HAMMERSTEIN AND SONDHEIM: YESTERDAY ISN’T GONE By Peter Filichia
I asked the question last week, and I’ll ask it again.
Have you ever noticed that Stephen Sondheim wound up writing new and edgier versions of the musicals that his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, wrote with Richard Rodgers?
Last week, I compared what the two did with a famous fairy tale: Hammerstein’s CINDERELLA and Sondheim’s INTO THE WOODS.
Now let’s look at their musicals about growing up, getting married and succeeding professionally.
Hammerstein wrote an original book and lyrics for his 1947 musical ALLEGRO. Sondheim provided the score for his 1981 musical MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, with a book by George Furth, which he adapted from George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1934 play.
Whether the CINDERELLA/INTO THE WOODS situation was subconscious or inadvertent on Sondheim’s part, a new take on ALLEGRO apparently wasn’t. Meryle Secrest, Frank Rich and Steve Swayne all reported that Sondheim stated that “all my life I’ve been trying to fix ALLEGRO.”
We can understand why: as a 17-year-old, he was there from its first day of rehearsal. Hammerstein had arranged for his Bucks County neighbor to become one of the show’s assistants. “I typed scripts, I got coffee and,” Sondheim added, referring to the musical’s director-choreographer, “listened to Agnes de Mille maltreat the singers.”
And after ALLEGRO closed – and long before MERRILY – Sondheim wrote two early musicals that could be interpreted as attempts to fix Hammerstein’s show. In 1949, he answered Hammerstein’s challenge to adapt a play by writing ALL THAT GLITTERS, a musical version of Kaufman and Marc Connelly’s 1924 play BEGGAR ON HORSEBACK. A starving composer has the choice to marry for love or for money; he finally opts for the former in a love-conquers-all scenario.In 1951, he took Hammerstein’s advice to write a fully original musical, which became CLIMB HIGH. A would-be actor flails, fails and takes comfort in a woman who loves him.
Do those sound a little namby-pamby for the Sondheim we came to know? The young man may well have been trying to please Hammerstein by writing musicals that he thought his altruistic and optimistic mentor would like.
Yet Hammerstein was instrumental in Sondheim’s ultimately trying the untried. In a 2010 interview with Terry Gross, Sondheim said, “(I)f you look at an overview of the stuff that was written before my generation, what you get is Hammerstein as an experimental playwright. His big experiment, which would have broken things open had it been a success, was ALLEGRO. (It) was an attempt to really try something new with the form. But because it was a failure, nobody picked up on it. Then it was up to my generation to start experimenting … I might not be so attracted to experimental musicals if I hadn’t wet my feet with ALLEGRO.”
Secrest also quoted Sondheim’s analysis of Hammerstein’s intentions with ALLEGRO: “What he was talking about was the trappings, not so much of success, but of losing sight of what your goal is.” And that is indeed what MERRILY is all about, too, as both musicals examined a man’s life through the choices he made.ALLEGRO dealt with Joseph Taylor, Jr. from birth as a son of a doctor to the age of 35, when he was a doctor himself.
However, Joe soon switched his practice from the small Illinois town, in which he grew up and loved, in favor of The Big City – Chicago – which he didn’t.
His wife Jenny slyly encouraged the move. When she sang “Money Isn’t Everything,” she meant it ironically before coming clean at the end of the song: “unless you’re very poor” and “as long as you have dough.”
Joe certainly wasn’t the first husband, nor will he certainly be the last, to say “Yes, dear” and seemingly embrace – while actually surrendering to – the famous credo of “Happy wife, happy life.”
As is often the case, here it meant “Happy wife, unhappy husband.” Joe’s miserable in Chicago because he attends to rich and powerful hypochondriacs who don’t need a doctor. He feels guilty because he knows that his hometown desperately requires an attentive and talented physician.
Joe eventually decides not to compromise. When offered a position that would have made him even more rich and powerful, he refuses it and is inspired, in a most pretty song, to “Come Home.”
But what about Jenny? Hammerstein solved that problem by making her unfaithful. After the marriage dissolves, we know that Joe and his devoted nurse Emily will marry. Hammerstein also implied that Joe’s marrying Jenny could be explained as a youthful mistake that so many have made. That includes Hammerstein himself, who married a month after he’d turned 22 and was divorced by 34. His second marriage, however, lasted 40 years until his death. Here’s guessing that he expected the same success for Joe’s second marriage to Emily.On to MERRILY. Sondheim and Furth settled for 25 years instead of 35. Their first impulse was to have us meet Franklin Shepard in 1980, when he’s the commencement speaker at the high school that he once attended. We gradually travel back with him to 1955, when he’s a graduating senior and the school’s valedictorian.
Frank wasn’t concerned with the smalltown values that Hammerstein’s Average Joe embraced. He becomes a movie mogul who’d abandoned his extraordinary talent as a Broadway composer. Frank is perfectly content to stay in Hollywood and remain rich and happy, as opposed to Joe, who cannot be happy simply by being rich.
When Joe went away to college, he sang, “I wish I were home” because “I’m lonely as hell.” Can you picture Frank feeling that way? We imagine that, like most young people, he’s thrilled to be on his own for the first time in his life. When Frank gets to his Big City – New York – he’s not remotely homesick; all he can concentrate on is conquering Broadway.Unlike Joe, who is able to redeem himself, Frank is beyond redemption. This mirrors both Hammerstein’s lifelong inclination to see life as it should be and Sondheim’s insistence on seeing life realistically.
MERRILY’s biggest asset that ALLEGRO didn’t have was its going-back-in-time conceit (inherited from Kaufman and Hart); it made for a far more pleasant second act. Watching Joseph Taylor, Jr. go steadily down a rabbit hole made for a dreary Act Two, even with the last-minute save. MERRILY starts out with the tough Franklin cheating on his second wife just as he did with his first, but as the show progresses – or regresses, if you will – he becomes nicer and nicer as he becomes younger and younger. So do his friend Mary Flynn and his collaborator Charley Kringas. True, we aren’t to forget what happened to them, but that doesn’t erase the more enjoyable moments. So, one must admit that, at least in a way, Sondheim (and Furth) did fix ALLEGRO.Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY: 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available on Amazon.
