of his best tunes so far. Although their forms are basically simple -waltzes, simulated folk ballads, old-fashioned show tunes - Sondheim has laced their carefree forthrightness with daring little twists in the melodic line: unexpected wry modulations, deliberately wrong notes, a fine gray overcast on the sunniness. M e r e a s this tended to make some of the music in Conipany and Follies ungainly, here it enhances the old, innocent waltz tunes with a jaded, world-weary and then again curiously modern aftertaste. to which Jonathan Tunick's stunning orchestrations add spice.

Others were not so sure: 'Distinctive', 'charming', 'pleasureahle'. 'remote', 'civilized' were frequently applied adjectives but many critics had no real frame of reference within which to judge what one called 'a Viennese operetta - about Sweden?' Still. Clive Barnes had at last found a Sondheim show he could really rave about: 'Heady, sophisticated, civilized and enchanting,' he wrote in the New York Times the

ioss Acklarid. Danid Kernon. Maria Aitkcn. li.ui, Si,nn,ons nnd the cast of the W ~ s t Elid proditctiot~ of A Little Night Music 119741

morning after A Little Night Music opened at the Shubert in February 1973. 'It is Dom Perignon. It is supper at Laserre. And it is more fun than any tango in a Parisian suburb . . . Yet perhaps the real triumph belongs to Stephen Sondheim, whose music is . . . an orgy of plaintively memorable waltzes. Good God! an adult musical.'

A Little Night Music (the title, incidentally, had been Sondheim's first suggestion for what later became known as Evening Primrose) ran one more than 600 performances on Broadway, collected Sondheim his third consecutive Tony award and made its backers a profit of only just under a hundred thousand dollars - a considerable relief after the Follies' losses. It was never one of Prince's absolute favourites. but it was, he says, 'all about having a hit' and that was what they got.

But the cost of the show in English terms (2125.000) was prohibitive. and a number of backers backed down before an eventual West End production was mounted in April 1975. Like Company in London, it eventually lost money, despite a long run towards the end of which Virginia McKenna took over from Jean Simmons and Angela Baddeley from Hermione Gingold. At the time of this 1979 writing, no other original Sondheim score has been staged in the West End, and despite the massive commercial triumph of his anthology show Side By Side By Sondiieim (now a constant standhy for repertory theatres up and down

lean Simmons as Desirbe Armfeldt in A Little Night Music (1 974)

the land since it requires only three singers, a narrator, a couple of pianists and a few back-projected slides), there has grown up the uneasy feeling that London can neither afford nor fully appreciate a Sondheim show. Sweeney Todd may yet change all that

Whipped cream and knives', was what Sondheim himself once called A Little Night Music, and several London reviewers echoed the phrase. Turning up my own review in Punch, I'm surprised by its lack of deep enthusiasm: my feelings seem to have changed about the show, partly I think as a result of consistently playing the album over the last four years (and the Broadway album at that), partly because a somewhat lack-lustre and nervous first night made i t difficult fully to appreciate the score at that one first sitting:

What, precisely, have we here? A presumably conscious decision by the man who has given us in the recent past the best musicals ever written about urban and marital despair (West Side Story. Company) to move headlong back into the Vienna

Woods or more precisely to turn-of-the-century Sweden. There . . . Sondheim has found himself a plot of mind-boggling coyness about an aged Countess Who Has Seen It All, her daughter the actress, and the latter's attempts to regain an old lover and discard a new one - the entire charade being watched from the sidelines by five largely unexplained ladies and gentlemen who appear to be auditioning for a barber's shop quintet. Put like that. A Little Night Music must sound pretty terrible, and in fact it isn't: although it often resembles nothing so much as Uncle Vanya under water, the evening is pulled through by the magnetism of its stars, notably Miss Gingold who has the uneasy task of stopping a show which has often nearly halted of its own accord . . . Jean Simmons glides imperceptibly through a long first half but then, after the interval, there comes the moment for her to sing 'Send In The Clowns' which she does both heartbreakingly and brilliantly: it is at that moment that the show finally takes off and soars into a prolonged finale which comes as some- thing of a release to those of us who were beginning to feel that we had been locked for rather too long in a very small room with all of the Strausses.

Hvrrriione Girigold as hlndame Arrnfcld! :I: A l ~ t t l e Nigllt Music (Broadway, 1973; London. 1974)

But after the 'jewelled music-box' of A Little Night Music, what next7 Hollywood bought the film rights. Prince himself directed, Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Rigg starred, Time magazine called the result 'an anachronistic retread of Naughty Marietta', and that

Elizabelii Taylor and Len Cariou in the f i l r r , of A Liltle Nigh1 Music (1978)

was more or less the end of that - the film played a few weeks in New York and remains unreleased in Britain. But 'every time Sondheim writes a score', said Alexander Cohen once, 'Broadway gets rebuilt'. and this time it was to get rebuilt Japanese.

First, though, there were some comparatively minor jobs to be taken care of: at Hal Prince's request he did some lyrics for a 1974 remake of Bernstein's Candide, and in that year he also came up with a score for a version of Aristophanes' The Frogs which Burt Shevelove (who'd done the adaptation) was staging for eight performances in the swimming pool at Yale. Then there was the background score for a haunting Alain Resnais film called Stavisky, a thriller script to be written with Anthony Perkins for an unsuccessful i f . intricate movie called The Last of Sheila, and a television acting debut in June Moon (again for Burt Shevelove).

Soon, though, it was time to start thinking about Pacific Ouertures.

In July 1833, a small naval force under the American Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into a Japanese harbour, aimed its guns at the mainland and informed the locals that President Millard Fillmore wished to impose a trade treaty. Such was the beginning of the 'opening up' of Japan though, as one later American noted, 'We didn't go in, they came out.' A hundred and forty years later a young law-school student called John Weidman (son of the playwright Jerome Weidman) built a play, around the events of 1833, one which he gave to Hal Prince who in turn gave it to Stephen Sondheim. The result was to be one of the most ambitious musicals even they had ever attempted.

Pacific Ouertures, which opened in N~.N York on 11 January 1976 and closed there rather less than six months later, was not what you might call a popular commercial success, though it collected for Sondheim some of his most respectful reviews to date. I t also collected a feeling of considerable uneasiness: a musical about the opening up of Japan? Hal Prince, again director-producer, remains addicted to it. When. just after the London opening of his Evita production, its success caused the National Theatre to enquire if just possibly there was anything, anything at all, that Mr Prince would like to direct for them; he said, Yes indeed, he would much like to direct Pacific Overtures on the National's open Olivier stage. There was a very long pause, one which is still going on at the time of this writing. 'I think,' murmurs Prince, 'they were rather hoping for Guys L Dolls.'

I t was Martin Gottfried, the Broadway critic who was one of Sondheim's earliest and most thoughtful champions, who best estimated the problems and the achievements of Pacific Ouertures:

Risk is the difference between assured mediocrity and possible greatness. By conceiving Pacific Overtures as an irony of Japan's Westernization. related through the rituals of Kabuki theatre, Harold Prince was almost begging for a disaster of preciousness, condescension, and who wants to see a Japanese musical anyway? Instead [Pacific Overtures] is an exquisite, enchanting, touching, intelligent and altogether remarkable work of theatre a r t . . . The show traces the development of Japan from a culture consciously insulated in Eastern traditions of contemplation and peace to a military and industrial power so successful at imitating America and the West that it is now better at the game.

Pacific Overtures, Broadalay (19761

A Broadway musical in the Kabuki style was indeed no mean achievemcnt, particularly when you consider that Sondheim and Prince had managed to spend just two weeks in Japan looking at the original Kabuki models. Not that the show is pure Kabuki: Sondheim's libretto also finds room for a spirited Gilbert and Sullivan parody as a British Admiral steps ashore in Japan and says:

Hello, I come with letters from Her Majesty Victoria

W o , learning how you're trading now, sang 'Hallelujah Gloria!'

And sent me to convey to you her positive euphoria

As well as little gifts from Britain's various emporia.

Her letters d o contain a few proposals to your Emperor

Which if of course he won't endorse will put her in a temper or

More happily, should he agree, will serve to keep her placid, or

At least until I'm followed by a permanent ambassador.

Her Majesty considers the arrangements to be tentative

Until we ship a proper diplomatic representative. We don't forsee that you will be the least bit

argumentative, So please ignore the man of war we brought as a

preventative

Pacific Overtures had some British sailors in its cast- list, too, and for them Sondheim also wrote a song. There cannot be many American composer-lyricists who would attempt a cockney song to be sung b y Victorian sailors in Japan looking over a garden wall at a girl they mistake for a Geisha. Undeterred as ever, this was the one Sondheim wrote:

Pretty lady in the pretty garden, can't you stay? Pretty lady, we got leave and we got paid today. Pretty lady with a flower, Give a lonely sailor 'alf an hour. Pretty lady, can you understand a word I say? Don't go away. Pretty Lady, you're the cleanest thing I seen all

year. Pretty lady, you're enough to make me glad I'm

here. Pretty lady in the pretty garden, won't you stay? Pretty lady in the pretty garden, what you say? Why can't you stay? I sailed the world for you. Don't go away!

