PICTURE THIS: HIRSCHFELD AND SONDHEIM By Peter Filichia
This must be a first.
What other book celebrates two theater artists, each of whom has a Broadway theater named for him?
The Al Hirschfeld Theatre is on 45th Street west of Broadway while The Stephen Sondheim Theatre is on 43rd Street east of Broadway. Where their legendary careers intersected through the years is the subject of Hirschfeld’s Sondheim.
The cover is Hirschfeld’s famous drawing of a bearded Sondheim, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, simultaneously writing on a music sheet with his right hand as his left is playing the piano.
(David Staller, the founding artistic director of The Gingold Theatrical Group, has one of these drawings on which Sondheim wrote, “Look what I can do with just three fingers on my left hand!” Yeah, Hirschfeld did leave some things to the imagination…)
At 14 inches long and 11 inches wide, the book is the quintessential coffee table book. However, the publishers at Abrams Books have suggested another use. As the subtitle says, “A Poster Book.”
So, if you can bring yourself to do it, you can tear the thing apart and cover your walls with the 25 posters, each of which takes up an entire 14-by-11-inch page.
Because Bernadette Peters wrote the Introduction, the first full-page shows her wearing the Dot costume from SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE. And yet, the book will reiterate a line that Peters sang as Marie in the second act: “Isn’t it lovely how artists can capture us?”
Nobody did it better than Hirschfeld…
The posters trumpet such musicals as:
WEST SIDE STORY (1957): Larry Kert as Tony is kneeling over the bodies of Bernardo and Riff. His mouth is open as wide as can be, wailing with an agony that rivals King Lear’s. Officer Krupke can be spotted in the distance, which is why 11 Jets are scrambling over the chain link fence to get the hell out of there.
COMPANY (1970): Bobby is surrounded by the eight women in his life; the expression on Dean Jones’ face seems to say that eight is enough. And who is shown literally breathing down Jones’ neck? Why, Elaine Stritch, of course, who was a pest to many people.
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (1973): Hermoine Gingold’s Madame Armfeldt is sitting near those who were invited to her manse – and those who were not. The harrumph-filled look on her face suggests the dour but funny lyrics that Sondheim gave her in the film’s “A Weekend in the Country.” (They can be savored on the soundtrack, which you should listen to in lieu of watching the film.)
GYPSY (1974): Angela Lansbury, in a performance that resulted in her second of five Tony wins, has her arms outstretched wide. You can decide if Hirschfeld was capturing a moment from her dynamic “Some People,” chilling “Everything’s Coming up Roses” or gripping “Rose’s Turn.”
Ah, but if you do plaster your wall with these, you’ll miss the drawings on the back side of each page. Some pages have one (Jerome Robbins smiling broadly on the movie set of WEST SIDE STORY, obviously before he was canned.); some have two (Julia McKenzie in SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM nestles near Cameron Mackintosh, its producer).
The smaller drawings include:
GYPSY (1959): Sandra Church’s Louise is peeking behind the curtain at Wichita’s one and only burlesque theater; Hirschfeld has her mesmerized by electrifying Electra, dressy Tessie Tura, and Mazeppa, the shlepper-emeritus.
PACIFIC OVERTURES (1976): Boris Aronson, then a seven-time Tony-winning set designer, is shown sitting looming above an almost-bare stage where only a few people in Japanese garb are congregating. The look on Aronson’s face suggests that he’s saying to himself, “Now how can I design such a demanding musical?” The answer? Apparently very well, given that he won his eighth Tony for it.
SWEENEY TODD (1979): Angela Lansbury returns, this time as Mrs. Lovett. She’s looking aghast at Pirelli’s dead body, but, as we know, she’ll soon get over it. By the way, productions of SWEENEY now routinely drop the entire sequence where Mr. Todd and Pirelli compete to see who’s better at his profession. Luckily, it can be heard in toto on the cast album.
There’s another good reason to keep the book as a book; you’ll have more chances to find the many Ninas on each page. Need I explain that after Hirschfeld’s daughter was born in 1946, he incorporated her name in a drawing? People so enjoyed finding the 10 lines that made up a Nina that Hirschfeld forevermore had to include at least one in each drawing; if he’d added additional Ninas, he’d place a number near his signature as a clue. In this book, try finding the seven in the drawing of the (woefully underappreciated) DO I HEAR A WALTZ? To be sure, you’ll have no trouble at all discovering four of the five on that Sondheim-filled front cover.
However, the book’s title is misleading, for some of the smaller drawings don’t deal with Sondheim’s works. There’s Ruby Keeler in NO, NO, NANETTE hoofing away with such joy on her face that you’re reminded of hearing her and her colleagues tapping their troubles away on the cast album. (She’s included to make a point that when FOLLIES opened, NANETTE was part of the nostalgia boom on Broadway.)
And other drawings sneak in because of their association, however tangential, with Sondheim. Because Lansbury appeared on Broadway in four of his musicals, there’s Hirschfeld’s drawing of her in the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.
In addition, there’s a good deal of explanatory text by David Leopold, the creative director of the Al Hirschfeld Foundation. He tells us which Hirschfelds so impressed Sondheim that he purchased the originals. Leopold quotes Hirschfeld many times, including this unexpected reaction when PACIFIC OVERTURES was on his mind: “I am much more influenced by the drawings of Harunobu, Utamaro, and Hokusai than I am by the painters of the West.”
In the end, looking at all these drawings will remind you so much of Sondheim’s brilliance that you’ll be reaching for your cast albums to once again hear everything alphabetically from “Ah, Paree!” to “Your Fault.”
And if we need another link between these two geniuses, we see it in a photograph of Hirschfeld sitting and drawing, not in a chaise longue, settee or barstool, but in his atypical choice of a barber’s chair. That, you’ll certainly agree, is one of the most important props in Stephen Sondheim’s most important work.
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.
