LISTEN TO CHILDREN THROUGH HAMMERSTEIN AND SONDHEIM
“Has anyone noticed how many R&H works have kids in them?”
Ethan Mordden asked that question in his 1992 book Rodgers & Hammerstein.
“The answer,” he then told us, “is nine out of eleven.”
True. Only OKLAHOMA! and ME AND JULIET don’t feature children. You might argue that ALLEGRO doesn’t, either, but it does start with the birth of a boy, and that kid doesn’t grow to adulthood overnight.
CINDERELLA? Children were never part of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, but Hammerstein’s musical version, in “The Prince Is Giving a Ball,” at least found room for a pre-teen would-be princess to moan, “I wish I were an older girl.”
In contrast, examine Stephen Sondheim’s take on children, and you’ll once again see – as I’ve asserted throughout this month to celebrate his birthday – that Hammerstein’s prize pupil went his own way.
First off, Hammerstein created arguably the greatest moment in musical theater history by writing about the impending birth of a child. Billy Bigelow in CAROUSEL envisions “My boy Bill” in his “Soliloquy” before realizing that the child could be “My little girl.”
That’s indeed what she will be. We eventually meet Louise as an unhappy teenager who bears the brunt of her father’s sins, which Carrie and Enoch Snow’s kids won’t let her forget.
Hammerstein created nicer youngsters in SOUTH PACIFIC. Nellie’s initial reaction to Ngana and Jerome is, “You’re the cutest things I ever saw in my whole life!” Arguably cuter ones, though, are found in THE KING AND I’s “March of the Siamese Children.” His Majesty’s many offspring enter and prostrate themselves to their father. Alas, the smallest child bows in the wrong place, which motivates The King to pick her up and move her to where she belongs while she stays in the same subservient position without moving a muscle. As much as we loved her, we fell in love with all of them as quickly as Anna did when she was getting to know them.
And if they weren’t enough, two other kids were on the scene: Louis, Anna’s son, and Prince Chulalongkorn. In real life, the two didn’t get along, but Hammerstein saw to it that they did.
PIPE DREAM deals with Fauna, the proprietor of the best little whorehouse in California – a locale where you just don’t find children. But Hammerstein softened Fauna by having her dance with the neighborhood’s urchins. In real life, these children’s mothers would have grabbed their sons and daughters, spanked their bottoms and caustically yelled, “I told you to stay away from that house!”
FLOWER DRUM SONG had a bevy of kids complain about “The Other Generation” 11 months before Hammerstein would introduce the most famous children in musical theater history in THE SOUND OF MUSIC.
On the other hand, Sondheim’s body of work suggests that he wasn’t drawn to musicals that involved kids. Yes, he gave us “Children Will Listen,” but that was cautionary advice to parents.
If you’re rebutting with GYPSY, remember that he had to be talked into doing that show after he was denied the chance to compose it. The musicals that he truly wanted to write rarely involved kids; A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, PASSION and ROAD SHOW offer none. Many others simply allude to children or give them little more than a passing mention.
COMPANY’s five couples appreciate that Bobby “takes the kids to the zoo,” but we don’t see him doing that because no kids are in the show. In ANYONE CAN WHISTLE, Baby Joan has three lines. Billy, Sara Jane Moore’s son in ASSASSINS, has 57 words and doesn’t sing. Both kids are pictured as annoying – a stark contrast to most of Hammerstein’s children, who are (or turn out to be) adorably appealing.
In PACIFIC OVERTURES, Boy is more of a device than a character. Sondheim has an Old Man recollect when he was “Someone in a Tree” at the age of 10. “Boy” is brought on to duet with his older self; then he, too, is never seen again.
SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE has three children: “Boy,” “Little Girl” and Louise. Because they appear in “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” Sondheim had to acknowledge them. When Act Two shifts to a 20th century art museum, children are nowhere to be found until the curtain call.
In FOLLIES, Phyllis and Ben as well as Sally and Buddy sing about their future married life – the former in “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow,” the latter in “Love Will See Us Through.” And yet, none of the four utters one word about having children, and this in the 1940s, when kids were often expected 10 months after a wedding.
Compare this to Enoch in CAROUSEL who envisions “When the Children Are Asleep” before he marries Carrie.
Also compare Fredrika in A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC to the child in its source material SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT. Desiree’s child in the film is a four-year-old boy, and while a 13-year-old girl is not old, Sondheim and bookwriter Hugh Wheeler did make her less of a child.
Even INTO THE WOODS didn’t see Jack (of beanstalk fame) and Little Red Ridinghood as young in the way we’d always envisioned them in our heads. Ben Wright was already 18 and Danielle Ferland was, to quote a famous Hammerstein lyric, 16 going on 17.
The baby born to The Baker and his Wife is a prop, really; it never breaks free of its swaddling clothes and, needless to say, doesn’t have a line. In fact, neither Sondheim nor bookwriter James Lapine even troubled to name the kid.
And for all the talk of how much the couple wanted a child, we never see them give those loving glances or say those “Coochee-coochee-coos!” while assuming an exaggerated voice to say, “And how is mommy’s little darling today?” Such feelings could have been easily musicalized.
May we infer that Sondheim’s contentious relationship with his judgmental mother caused him not to write such a song? Add to that the critical lyrics he had Jack’s mother dispense to her son. Perhaps Sondheim had Mama Foxy in mind when, in COMPANY, Joanne offers one definition of marriage as “the children you destroy together” – the only other reference to kids in the entire musical.
Sondheim’s cruelest lyric that didn’t reach the stage occurred in “There’s Something about a War,” dropped from FORUM before its Washington tryout. Here, Roman commander Miles Gloriosus fondly recalls the time when he had “children to annihilate.”
Many people mellow as they age; where children are concerned, that seems to have been true of Sondheim. After all, during previews of SUNDAY, he quickly wrote a song that implied that the most important things in life are “Children and Art.”
There’s reason to believe that he may not have just been writing for the character of Marie but speaking for himself. For in 1988, when Diane Sawyer interviewed Sondheim on 60 Minutes, he happened to mention that INTO THE WOODS was “about parents and children.”
That spurred Sawyer to ask, “Did you want them – children?”
Sondheim took a moment before answering, and with a somewhat sad face, responded, “Yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t have any,” before adding, “but art is the other way of having children.”
It’s a rare musical theater enthusiast who isn’t grateful for so many of his offspring.
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.