A further innovation was that the entire cast for Pacific Overtiires was Japanese, including those playing non-Japanese characters: the idea was to present it as though it were a Japanese show, yet allowing certain lapses in the strict Kabuki format. 'You don't find Hal Prince,' wrote Jack Kroll in Newsu~eek. 'dolling up old Doliys o r maiming old Mames: his fourth musical with Stephen Sondheim blends Zen and Zap to challenge the Broadway audience.'

But the greatest rave of all came in a BBC radio 'Letter From America' by Alistair Cooke:

The first night of Pacific Ooertzires was one of those very rare nights in the theatre when you feel the whole generation of pleasant but clogging cliches has been shed like a skin, when - as Handel put it - the people who walked in darkness had seen a great light. I should like to think that i t will shine for legions of foreign visitors to New York and they will therefore renew their faith in th? vitality of that re- markable twentieth-century invention: the Ameri- can musical comedy.

It didn't happen quite like that: as Cooke had pointed out in this same Letter, 'Mr Sondheim assumes you have taken in through your eardrums the harmonies of Ravel and Debussy and on to Stravinsky and maybe Schoenberg and then some. This is asking a

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(Noel) Cowardy Custard. Side By Side By Sondheim (which travelled on into

the West End, where it remained for two years, and then to Broadway where it did nearly a year) was essentially just a lot of night music, but it remained a curiously and ineffably English achievement. Unlike Coward or Cole Porter at the time of their Mermaid tribute-shows, Sondheim was neither seventy nor dead, and his songs unlike theirs were virtually all 'book' numbers - ones which might not have been expected to work out of context. But the miracle of the show was that Sherrin (who also functioned as director) and Kernan and Martin had been together so long, in fact since the early 1960s when they started a BBC TV satire show called 'That Was The Week That Was'. that they could work together fast , instinctively and almost journalistically, lighting with great. joy on lyrics which as here reflected the world around them rather than the moon/June escapism of Sondheim's predecessors

I t was a lyrical, acidly elegant show which explored, annotated and celebrated Sondheim from West Side Story through Gypsy and Compuny all the way to Pacific Overtures and, in the closing medley on the

first night, the Mermaid rang with cheers the volume of which I've seldom heard in any theatre in the world - cheers not only for the great songs and the great shows they came from (many still unseen in London) but the cheers of an English audience waking up at last to the realization that in Stephen Sondheim we have the greatest lyric poet of contemporary world theatre.

Side By Side By Sondhein~ is still going the rounds of regional British and American theatres (since Sherrin. subsequent narrators have ranged from Robin Ray through Hermione Gingold to me, and ranges don't go much further than that - yet another test of the show's imperishability) but it was while Sondheim was in London for the 1973 premiere of Gypsy that he happened to see, at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, a play by Christopher Bond which has formed the basis for his latest musical.

Sweeney Todd, which opened on Broadway in March 1979 to generally ecstatic reviews, and eight Tony Awards, is of course the story of the demon

Julia McKenr ie , Dailid Kerriun and Milliccr>t Mnrtirr i n the London productro,~ of Side By Side By Sondheim 119761

barber; and it is perhaps some measure of the respect with which Sondheim is treated in Britain that no less than three major Fleet Street papers (the Guardian, Observer and Daily Telegraph) sent their principal drama critics to New York to cover the first night . . . an honour not, so far as I can recall, accorded to any other Broadway composer within living memory. True, Sweeney Todd was always known as the demon barber of Fleet Street.

As the first-ever Broadway musical about cannibalism, Sweeney Todd was bound to attract some attention: set in a huge kind of iron foundry, with a central rotating box which serves as Sweeney's parlour and the disposal unit for his victims, this is scenically and musically the most impressive thing that Broadway has done in a long time, and there are many in New York who believe it represents Sondheim's finest hours in the theatre.

In a production by Hal Prince (who came to it straight from Euita) complete with manic organist, full i , i , t ~ ~ i , i d L!iiifi,.rk ens l i i i t ~ c Turpin and L P ~ ( , l i t r ? a ( il- t l i r

chorus and some dazzlingly stage-managed theatrical div~rclii harhr-i,r Swceney Todd fBroadu,aw. 19791

effects, Sweeney Todd is essentially the reverse of the

JILL MRRm

attdon tour

Oliuer! coin. Its set looks like Oliver's multiplied by ten, and its book and lyrics (written by Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler) are dedicated to destroying the cosy Dickensian myths about a chirrupy Victorian London. replacing them with a satanically evil show about the sheer (and literally) bloody awfulness of nineteenth- century London life.

Sweeney remains forever unrepentant about his razor-sharp killings ('And what i f none of their souls was saved?/They went to their maker impeccably shaved') and his hatred is not reserved for London alone, of which metropolis he sings 'There's a hole in the world like a great black pit1And the vermin of the world inhabit it'. Todd's hatred is simply and uncompromisingly for the whole of humanity, and when in the show's closing moments he slams a great iron door shut behind him, he is slamming it not just on the set but on the whole wide world.

Sweeney Todd is not, in short, a show for all the family to sing along with, whatever the nervous Broadway advertisements for 'a musical thriller' might suggest: rather it is a pitch black, savage and vitriolic show about everything that Broadway is supposed to make you forget. True, it's not perfect: Pr~nce's production is apt to become a little over- overwhelming, and some defiant attempts at comic relief are inclined to get a little desperate. But if you believe, as I happen to believe, that Sondheim is the greatest thing to have happened to musicals since the war, and i f you further believe that there is only so far the musical can get with loveable Orphan Annies or

loveable older stars descending long staircases very slowly, then Sweeney Todd is a must. Where else would you get jokes set to music about shepherd's pie peppered with actual shepherd on top?

Sioeeney Todd is in short (or rather at some length) a brilliantly rancid show about death and survival at the razor's edge. and it takes Broadway into an area of music-theatre unknown since the days of Brecht and M'eill: the sooner it is on show in London, the better for us all.

From its very beginnings ('Attend the tale of Sweeney ToddIHe served a dark and a vengeful God') it is clear that here is something special, yet rooted deeply in the Sondheim theatrical philosophy and starring two stalwarts from his own company - Angela Lansbury as the jovial coykney Mrs Lovett (her third Sondheim musical in fifteen years) and Len Cariou (from the stage and screen versions of A Little Might Music) now playing the title role. Reviews were

hnwcver not pxac t l y unanimoni: beyonil t h r pred~c- table objection from some quarters about the show being 'just not Broadway', a claim countered by Sondheim with the reminder that his first show. West Side Story, had not been exactly unbloody, there were also those who thought that Eugene Lee's gargantuan set overshadowed everything that happened within its confines.

Sweeney Todd ran up pre-opening night bills of a little under a million and a half dollars and its economic fate is, at the time of this writing, still uncertain. What is certain is that Sweeney soars above and beyond Broadway: one day it will I believe turn up in the repertoires of leading opera houses the world over, ultimate proof of Sondheim's unique ability to turn a musical into an event.

Soon after Sweeney Todd's Broadway opening in March 1979. Stephen Sondheim suffered a minor but nonetheless unnerving heart attack; within a fortnight, predictably, he was back from hospital in his own New York town house, the games still all over the walls, and working on an as yet unnamed project for the early 19805. Meanwhile, his latest show runs on at

the Uris Theatrc 'The question hanging over S m e ~ n e y I U J CTz7ric:< t75 5:rt-c,71r1, Toctd mz't ,-l,!~qe,l,< I t t ~ , ' ; l ~ c ! r u 05 jhlrs

Todd,' wrote Michael Billington for the Guardian, 'is L("''t' iB,-oodara!i. 19%')

of course whether a Broadway public that seeks affirmation and hope will take to a musical where the hero proclaims that life is shit, that people are vermin, and where the final sound is of Sweeney unrepentantly clanging an iron door.'

For the answer to that qu~st ion we may have to wait a while; but Sweeney Todd, like many of Sondheim's earlier shows, seems likely to have a life that cannot be measured only in terms of an initial New York run. There has been much talk lately of him moving further and further towards opera; in reality I suspect the journey is asmuch away from the old Broadway forms as towards anything so specifically limiting. But already, in many parts of Europe, he has entered the repertoire of national theatres: curiously in Britain that has still to happen. I cannot believe that i t will take much longer.

