Stephen Sondheim goes someplace every month or two to make some money being interviewed. Usually it's by Frank Rich, who's a very smart guy…but from what I can tell, he tends to ask Sondheim the same questions, mostly about Gypsy and West Side Story. (Rumor has it Sondheim's written other shows.) He also likes to ask questions that he knows Sondheim can answer without breaking a sweat. Last night, America's greatest living composer didn't sweat but he did have to work a little harder to respond to questioning by a charming, shy gent named Michael Silverblatt. Mr. Silverblatt is a host on local radio station KCRW and an unabashed Sondheim fan who merely posed questions that he wanted to have answered. It made for a fascinating evening and one that I expect Mr. Sondheim enjoyed more than he'd anticipated.
Carolyn and I were sitting in the second row, close enough to see the impish twinkle on his face as many of the queries sent him into uncharted territory. We also came close to being the unwitting targets of a Sondheim spit-take. Silverblatt asked him if he'd ever seen any real bizarre interpretations of his shows. He asked this just as Sondheim was taking a sip of water and it was all the man could do to not pull a Danny Thomas. (The answer was no, but he heard about a production of Company in which the director had Bobby commit suicide at the end.)
Another intriguing question: Sondheim, as you all know, officially wrote only the lyrics for West Side Story, Gypsy and Do I Hear a Waltz? Silverblatt asked him — I think this was a question from the audience, which submitted many on cards — if he'd written any music for any of those shows. Sondheim hesitated a moment before admitting — and I never heard this before — that he wrote part of the music that leads into "Something's Coming" in West Side Story. He also explained that for the other two shows, he usually supplied the composers with detailed rhythmic notations so he had serious impact on how those tunes were structured.
Some other things I remember…
- After A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, there was almost a production of Saturday Night, the show that was to have been Sondheim's Broadway debut. It went unrealized when its producer died but after Forum, an arrangement was made for Bob Fosse to not only direct a production but to also star in it. It got as far as casting but Sondheim said he killed the project when he decided he didn't want to go forward with "old work."
- He was also approached by Fosse to collaborate on a show based on the movie, Big Deal on Madonna Street. This was many years before Fosse did it as a show called Big Deal. Sondheim said Fosse came to him with a book (script) he had written and proposed that Sondheim write the songs. He almost went for it until he realized that Fosse had set the entire story in Mexico and that it called for Mexican-style tunes. Said Sondheim, "The only kinds of music I can't stand are Mexican and Hawaiian."
- Silverblatt also got him to talk about another show that didn't happen. Several years after West Side Story, the team of Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Sondheim worked on a musical version of the Bertolt Brecht play, The Exception and the Rule. Eight songs were written but Sondheim said he wasn't happy with the project and called it off.
- Sondheim was asked which was harder — to write funny or serious. He said comedy was much harder. Asked to name some funny songs he'd written for his shows, he mentioned "Barcelona" from Company and "Impossible" from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
And he explained his recently-revealed (heretical to some) criticism of the lyric writing of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, but it pretty much repeated what he said in his new book, Finishing the Hat.
One other point. Last time I heard Sondheim interviewed in Royce Hall, they took questions from the audience via a microphone placed in the aisle. It pretty much brought the festivities to a screeching halt. The queries from the floor drew answers of little interest as the askers seemed to care more about talking to Sondheim (or maybe making themselves the center of attention) than in eliciting good information. This time, audience questions were submitted, as I mentioned, on cards so Mr. Silverblatt could select the ones worth posing. It worked quite well. Other interviewers please take note. And take note of what Michael Silverblatt did. He asked about things he wanted to know about and we got a great evening. That's what an interviewer is supposed to do.