CAREER CHART BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stephen Sondheim b. New York, 22 March 1930

WEST SIDE STORY (lyrics only): New York (1957), London (1958)

GYPSY (lyrics only): New York (1959), London (1973) A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY T O THE

FORUM (music and lyrics): New York (1962), London (1963)

ANYONE CAN WHISTLE (music and lyrics): New York (1964)

DO I HEAR A WALTZ? (lyrics only): New York (1965) COMPANY (music and lyrics): ~ e k York~ (1970), London

(1972) FOLLIES (music and lyrics): New York (1971) A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (music and lyrics): New York

(1973), London (1975) THE FROGS (music and lyrics): Yale (1974) CANDIDE (additional lyrics): New York, (1974) PACIFIC OVERTURES (music and lyrics): New York

(1976) SWEENEY TODD (music and lyrics): New York (1979)

ADDITIONAL MATERlAL

Christmas Carol for the Lunts' I KNOW MY LOVE, New York (1951)

Song for A MIGHTY MAN IS HE, New York (1955) Opening routine for Ginger Rogers' nightclub act Incidental music for THE GIRLS OF SUMMER, New York

(1956); INVITATION T O A MARCH (1961); PASSIONELLA (1962) and THE ENCLAVE (1973)

Lyrics for HOTSPOT (1963); THE MAD SHOW (1966); ILLYA DARLING (unused, 1967); TWIGS

(1971)

CINEMA:

WEST SIDE STORY (1961) GYPSY (1963) A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE

FORUM (1966) A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (1976 - unreleased in UK) also: STAVISKY (background music, 1974); Song for THE

SEVEN PERCENT SOLUTION (1976); THE LAST OF SHEILA (non-musical, co-written with Anthony Perkins, 1975)

TELEVISION:

Scripts for TOPPER (1953) and THE LAST WORD (1955) EVENING PRIMROSE (music and lyrics, 1966)

ACTlNG DEBUT (TV):

JUNE MOON (1974)

STAGE TRIBLTES:

BECKERMAN, BERNARD and SIEGMAN, HOWARD, On Stage (New York Times theatre reviews

1920-1970) Arno, New York, 1973 FORDIN, HUGH, Getting To Know Him (Oscar

Hammerstein), Random House, New York, 1977 LAURENTS, .ARTHUR and SONDHEIM, STEPHEN,

Anyone Can Whistle, Amiel, New York, 1976 NOLAN, FREDERICK, The Sound Of Their Music

(Rodgers and Hammerstein), Dent, London, 1978 PRINCE, HAROLD, Contradictions, Dodd, Mead, New

York, 1974 RODGERS, RICHARD, Musical Stages, W.H. Allen,

London, 1976 SHEREN, PAUL and SUTCLIFFE, TOM, Stephen

Sondheim 6 The American Musical (published in Theatre 74) Hutchinson, London,1974

SIMON, JOHN, Uneasy Stages, Random House, New York, 1975

TYNAN, KENNETH, Curtains, Longmans, London, 1961 ZADAN, CRAIG, Sondheim 6 C o . , Macmillan, New

York, 1974

SONDHEIM (New York, 1973) SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM (London, 1976;

New York, 1977)

XLII

Words by STEPHEN SONDHEIM

voice

Piano I

, Fast J . i , a MuC:ic by LEONAFD BERNSTEI~~

iw-

Could- ad l ib .

I I I I1 I

be. Who-

I - 1. knows? 2. knows?

There's It's-

Copyright a1957 by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim Chappell Music Ltd., 50 New Bond Street. London W1 International Copyright Secured A11 Rights Reserved Made in England

some-thing due- an - y day.- I will know- r ight a - way,- on - ly just- out of reach, Down t h e block, on a beach,-

11 I I I I IC, soon as i t shows. I un - der a tree.

I t may come can-non-ball-ing down thru' the sky, Gleam in i ts eye, I got a feel-ingthere'sa m i r - a - c l e due, gon - na come true,

1 - Bright a s a rose. Who-

I - Corn- in' t o me!

Refrain (with rhvthmic ezcitemenf)

1 - Some - thing's com - i k , I don't know- what it is,

- I . but it i s gon-na be great.

I - Some - thing's corn - ing, don't know when- but it's soon;

catch the m o o n one-hand-ed catch.

48 Warmly I 1

0 m.f - I - I 3 1 A - I *- I- r - 1 TJ I I

8 I d I I I I 1 I I I I I I rl I

I I -

A - round the COT - new,-

I - or whis - t l i n g down

37 I dim. 1 I +-- I \

I I I 1 8 I I I I

I I I * - I * -

I I I

the riv - er.. I

Come on,-

- I * I C I

/ dim?

/, 4

de - - l iv - er

'am I

I - Come On, some - thing, Come on in.- Don't be shy,

I - meet a g u y , Pull up a chair.

I The air is

- hum - ming, And some - thing- great- I n

'%u! - m03 I

Maria Words by STEPHEN SONDHEIM

voice

Piano i I sung: The most beau - ti - ful sound I ev - er heard: M a -

I All the beau - ti - ful sounds of the world in a s in - g l e word: Ma -

Copyright @ 1957 by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim Chappell Mupic Ltd. , 50 New Bond Street , London W1 Intematlonal Copyright Secured All Right. Reserved Made in Exland

01 awss aqa aq la - aau M awvu ~~qa XI - uap- pns I

'I? -!l-I?JAJ 'I? -!l-t?N 'I? -!-I 'I? -!J-BN 'I? -!l-EN 'I? I

- I I 1 I II I f I/ I I I I

I " sLd - dkn - ly I G ~ fhund Row Gn- der- ful a sdund dan be! Ma -.

Short version C 6 raa. --- a I

'3 I pp szoutcy IC -fi U I I r f I -

I I I I h m e r~ I I ' I I I I I

I m I I

4 0 4 0 I 1 n

nev - er stop say - ing, " ~ a - ri - a?

- 4+

I , , ri - a, Say i t ldud and thkre's mu - sic piay- ing. Say it

Tonight

Words by STEPHEN SONDHEIM Music by LEONARD BERNSTEIN

Moderate Beguine Tempo I I I - I I I Voice II

Piano

A ., Warmly

I To - night, To - night, won't be just an - y

1 night. To - night there will be no morn - ing

Copyright @ 1957 by Leonard Bernekin and Stephen Sondheim Chamell Music Ltd.. 50 New Bond Street. London W1

- ~, ~- -

~nteGtional copyright Secured AII Rights Reserved Made in England

s n aas

slow - iy And sti l l the sky is light. 0

I

Em7 Am7 D9 D7 - TI- \

8 I 1 I A

I I I I I

A 8

Slowly

Words by STEPHEN SONDHEIM Music by LEONARD BERNSTEIN

Piano

- I I D. 1 I

a place for us, Some-where a place for us.

Voice

I Peace and quiet - and op - en air wait for us some - where. -

I L I

I

cr

Copyright @ 1957 by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim Cham11 Muldc Ltd., 50 New Bond Street. London W1 International Cowright Secured A11 Rights Reserved Made in England

tl

time for u s a time for us.

I I

Time to-gether with time t o spare, Time to learn, time to care.

Ebm

some-where-

~ e ' i i f i n d a way of for - giv-ing,- some -where.

I a place for us , A time and place for u s .

I - Hold my hand and were half - way there. Hold my hand and 1'11

I - take y'ou there, some- how, - some-day, -

some - where . - some-where .

Let Me Entertain You

Piano I Words by STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Music by JULE STYNE

Animato

I '- Ex - tral Ex- tra! Hey! look at the head - line. His - tor - i - cal news -

n, ~ f l dim , C Cdirn Dm7 G7 C G9

Ex - tra! They're

Williamson Music Inc. , and Stratford Music Corporation owners of pblication and > allied rights throughout the world Chappell & Co. Inc.. sole selling agent Chappel1 Music Ltd. , 50 New Bond Street, London W1 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

Refrain (with a lilt and not fast) A C Cdim G7

I - ~ e t me en- tkr - tain you, Let me make you smile.

m Let me do a few tricks, some old and then some new tricks, I'm ver- y ver - sa -

Fm C Cdini

I tile. And if you're real good, I'll make you feel good,

I - I want your spir - its to climb. Just let me en - ter -

I thin you And we'll have a real good time, yes sir,-

/ >

1 '2. I C Cdim Dm7 G7 C

I

Some People

Moderately Bright w

Words by STEPHEN SONDHEIM Music by JULE STYNE

- Th'ats 0- kay for some peo - ple who

they're a - live!

Copyright a 1 9 5 9 & 1973 by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim Williamson Music Inc. , and Stratford Music Corporation Chappell Music Ltd., 50 New Bond Street, London W1 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

ple can thrive and bloom- L i v - ing l i f e - in a

l i v - ing room.- per - fect for some peo -

I - pie of one hun-dred and five! But

I I at least- got - ta try,

I - When I - think of a l l the sights that I - got - ta see yet,

I A l l the p l a c - e s I- got - ta play, A l l the things that I - got - ta be yet

Come on, Pop - pa,whad - da ya say? ple can be con-tent-

I - Play - ing Bing - o and pay - ing rent .-

That's peach - Y for some peo. - ple, For some

I hum - drum peo - pie to be.

I But some peo - ple ain ' t me!

- me'.

If Momma Was Married

.\toticrate Waltz Ternpo.ld. ="o)

Words by STEPHEN SONDHEIM Music by JULE STYNE

If mom - rila was m a r - r izd, we'd l i ~ e in J. ho t~se , ;\s p r i - v: t e a s nlom ma was niar- r ied , I 'd jump in the a i r and give a l l my

a be:- p r i - vate can Jus t mom - nia, th ree ducks, five ca - toe - shoes to you. I'd get a l l these hair - r i b - bons

n a r - i e s , a mouse, two mon - keys, one fa - ther , s i x t u r - t les and out of my hair and once and for a l l I 'd get mom - m a out

Copyright a 1 9 5 9 (unplb.) and 1960 by Norbeth hoductions, Inc. and Stephen Sondheim Williamson Music Inc. , and Stratford Muaic Corporation owners of plblications and allied rights throughout the world Chappell & Co. Inc. . sole selling agent Chappell Music Ltd., 50 New Bond Street. London W1 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

2. 2 - - 4 d d &

--u 2- If m o m - m a was m a r - r i e d w u

, If mom - ma was

get out your white d r e s s ! You've done it be - a , please take our ad - vice. We a r e - n't the

ma, God

speedand God bless. We're not keep-ing score, what 's one more or l ess ? buy you the r i c e if on - ly this once you would - n't think twice!

Oh mom-ma, say "yes" and waltz down the ais le while you It could be s o nice if morn - ma got m a r - r ied to

may. I ' l l glad - ly sup - port you, I ' l l e - ven e s - cort you. And stay. But mom-ma gets mar'- r ied and mar-r ied and mar - ried, and

nev - e r gets ca r - ried a - way.

I get mar - ried to - day!

I moln - ma, oh mom

I oh mom ma,

Piano

Do H e a r A Waltz? Words by STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Music by RICHAFtD RODGERS

Tempo di valse allegro

Refrain

, '-

odd, "but I hear " a waltz. dear, don't you hear a waltz?

There Such

Copyright a 1 9 6 5 by Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim Williamson Music Inc. , owner of publication and allied rights of Richard Rodgers for all countries of the Western Hemisphere Burthen Music Company lnc., owner of pblication and allied rights of Rephen Sondheim thrmghout the world Chappell & Co. Ltd. , sole selling agent for Burthen Music Company Inc. Williamson Music Ltd. & Chappell Music Ltd. , 50 New Bond Street. London W1 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

i s - n ' t a band and.. I dodt un - der - stand i t at a l l . love - ly Blue Dan - u - bey mu - sic, how can you be stil l? /

I

I can't hear a waltz , You must -hear a waltz !

' Oh, my Lord, t,here i t goes a - gain! Why i s - E - ven stran- gers a r e danc - ing now: I - An old

Waltz - ing - with her cat.

I hear a waltz? I want more than to hear a waltz:-

I ..

1 want you to share it 'cause Eh,

n & Gdi m Am7 A7 D7 h . ~ p

I W -. I rn I I I I i P I I- b-P i r, I I

I I 1 I A. I I I I I 1 I 1 -- I *. I

I - . - I hear a

I

I I 2. Coda D 7 G C 6 G C6

Do waltz. I - -

w I I I I I I hear a waltz.

Thank You So Much Words by STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Music by RICHARD RODGERS

Moderato

Piano

I -1 . rfe: Corn- pli - cat - ed, yes, but I do not re - gret ~ t .

A , 8h~:Friend - ly peo - ple, brac - ing a i r and love - ly weath- er,

>

Copyright @1965 by Richard Rcdgers and Stephen Sondheim Williamson Music Inc., owner of publication and allied rights of Richard Rodgers for all countries of the Western Hemisphere Burthen Music Campmy Inc. , owner of pblication and allied rights of Stephen Sondheim throughout the world Chappel1 8 Co. Ltd., sole selling agent for Burthen Music Campany Inc. Williamson Music Ltd. & C h a p 1 1 Music Ltd. , 50 New Bond Street, London W1 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

Ref rain (leisurely) G Em

- q u i c k - lg:' R e a l - l y i t s e e m s a crime. B u t

yr - -- I - t h a n k you s o much f o r some - i h i n g b e - t w e e n r i - dic - u - lous and sub -

Thank you for s u c h a l i t - t l e b u t love - Iy

time. t i m e .

Comedy Tonight Words and Music by

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

I Piano

Refrain (,with vkar)

1. Some - thing fa - mil - iar, some - thing pe - cul - iar, 2. Some - thing con - vul - sive, some - thing re - pul - sive,

Some - thing for ev - 'ry - one, a com - e - dy I Some - thing for ev - 'ry - one, a com - e - dy to - night! to - night!

I Some - thing ap - peal - ing, some - thing ap - pal - ling, Some - thing es - thet - ic, some - thing fre - net - ic,

Copyright a 1 9 6 2 by Stephen Sondheim Burthen Music Company Inc. owner of plblication and allied rights throughout the world Chappell & Co. Inc., New York, N. Y . , sole selling agent Chappell Mudc Ltd.. 50 New Bond Street. London W1 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

I Some -thing for ev - 'ry- one, a com - e - dy to - night!

I " Noth - ing Noth - ing

with kings, of Gods,

nbth - ing with crowns. noth - ing of Fate.

Bring on ,

Weigh - t y the lov - ers, li - ars and , clowns!- af - fairs will just have to wait. -

I Old sit - u - a - tions, Noth - ing that's for - mal,

new corn - pli - ca - tions, noth - ing that's nor - mall

I " I u I

Noth - ing por - ten - tyous or po - lite; NO re - . ci - t a - tions to re - cite!

t o - mor - row,

I

corn- e - dy

Love IHear Words and Music by

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Piano I Lyric ally

Refrain fzuith a lilt)

leaves you we

Copyright 0 1962 by Stephen Sondheim Burthen Music Company Inc. owner of publication and allied rights throughout the world Chappel1 & Co. Inc. , New York. N. Y . , sole eelling agent Chappel1 Music Ltd. . 50 New Bond Street, London W1 International Copyright Secured All Right8 &served Made in England

I I CI try to speak dith pas - sion &d squeak, I hear.

, ., Grnai.7 G6 Gmaj.7 G6 Am7 Gdim D7(sus.4) D7

I Love, they say, TI makes you pine a - Way) But you

I - pine, I blush, I squeak, I squawk, To - day I wbke tbo dazed, 1 h pale, 1'm sick, 1'm sore; I've nev - er felt SO

I hear,. I

I " in. know I am, I'm sure ... I mean... I

swear ... I mean ...

Everybody Ought To Have A Maid

4

A Moderato comrnodo

Words and Music by STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Piano

Refrain

1. Ev -'ry -bod - ought to have a maid . 2. Ev-'ry- bod-y ought to have a maid. Y.Ev-yry-bod-y ought t o have a maid.

Ev-'ry-bod-y ought to have a Ev-'ry-bod-y ought to have a Ev-'ry-bod-y ought. to have a

work - ing girl , Ev -'ry - bod - y ought to have a lurk - ing girl To work - ing gir l , Ev -'ry - bod - y ought to have a lurk - ing girl To work - i l~g girl , Ev -'ry - bod - y ought to have a lurk - ing girl To

Copyright a1962 by Stephen Sondheim Burthen Music Ccuapany Inc. owner of plhlication and allied rights throughout the world Chappell Q Co. Inc. , New York, N. Y . , sole selling agent Chappell Music Ltd. , 50 New Bond Street, London Wl International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

put - ter ;I - rou~id the house. put - t e r a - round the house. put - t e l , a -round the house. - - -..-

Ev I ' ry - bod - y ought t o have :L Ev - ry-bod - y ought to have a Ev - ry-bod - y ought to have a

Ev - 'ry - bod - y ought t o have a men - i - al, Con - Ev - 'ry - bod - y ought t o have a serv - ing girl, A

Some-one who's ef - f i - cient and re - li - a - bla, 0 -

, . i I ' I , - r , J - I

u i - et - e r than a mouse. y i - e t - e r than a i i~ouse.

Ti - dy - i11g up t h e dish - e s , nea t a s :t pin? Oh! Oh! 'Spe - cia1 - 14. when she's jus t been traip-sing a - bout. Oh! Oh! Fid - dl - ing' with h e r thin1 - ble , m e n d - i n g a gown? Oh! Oh!

I Would - $t she be de - l i gh t - f u l , sweep - i ng ou t , s leep - ing in? Would - dt s h e be d e - l i gh t - f u l , liv - ing i n , g i v - ing out?

Ev-'ry-bod - y ought t o have a ma id , Some- one whom you hi - re w h e ~ l you're Ev-'ry-bod - y ought t o have a maid , Some- one who, when fetch - i ~ ~ g you your Ev -'ry-bod - y ought t o have a maid , Some-one who'll be bus - y as a

A C Cdim

Flut-ter-ing up the stair - way, Shut-ter - ing sy t he win - dows, Skit-ter-ing down the hall - way, ' Flit - ter - ing thru the par - lor,

,,te,.,ute, I Pat-ter-ing thru the a t - t i c , Chat-ter - ing in the cel - lar, . Wrig-gl -ing in the an - t e -room, Gig - gl - ing in the liv - ing- room,

Dm7 Ab 11.2. Dm7

Clnt-ter-illg in the kit - chen, Flat-ter-ing in the bed - room, Jig - gl - i~ ig in the din - ing room, Wig-gl - ing in t he 0th - er rooms,

round the house! Put- ter - inp: all i - round -

Impossible Words and Music by

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Piano

Moderato in 4

Rub ato n Dm

fither:Why did he look a t he r that way? Son: Why did he look a t her tha t way? Son: Why, did she wave a t him tha t way? 1~ather:Why did she wave a t him tha t way?

In tempo F6 G7 C Fdim

80th:Must be my im - a g - i - na - tion. 80th: Could there be an ex - pla - n a - tion?

Copyright 01962 & 1964 by Stephen Sondheim Burthen Music Campany Inc. owner of pblication and allied rights throughout the world Chappell & Co. Inc. , New York, N.Y. . sole selling agent. Chappell Music Ltd., 50 New Bond Street, London W. 1 International Copyright Secured All Right6 Reserved Made in England

Refrain -With a lilt

Son: Shds a love - l y bloom-ing flow- er, He's a l l worn out. - Im - pos - s i - ble! f i t h e r : He's a hand- some lad of twen- ty, I'm thir - ty - nine,- It's pos - s i - ble! I -

Eirther: Just a. fledg-ling in the nest. s o l ' : Just a man who needs a rest, Son: Old - er men know so much more. P a t h e r : In a way ~ ' m for - t y four,

f i t h e r : He's a beam - ish S O : Next to him I'll

boy a best. Son: Poor o l d , fel - low. seem a bore. Rather : All right, fif - ty!

- fither: He's a child and lope's a test He's too young to p ~ s s . - Im - pos - s i - ble! SUN: Then ti - gain he is my fa - ther, I ought to trust. - Im - pos - s i - ble! . ,

a t : Romp - ing in the nurs - e r - y. s o n : He looks t i r - ed. s With a gir l I'm ill a t ease. Pather: I don't feel well.

I

Puther: Son, s i t 'on your fa - ther's knee, Son: Fa - ther, you can le&n on me. SU,I: Sir, a - bout those birds and bees, I - Pather: Son, a glass of

wa - ter, please; Both: The s i t - u - a - tion's fraught, -

I - Fraught-er than I thought With hor - ri' - ble, im - pos - s i - ble,

n , C; r -

Y k r I - I I t- \

A M r I I I a m I I r r n ' I I I I I / * \' V I I I / m eJ

pus - si - bil - i - t ies. I

Lovely Words and Music by

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

, Moderato

Piano I Refrain - Expressively (d = 4s)

F7(sus.4) F7 Fm7

I You're love - ly, ab - so - lute - ly ldve - l y -

who'd be - likve the love - l i ness

Cul,\.l.iglrl % I'JI,:! b\ Slcl~lien Sullllllcinl Burlllen Alusic C o n l l , o ~ ~ y Inc. uu.ncl. ul ~,uWicaLiun :~nd :dl ied r ighls t h r u t ~ g l l ~ ~ ~ ~ l Lllc a ur ld C h u p ~ l l & Co. Inc. . Xen York. S. Y. . so le se l l ing %en1 Ch:lppx!ll Music LLd. . 50 S c u Bond S l r c c l London W I 1oLer1lolion:d C o n r i g h t Sccurcd All Rights R e s c r \ e t l >Lntlc 111 Engl.lnd

some- dream -

I " - CO me, true. Now

I - Ve - nus will seem tame, He1 - en and her

thou - sand- s h i p s , will have to die of shame.

you're so love - ly? lu - mi - nous - ly

I love - ly , That the world will nev - er seem- the

A ~ m . 7 Rhe C Bb C Bh I n

I " I I I

sanlc. You're same. A

Anyone Can Whistle Words and Music by

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Piano I

I - eas - y. It's all s o sim - p-le :

Copyright 0 1 9 6 4 by Stephen Sondheim Burthen Music Company Inc.. a m e r of plblication and allied rights throughout the world Cham11 & Co. , Inc. , New York, N. Y . , sole selling agent Chappel1 Music Ltd. , 50 New Bond Street. London W1 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

I - I P I can dance a t d n - g o , I c a n r e a d Greek,

I @,I

W ' - e a s - y! what ' s h a r d is

what's na t -u - ra l

i

l ea rn to be free, -. May - be if you whis-tle, whis - t l e for.

I me. - me.

Piano

Evevybody Says Don't.

Words and Music by STEPHEN SONDHEIM

4 F L d

R e f r a i n (animatedly but not too fast)

I Ev-'ry-bod - y says don't, ev- 'ry -bod - y says don't, ev-'ry-bod - y says don't, i t is - n't

i t is - n't nice.

Copyright @I964 by Stephen Sondheim Burthen Music Company Inc. , owner of publication and allied rights throughout the world Chappell & Co., Inc., New York, N.Y., sole selling agent Chappell Music Ltd.. 50 New Bond Street, London W l International Copyright Secured All Righta Reserved Made in England

Ev - ' r y - bod- y says don't, ev-'ry-bod- y says don't, ev- 'ry - bod - y says don't walk on the

--- --- I grass , don't- dis - turb t he peace, don't- skate on the ice.

walk on the grass , i t was meant to feel! I

- - - - -

E v - ' r ~ - b o d - ~ says don't, ev-'ry- bod- y says don't, e ~ - ' r y - b o d - ~ says don't get out of I A

I line. When they say that, then, l a - dy, that's a sign

I - Nine times out of ten, l a - dy, you a re do - ing just

I a I (1:;: 7 J I L )r

c I I k md I \ I \ b. a I h.. # - I I I A

I I I . I I I I 1

7 4 - > >

I Make just ' a rip - ple,

I ~ r m e on, "be brave. This time a rip - pie,-

I - Next time a wave!

all! Ev - 'ry - bod - y says no, ev-'ry-bod - y says

1 stop, ev - 'ry - bod - y says must - n't rock the boat, must - n't touch a

I thing! Ev-'ry- bod - y says don't, ev -'ry- bod - y says

I wait , ev - ' ry - bod - y says can't fight Cit - y Hall, can't - up - set the

I I I I \ h I I

I. L h I - I /I - I -. I r 4' - - m

car t , can't- laugh at ' the king! ' Well,

Fa l l if you have to , but .la - d y , make a noise! -

Ev-'ry-bod- y says don't, ev-'ry-bod - y says can't, ev-'ry-bod- y says wait a - round for

- I m i r - a - cles,- that's the way t h e world is made! I in - sist on

1 - rnjr - a - cles- If you do them! Mir - a - cles-

I Noth - ing to them! I say don't: don't be a -

fraid! I V ' >

Music and Lvrics bv STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Little Things You Do Together

Words and Music by S T E PHEN SONDHEIM

Moderato

I - Itle The Lit - tle Thinge You Do To - geth - er, - do - to - geth - er,-

I - d o td - geth - e r , that make per - fect re - la' - tion -%hips, It's

C 7add F C Cmaj 7

I hob - b i e ~ you pur - m e to - geth - er, Sav - ings you ac - crue to - geth - er,

Copyright 0 1 9 7 0 by Music Of The Times hblishing Corp. (Valando Music Div.) and Rilting Music Inc. All rights administered by Music Of The Times Publishing Corp. . 655 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10021 Carlin Music Corp. , 14 New Burlington Street, London W1X 2LR International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

Looks you mis - con-strue to - geth - e r that make mar-riage a joy.

A CaddF G+ C

mm - hm. It ' s the lit - tle things you share to - geth - er,- lit - tle ways you t ry to - geth - er,-

C Cmaj 7 G7/C C Am6

swear- to - geth - er,- wear - to - geth - e r , that make c ry - to - geth - e r , - 'lie - to - geth - er,. that make

per - fect r e - la - tion - ships, The con - cer ts you en - joy t o - geth - e r , per - fect r e - la - tion - ships, Be - corn - ing a cli - ch6 to - geth - e r ,

I Neigh - bors you an - noy to - geth - e r , Chi1 - dren you de- stroy to - geth - er,- Grow - ing old and gray to - geth - e r , With - e r - ing a - way to - geth - er,-

s o h a r d to be

I mar - ried, when two m a - n e u - ver a s one. mar - ried, It 's much the simp - lest of crimes.

It 's It's

not so hard- to be mar - ried, and J e - sus Christ,- it is not s o hard- to be mar - ried, I've done it num - bers of

It's shar - ing lit - tle winks to - geth - er,- drinks- to - geth - er,- times. It's peo - ple that you hate to - geth - e r , - bait - to - geth - er,-

kinks - to - geth - e r , - that make mar-riage a joy.- It's I -= date - to - geth - e r , that make mar-riage a joy.- It's

bar -gains that you shop to - geth - e r , Cig - a - rettes you stop to - geth - e r , things like us - ing force to - geth - e r , shout - ing till you're hoarse to - geth - e r ,

I - . .

Cloth - ing that you swap to - geth - e r , - that make per -fect .- re - la - tion - ships. Get - ting a d i - vorce to - geth - e r , - that make per - fect r e - l a - tion - ships.

I Uh - huh, mm - hm. It's

I not talk of God and the de-cade a - head- that al - lows you to get through the worst-

120 C6 Cmaf 7 GI 1 G9 GI1 G7

It's 111 dof1 and 'IYou don't" and "No - bod - y eaid - that" And

- I 'Who brought the sub- ject up first?"- It's the lit - tle things, .

D.S a1 Coda 61 3 f&

the lit - tle things, the lit - tie things, the lit - i e things. The

ID: I 6 ; I W A I I I Y A 1 I

1 I I I I 1 I I I , I I I I I I I 1 1. A I I A. A - I

Oda CaddF G+ C CaddF G+ I I

I Y I I I I u I I I

hA* *- Uh - huh, kiss

st - \3, 3

-u-

c C C add F G+m A

Y I I I I Y I I I r I I I 1 . 1 I

r k-l. I nrle yr 1- I

1 kiss, mm - hm.

Another Hundred People Words and Music by

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

An - 0th-er hun-dredpeo-ple just got off of the tr&- and came up through the gmGdd- while an -

I - 0th - er hun - dred peo-ple just got off of the bus - and are look - ing a - round - at an -

I 0th - =?r hun - dred peo-ple who got off of the plane - and are look - ing at ue - who

Copyright @ 1970 by Music Of The Times Fublishing Corp. (Valando Music Div. ) and Rilting Music Inc. All rights ahinistered by Music Of The Times Fublishing Corp., 655 Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10021 Carlin Music Corp., 14 New Burlington Street, London W1X 2LR International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

I - off of the train - and the plane and the bus- may - be yes-ter - day.

I - It's a ci - ty of strang - era. -

I - Some come to work, some- to .play. - A ci .- ty of strang - era,.

I I I I I I L 1 1 1 I 1 I I I l l I 1 I I

w I d I I. Y I I 1 A I 1 1 7 I - TU I - . I / n- - 4

Some come to stare, some - to stay. - And I -

ev - 'ry day ones who stay

n can find each 0th - er in the crowd - ed streets and the

I - dust - p trees with the bat - tered barks, And they

I walk to - geth-er p q t the post - ered walls , with the crude re - marks.

OW. -

I - let it Did you get my mes - sage 'cause I

- I n u I w I #

-tce I r I I I

4 - And an -

" - --- I 0th- er hun- dred peo-ple just got off of the train. --

I molt0 r i t .

Barcelona

Moderato

W o r d s and Music by STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Boj': Wllere you g o - ing'? (;ii.l: Bar - c e - lo - na. 1j: Oh--- (;: Don't get up. Il: Do y:~:i have to '? Lioj.: What - chn th ink- inp? (;ii-1: Bar - ce - lo - na. 8: Oh--- G: Flight eight-een. 12: Stay ;: !nin - ute.

(;: Yes, 1 have to. B: Oh--- G: ~ i n ' t get up. (;:Now you ' re an - gry. 11: No. I 'm not. C. Yes, 'you : 1 would l ike to. 3 : S o (;' Don't be menn.Il: Stay a min-ute (;: No, I can' t . 8 . Yes. I O U

a r e . 11: No. I ' m not. Pu t your things down. (;: See. you ' r e an - jirp. I:: No. i ' m not. C : Yes, yc:u can. [;:No. I can't. 1;: Where you s o - ins'? (;:Bar - ce - lo - na. Il:So you s a i d . (;:And Ma -

Copyright 0 1 9 7 1 by Music Of The Times Fublishing Corp. (Valando Music Div.) and Rllting Music Inc. All rights administered by Music Of The Times Fublishing Corp. , New York. N. Y. This arrangement Copyright 0 1 9 7 7 by Music Of The Times Publishing Corp. (Valando Music Div.) and Rilting Music Inc. Carlin Music Corp.. 14 New Burlington Street. London W1X 2LR International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

are. B: No, I 'm not. Put your wings down and stay. (;' I 'm leav- ing. fj: Why? C;: To go to . . . - drid. B: Bon voy-age. (;:On a B2e - ing. E:Good night. (;:Youare an - gry. H : No'. (;: I've got t o . . .

I I - fj: Stay. (;: I have to fly. . . f I know. /loll,: To Bar-ce-lo-na.- fl: Right. (;: R e p o r t to ... I): Go. That 's not t o

fl: Look!

f i

I You're a ver - y spe - cia1 girl. Not just

I o - ver - night. N o . You're a ver - y

(I) has51 I

I I I 1 I ! I - . I m . P I A ' I I I I I . I

I m ' I

s p e - cia1 g i r l And not be cause you ' re

I b r i ~ h t . Not jus t be cause you're

You ' re just I . ve r - V

I s p e cia1 g i r l . June

D. C. 01 * Coda

Do)': A - pr i l . (;irk T h a n k

I I ' I

s a y T h a t if I had niy way. . . Oh. well. I ~ a e s s , o - ~ J L .

- r I

B: What '? G': I ' l l Stay .

- I

I ) : But. . . C)h. t ioa i A

Bei - Moderato (with a beat)

live Words and Music by STEPHEN SONDHEIM

I Some-bod - y hold me too close,

( Some-bod - y hurt me too deep, Some-bod - y sit in my chair, and ru - in my

and make me a - ware of BE - ING A - LIVE,

BE - ING A - LIVE. Some -bod - y need me too

i much, Some-bod - y know me too well, Some-bod - y pull me up

Copyright 0 1 9 7 0 by Music Of The Times Publishing Corp. (Valando Music Div.) and Riltirg Music Inc. All rights administered by Music Of The Times Kblishirg Corp.. 655 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10021 Carlin Music Corp. . 14 New Burlirgton Street, London W1X 2LR International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in Ergland

I - short and put me through hell and give me sup - port for BE-ING A - LIVE,

Dm7/G Fmaj7/G Dm7/G G13 Dm7/G Fmaj7/G Dm7/G G13 n I - 3 ~ - 3 -

I I I a I A I I r 1 r I a - 7 r 4 I I I r I

I - 1 a. I I I 1 / I \ I

- Make me a - live, Make me a - live.

Make me con - fused, mock me with praise,

I - Let me be used, Var - y my days.

I - But a - lone is a - lone,

- - not a - live. Some-bod - y c r w d me with

~7 (bs)

Some-bod - y force me to care', Some-bod - y make me come

I I I I 7 I I r I

r I I r

r . I I 1

I I r I ' I

I I L - I I I\

d &. st'

I - through, 1'11 al-ways be there a s fright - ened as you, to help us sur - vive

I I I I

I - 1 , r I I r I I I

I 1 1 r n I I. r I L I L I I L I. d' 1 I I A* t l d* L \ - w . # ' + +* d' - L# - +'

I - - BE-ING A - LIVE.

Sor y-Grateful Moderato

~ 6 9

Words and Music by STEPHEN SONDHEIM

You're al-ways s o r - ry,- you're

I a1 - way. prate - ful.- a1 - ways won - dlring - whnt .hold her. LhInk - ing, - "I'm

Y

Then she walka in. - not a - lone."- I been@- You're still a - lone.-

And You

rtill you're s o r - ry, and still you're grate - ful, And still you won - der , and don't live for- her, you do live with- her, You're scared shetr start - ing to

Copyright 0 1970 by Music Of The Times Publishing Corp. (Valando Music Div. ) and Rilting Music Inc. All rights d i n i s t e r e d by Music Of The Times Publishing Corp. , 655 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10021 Carlin Music Corp. , 1 4 New Burlirgton Street, London W1X 2LR International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

still you doubt,- drift a - way,-

- and she ,goes out. - and scared she'll stay. -

I Ev - 'ry- thing's dif - f'rent, Good things get bet - ter,

noth - ingls changed,- bad gets worse.-

SOR - RY - G W T E - N L . re - gret - ful - hap - py, why

/ look for an - m e r s where none oc - cur?-

I a1 - ways a1 - ways be - what you a1 - ways were,- Which has

I noth- ing to do with, All to do with her.

I her.

Broadway Baby 137

W o r d s and Music by STE PHEN SONDHEIM

I'm just a Broad-way Ba- by.- Broad-way Ba- by,

I show. - Broad - way Ba - by, 1 show. Broad - way Ba - by,

I - Learn-ing how to sing and dance,- Mak - ing rounds all af - ter-noon, -

Wait-ing for that one big chance to be in a Eat - ing a t a greas - y spoon to save on my

ike to- be

Copyright 0 1 9 7 1 by Music Of The Times Publishing Corp. (Valando Music Mvision) and Beautiful Music Inc. Co. and Burthen Music Company, Inc. All rights administered by Music Of The Times Publi~hing Corp. Carlin Music Corp. . 14 New Burlirgton Street, London W1X 2LR International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

138

m on a - bill-

1 - to Wash - ing - ton Heights.- Some day may - be, all o - ver Times Square.- Some day may - be.

All my dreams will be r e - paid.- Heck, I'd e-ven play the- maid Lf I stick it long e - nough,-

I 1 I 0 I I I -

I I I I

show.

7 I Say,- is - t e r pro - duc - er,- S o m e girls- get the breaks.-

I I --'J!S -'noii oq ,q - ym - --'la - anp -old laq - s!~ -

-*say4 I! Iqm -102 - aA,I -'l!6 -' ana Krn arn -a~!2 -

Slowly, like a blues

Words and Music by STEPHEN SONDHEIM

I Good times and bum times, I've seen 'em all and, my dear,- I'm still here. -

Gmaj9 Gsus4 Gmaj 9 Em11 Em7

I Plush vel - vet some - times;- Some-times just pret - tels and beer, - But I'm "here. -

- -- I I've stuffed the dail - iis- in m y shoes,- Strummed uk - u - le - les,- Sung the- blues,-

copyright 0 1 9 7 1 by ~ u n i c The m e n ~ u b 1 i . w corp. (~alando ~ u n i c Division) and Beautiful Mualc Inc. Co. and Burthen Muatc C a m p y , Inc. All rights adnibdatered by Muatc Of The Tlmee Publiehlng Corp. Carlin Muatc Corp. . 14 New Burliqgon Street, London W1X 2LR Internanonal Copyright Secured AU Right. Reserved Mada in Ergland

141

Gmaj 7

I Seen all my dreams dis - ap - pear.- But I'm here. -

I've slept in shan - ties,- guest of the W . P. A.- I've been through Re - no,- I've been through Bev - er - ly Hills,-

But I'm here. - And I'm here.-

A ,L Gmaj 9 Gsus +'(

G-3

I Danced in my scan - ties,- Three bucks a night was the pay.- ~ ; t I'm here.- Reef - ers and vi - no,- rest cures, re - li - gion and pills, - And I'm here.-

I've stood on bread - lines- with the- best,- Watched while the head - lines- did the- rest.- Got through it stink - o-

I

I In the d e - press - ion was I - d k - pressed?- No - where nka; /-

I should have gone to an act - ing- school,-That seems clear.

I met a big fi - nan - cier- and I'm here. Still somz - one said, "She's sin - cere," So I'm here.

Gmaj 9 Gmaj9 D9(-13) G m a j 9 Am% Gmaj9 D9(-13)

I've been through Gand - hi,- Wal - ly and Georg - 's af - fair, - ' And I'm here.- Black sa - ble one day,- Next day it goes in - to hock,- But I'm here. -

Gmaj 9 AmyD E m 9 E-13

A - mos 'n , And - y, - Mah - jongg and plat - i - num hair, - And I'm here. - Top bill - ing Mon -day ,- Tues - day you're tour - ing in stock,- But I'm here.-

' t 'i ' & ' t

I got through "Ab - ie's - I - rish Rose,': Five Di - onne ba - bies,- Ma - jor Bowes,- F i s t you're an - 0th - e r sloe - eyed vamp,- Then some - one's moth-er,- Then you're camp.-

I Had her - bie jee - bier- for Bee - be's- Bath - y - sphere.

I've got - ten through Her - bert and J. Ed -gar Hoo - I - ver, -

1 Gee, that was fun- and a half.- When you've been through Her - bert and J. Ed - gar Hoo - - ver,-

An - y - thing else- is a laugh.- >

Then you car - eer from car - eer- to car - eer

1 I'm a1 - most through m y _ mem - oirs And I'm here

Gmai 9 D9 ~trn71-5)

I've got - ten through "Hey, la - d y , are - n't you who0 - - zis? - I -

/ Wow! What a look - e i you u e r e , ' L Or, bet - ter yet , "Sor - ry, I thought youwere"whoo- .

21s. - what ev - er hap - pened to her?"- >

I -

Good times and bum times,- I've seen 'em all and, my dear,-

' t ' t

I - 11% still here. - Plush vel - vet some - times,-

( some - times just pret - zels and beer,- But I'm here.-

I I've run the garn - ut,- A t o Z.- Three cheers and dam - mit,-

1 got through all of last year- and I'm here. -

I Lord knows a t least I was there-

cl v- I - - - -

And I'm here - Look who's

L I . I1 r I I I I

I

I "si l Y i U I I

A' a . I . A.

2 - -iT 3 3 PI: a- =

L. T.

I " here! I'm still here!

Could I Leave You Words and Music by

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Leave you? Leave you?

1 How could I leave you? How could I go it a - lone? Could I wave the

I years a - way - with a quick g ~ o d - bye? How do you wipe tears a - way - when your eyes are

I dry? - Sweet -heart, lov - er, could I re - cov - er,

Copyright @1971 by Muaic Of The Times Publishing Corp. (Valando Music Division) and Beautiful Music Inc. Co. and Burthen Muaic Company Inc. ALL rights administered by Music Of The Tlmes Publishing Corp. Carlin Muaic Corp. . 14 New Burlingtm Street, London W1X 2LR international Copyright Secured AU Rlghts Reserved Made in England

Give up the joys I have k n o w n ? Not to fetch your pills a - g a i n Ev - 'IT day at

~ # m 7 B 9 c #m

Not to give those din - ners for ten el - der - ly men from the U. N . How could I sur -

vive? Could 1 . leave you and your shelves of the ,

Collld 1 leave you? No, the point is, could

world's past books? And the eve - nings of mar - tyred looks,

cryp - tic sighs, sul - len looks from those in - jured eyes,Could I leave the leave me the flat, leave me the Braques and Cha - galls and all that, you could

quips with a sting, jokes with a sneer, Pas - sion - less love - mak - ing leave me the stocks for sen - ti - ment's sake, and nine - ty per - cent of the

A . ~b (addand) B bm6 E b(add2nd)~ bm Gm7sus4 Cil

once a year, Leave the lies ill - con - cealed mon - ey you make, and the rugs and the cooks.

and the Dar - ling,

II I

DOCO accell. e cresc.

I wounds nev - er healed and the game not worth win - ning and wait! I'm just - be - gin - ning! What, you keep the drugs, an - gel, you keep the books, hon - ey,

I Leave You? Leave You? How could I leave you? What would I d o on my

own? Put - ting thoughts of you a - s i d e in the south of F r a n c e , Would I think of

I I su - i - c i d e ? Dar - ling, shall we dance? Could I

I live through the pain on a ter - race in Spain? Would it pass? It would

J~O 30 I@ pue ]a - u!ds ag) daaq noA 're8 - ns 'pue18 agl aXal 11'1 I

'mouq noA I,U - p!p 10 - ' I

aql u! a8a 1noA jleq Aoq r! ql!m a8e~ Au AJ - nq I Plno3 'sscd 1

I friends and . . . just wait a god - dam min - ute! leave you? Leave you?

I How could I leave you? Sweet-heart, I have to con - fess:

I Could I leave you? Yes. Will I

I I i - leave you? Will I leave you?

Guess!

T h e 'God-Why-Don't-You-Love Me' Blues lS3

Words and Music by

(d.92) STEPHEN SONDHEIM n I I I

v Y I I've those

"God, Why don't you love me, oh YOU d o 1'11 see "Whis - per

YOU how I'm bet - ter than I think, but what d o

I I I 1' I

I I \ I . I I , IJ I I I I I I 1 I

4- /*- /* la - ter" Blues, you know?" Blues.

That "long as you ig - nore me, you're the on - ly thing that That "Why d o you keep tel - ling me I stink when I a -

Copyright a1971 by Music Of The Times Publishing Corp. (Valando Music Division) and Beautitul Music Inc. Co. and Burthen Music Company Inc. All rights ackninistered by Music Of The Times Publishing Corp. Carlin Music Corp. . 14 New Burlington Street, London W1X 2LR International Copyright Secured All Righta Reserved Made in England

1 mat - ters" dore you?"

feel - ing. feel - ing.

-- That "if I'm good e - nough for you, you're not good e - nough- That "say I'm all the world t o you, you're out of your mind,'L

And "thank you for the pre - sent but what's wrong with it?" stuff.- "I know there's some - one else and 1 could kiss your be - hind.':

Those "don't come an - y clos - er 'cause you know how much I Those you say I'm ter - ri - fic but your taste' was a1 - ways

,,'noL II!Y I1.I '2" 01 auro3.. ,;no/( paau 1 'L~M - e 03.. I

el - 108 'p!p no/( qo 'aur ahor no/( ley1 1Ia1.. awl I

"Dar - ling, I'll d o an - y - thing to keep you with

till l Y YOU

1 - tell me that you love me, oh YOU

did, now beat it, will you?" I /'

blues.

You Must Meet My Wife Words and Music by

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

She

light - ens my sad - ness, she liv - ens my days, she bursts with a kind of

I - mad - ness my well - ord - ered ways.- My hap - pi - est mis - take, the ache of my

Cqyright 0 1 9 7 9 Rilting Music. Inc. & Revelation Music Publishing Corp. Chappel1 Music Ltd., 50 New Band Street, London W1 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made In England

I * . I I 1

bub - bles with plea - sure, she glows with sur - prise, Dis - rupts my ac - cus-tomed

I lei - sure and ruf - fles my t i e s . I don't know e - ven now quite how it be -

D7 I

E7-5 E7 Am7 ten. Cm/G - I u I - I n r ~i

I r 1 - r - 0 I # I I r I 1 I I I 4. I I I I I I -

I I

You must meet my wife when you can.

I - One thou - sand w h i m s to which I

Fsus F Fsus E Ebsus

her small - est tear- turns me a s h -

Eb Absus Gsus G Gsus

Y - I Y I

I nev - er dreamed- that I could live I I I Y in - SO corn -

plete - ly de - ment - ed, con - tent - ed a fash - ion. So

sun - like, so win - ning, so un - like a wife, I d o think that I'm be -

'ajlm Xm lam noX JI I

ue3 111ls auo a%e Am le moq aur ~SE 1,uoa - a joC su81s moqs 01 I

Lzazsons Words and Music by

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

1. At the vil - la of the Ba - ron De 2. At the pa - lace of the Duke of Fer -

I Sig - nac. ra - ra,-

Where I spent a some-what in - fa-mous year, Who was pre - ma - ture - ly deaf, but a dear,

At the vil - la of the Ba - ron De Sig - nac, - At the pa- lace of the Duke of Fer - ra - ra, -

I had la - dies in at - tewdance, I ac - qui - red some po - si - tion

Copyright 01973 Riltirg Mullic, Inc. & Revelation Music Publishing Corp. Chappel1 Music Ltd. , 60 New Bond Street, London Wl International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

fi - re op - a1 pen - dants. plus a ti - ny Ti - tian.

, R

What's hap-pened to them, What's hap-pened to them,

Li - ai - sons to - day? Li - ai - sons to - day?

Dis - grace - ful!- To see them,-

What's be - come of them? Some ofthem hard - ly pay their shod - dy way. In - dis - a i m - i - nate wom - en, it pains me more than I can

I

What

once was a rare champagne is now just an a - mi - a - ble hock,What once was a vil - la at least is

1 "digs." What once was a gown with train is now just a sim-ple lit -tle frock,What

once was a sump-tu-ous feast is figs. "No, not e - ven

(?: b..

Rai - sins." Ah, Li -

I

I.-. - I I L DO*

ai - sons... -

0' I r r

I "Where was I? Oh, yes ..."

of taste that

I play. Where is style? Where is

I skill? Where is fore-thought? Where's dis -

I cre -tion of the heart, Where's pas-sion in ,the art, Where's craft?

1 With a smile and a will, but with

I more thought, One ac - qui-res a chat - eau ex -

I trav - a - gant - ly o - ver - staffed. Too man - y

1 peo - ple mud - dle sex with mere de - sire And when e -

I mo - tion in - ter - venes, ,,the nets de - scend. It should on

1 no ac -count per - plex, or worse, in - spire. It's but a

- - 7 w - - w

plea - sur - a - ble means to a mea - sur - a - ble end.

I trend. "Where was I? . . . Oh, yes. . . "

--- In the cas - tle of the King of the Be1 - glans-

We would vis - it through a false chif - fo - nier.

@'a, @'a,

I In the cas - tle of the Kinn of the Be1 mans.-

Who,when things got rath - 5r touch - y, deed - ed me a duch - y. . .

I Li - ai - sons,- What's hap-pened to them, Li - ai - sons to -

I day? Un - t i - dy.- Take my daughrter, I taught her, I

1 e - ven named her De - si - rke. In a

1 world where the kings are em - ploy -ers,

Where the am - a - teur pre - vails and de - li - ca - cy fails to

Pay, In a world where the

I princ es are law - yers, What can

I an - y - one ex - pect ex cept to re - col - lect Li

I I a tempo I I

1 in the but -tons, in the bread.- Ev - 'ry day a

1 lit - tle sting In the heart and in the head.-

I Ev - 'ry move and ev - 'ry breath, And you hard - ly

1 feel a thing, Brings a per - fect lit - tle death.___

saauq dlu uo 'J!T dlu saqoqs 'dl - laafis

- He talks soft - ly of his wars And his I Men are stu - pid, men are vain, Love's d is

Y , I I I 1 , . ha. I

I w * v y I v y I -- I I

hor - ses and his whores. I think love's a A gust - ing, love's in - sane. hu - mil - i l -

(2nd Girl:) 11.

1 - dir - .ty bus - 'ness! So do I !

r - i true! (1st Girl:) I'm

'smur - mur aq] U I

u! '101 - red agl ul

1 in the pau - x s , in the ges - tures, in the sighs.

1 in the bread. Ev - 'ry day a

I Ev - ' r y day a lit - tle dies

( lit - tle sting In the heart and

pa3 - rad e s%u!rg ' "8qql e laaj 61 - pq noK putr 'qlearq I(I, - Aa I

- lad e s%u!~a . ' -%qq~ e 1aaj I(1 - preq noI( puy 1

The Miller's Son Words and Music by

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

shall mar - ry the mill er's son, the bus shall mar - ry 'ness - man,

shall mar - ry the Prince of Wales,

Cm7 ten.

Pin Five

Pearls

my hat on a nice piece of pro - per - ty. fat ba - bies and lots of se - a - r i - ty.

and ser - vants and dress - ing for fes - ti - vals. ten.

c m ~ m / s b ~b GSUS

Fri - day nights, for a bit Fri - day nights, if we think Fri - day nights, with him all

of fun, we can, in tails,

We'll go We'll go We'll have

Copyright a1973 Rilting Music, Inc. & Revelation Muslc mblishing Corp. Chappell Music Ltd., 50 New Bond Street, London W1 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made In England

wink and a wig - gle and a gig - gle on the grass and I'll PU* and a fum - ble and a , tum - ble in the sheets and 1'11 rip in the bus - tle and a rus - tle in the hay and I'll

I I I I I I I I

cl d* 4 4 -d 4-4 4 " I -

fan - dan -

pinch and a did - dle in the mid - dle of what pass - dip in the but - ter and a flut - ter with what meets

flings of con - fet - ti and my pet - ti - coats a - way

It's a

poco cresc. I U I

ver - y short road from the pinch and the to the ver - y short fetch from the push and the whoop to the ver - y short way from the fling that's for fun to the

squint and the stoop and the mum - ble. It's not thigh press - ing un - der the ta - ble.

ver - y short road to the ten thou - sandth lunch, and the much of a stretch to the cribs and the croup and the ver - y short day till you're stuck with just one o r it

are a~aq1 'al!'I~ ueau ale a~aq1 'al!~~ ueaur are a~aql '~I!YM ueau - I

aql UI .d[s aql uo auop aq 01 seq aq1 UI .hP 08 pue doo~p ley1 suros - oq

UI '@is aql pue y3no~S aql Pue Vlaq

Temoo Primo

I and a girl ought to cel - e - brate what pass - es Or

I man - y a bed to be sam - pled and seen in the mean - while.-

I And a girl has to

I " t eel - e - brate what pass - es

%g - ssed I

uaaq aAeq IOU 11.1 lnq pass!^ aAeq 11.1 lor e s,araql 'paq e A - ueur I

Send In Tvle Clowns Lento

Words and Music by STEPHEN SONDHEIM

~b ~ b s u s 4

* + - - Is-n't it rich?

pair? Me here at last on the ground, you in mid - air. . . Send in $e

I prove? One who keeps tear - ing a - round, one who can't move. . . Where are the

Copyright 01973 Rilting Muslc, Inc. & Revelation Muslc Fublishing Corp. Chappel1 Music Ltd., 50 New Band Street, Landon Wl Internattorial Copyright Securcd MI Rights Reserved Made in England

%u!- ua-do paddols p,~ uaqm lsnf I

s t + - - Don't you love farce? My fault, I fear.

rich. Is - n't it aueer. I thought that

Los - ine mv

clowns. Don't bo the r , they're here. - Is - n't it

clowns. Well, may-be next year. . . I ten.

Su!dd!qr par re alps :a,,,,0 er

N011Vl3A3L

Pretfy Lady Words and Music by

: SAILOR: What pretty flowers. STEPHEN SONDHEIM Andantino dolce (Diclogtle co;ltinues) /--- . . .much obliged.

P'., 0- * F-F F- A h K i

/LA" C,

I lr. w I w d

PP Cello (pizz.)

2. Rass 1 2. simile

5 SAILOR 111:

k i. 8 - : V I I I / I i i I

O * I O I - - 4

Pret - ty la - dy in the pret - ty gar -den, can't-cher stay?

I - Pret - ty la - dy , we got leave and we got paid t o - day.

I S t r * -mi 1

Pret - ty la - dy with the flow - er, Give a lone - ly sail - or 'alf an ho - ur.

L.H. I

I I I A ' 1

I.0. - - 0.0 . * I -

1' I . I -b--- Rilting Music Inc. & Revelation Munc Fubli8hing Corp. ri

Chappell Music Ltd.. 50 New Bond Street. London W1 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Made in England

1 7 (SAILOR 111:)

Pret - ty la - dy , can you un - der-stand a word I Don't go a -

n . .

I I I I I I I f 1

I I I r~ I I - - /

way. I sailed the

I world 6 r you. Pret - ty la - dy, I'm a mil-lion miles from Step-ney

I Pret - ty la - d y , you're e - nough t o make me glad I'm here.

I SAILOR I Ib

I Green. You are the soft - est thing I ev - er

I Pret - ty la - dy, 'ow a - bout it? Don't you know 'ow long I been with-out it?

I laugh for I don't know how long. I'll sing a song for you, Tell you

seen. Stay with me please, I been a -

Pret - ty la - dy in the pret - ty gar - den, wot-cher say? Can't-cher

I tales of ad - ven - tur - ing, strange and fan - tas - ti - cal. +Strs. (sust.)

cello TJ I B. CI. (+Bass)

Don't be a - fraid, Hey. No, lis - ten,

stay?. . . Hey, wait, don't go yet. Pret - ty la - dy with the pret - ty bow,

Pret - ty la - dy, I ain't nev - er been a - way from home. Strs. (cued in W.W.).

41

y, beg your par - don,

Please don't go. I

Won't-cher walk me through your pret-ty gar - den?

Ad lib (111:) ,--- ,

Pret - ty la - dy, look, I'm on my knees.

Pret - ty la - dy, look, I'm on my knees. Pret - ty

I " Pret - ty la - dy, look, I'm on my knees. Pret - ty

Cello f 11 f

I1 - m

Cue to continue: Vamp: (under dialogue) 'T'sall we've got. Please?

(I & 11:)

f B. CI.

52 SAILOR 11:

I Pret - ty la - dy in the pret - ty gar - den, won't-cher stay?

Pret - ty la - dy, we got leave and we got paid to - day.

Pret - ty la - dy, we got leave and we got paid to - day.

- - - -

I I I I I I . I I.

Bass

sub. f n -.

I I r F r I

I

Give a lone - ly sail - or

I SAILOR I : sub. f

Pret - ty la - dy with the flow - er, Give a lone - ly sail - or

sub. f

- Give a lone - ly sail - or

I I

'alf an ho - ur. Pret - ty la - dy in the pret - ty gar - den, won't - cher

1 Pret - ty la - dy in the pret - ty gar - den, won't -cher stay?

stay? Why can't - cher stay?

I - pret - ty gar - den, won't - cher stay?

I Strs. 1 / 1

" Don't go a - way.

(I:)

h I u I I I r I v I I

I I -I I r I I I I I I w -

- I sailed the world 2 $u- -'