TWO FAIRY TALES: HAMMERSTEIN’S AND SONDHEIM’S By Peter Filichia
The front cover of Christopher Anderson’s 1983 book Father: The Figure and the Force says:
Father.
He was once the most important man in your life.
He still is.
On the other hand, Sigmund Freud said that aboy does not become a man until he kills his father – or at least replaces him.
That brings us to Stephen Sondheim’s relationship with Oscar Hammerstein.
Each week in March, to celebrate the month in which Sondheim was born, I’ll be exploring my theory about Hammerstein’s influence on his work. At the very least, it suggests that Sondheim’s creative “father” remained the most important man in his life.
Both theatrical legends came to mind as I was playing the 1965 soundtrack to CINDERELLA. It was a fine way to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the second iteration of the musical that Rodgers and Hammerstein specifically wrote for television.
“And,” says musical theater historian Ken (Not Since Carrie) Mandelbaum, “its quality is right up there with their best scores.”
Agreed. The day after I saw the initial broadcast, I rushed out to get the album. I reveled in Rodgers’ famous (purposely) “wrong note” that followed “In my own little corner, in my own little chair.” It was as delicious as dark bittersweet chocolate.
I loved what Hammerstein did with “The Prince Is Giving a Ball.” Lesser writers would have just given the names of the King, Queen and Prince; Hammerstein, as usual, gave a little something extra.
The best example is his calling the Prince “His Royal Highness Christopher Rupert Windemere Vladimir Karl Alexander François Reginald Launcelot Herman Gregory James” – but it had this young lad question the less-than-lofty “Herman?!?!” It’s a good joke.
All right, I was a little disappointed in the lyrics to “Ten Minutes Ago,” which the Prince sang to Cinderella, because Hammerstein had her parrot back the precise words that he’d just delivered to her. Having her come up with her own thoughts would have made her more interesting and not just a yes-woman.
Actually, my favorite cut had no Hammerstein in it: Rodgers’ “Gavotte.” I was grateful that it started the second side. In those days, as I mentioned last week, listening again to a favorite song was easier when you could drop the needle in the wide groove that started Side Two, than finding than finding the track deeper in the record, where the groove wasn’t so generous or easy to locate.
After about ten repeats in a row, I suddenly thought, “Hmmm, all my friends are raving about that new song by The Zombies that made it into the Top Ten this week, and I’m listening to a gavotte from CINDERELLA.”
Anyway, back to Hammerstein, Sondheim’s mentor and virtual father. Young Steve often said that “if Oscar had been a geologist, I would have become a geologist.”
Luckily for us, both Hammerstein and Sondheim spurned igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks in favor of Broadway. Indeed, before Hammerstein would befriend him, when young Stephen was asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, he mostly answered, “A magician.” Considering what extraordinary wonders he achieved in musical theater, one could say that in some respects Sondheim became one.
But I maintain that Hammerstein’s fatherly influence on Sondheim proved both the statements made at the top of this essay. Many of the subjects that Sondheim chose for musicals mirrored the ones Hammerstein had written with Richard Rodgers.
And though imitation has been said to be the sincerest form of flattery, Sondheim proved he was no mere copycat; his takes on Hammerstein’s subjects were often 180 degrees removed from his mentor’s.
This week, in honor of CINDERELLA, let’s concentrate on the differences between Hammerstein’s work on that innocent story and what Sondheim did 30 years later in INTO THE WOODS.
Because CINDERELLA would be broadcast on the still relatively new innovation called television, Hammerstein wrote for a mass audience. He thus stayed in line with Charles Perrault’s 1697 story that, two and a half centuries later, parents were still telling their children: Girl meets Fairy Godmother, Girl loses slipper at ball, Girl gets Prince.
But Sondheim and bookwriter James Lapine instead used The Brothers Grimm’s version as their template. So, if INTO THE WOODS surprised audiences’ CINDERELLA expectations with lyrics and dialogue about lentils, tears, a tree, blinded stepsisters, sliced feet, and a festival (as opposed to a ball), this was all in Grimm. However, even the Grimms mirrored Perrault’s idea of Cinderella and the Prince enjoying a wedding and presumably living happily ever after. And though Hammerstein decided to literally end his musical by having Cinderella the bride throw her bouquet to all single women, Sondheim wanted to examine what happens to a marriage over a period of time. (Sound familiar? It’s what he did in FORUM, COMPANY, FOLLIES, A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG.) He and Lapine instead had their so-called “very nice prince” commit adultery and baldly give as his excuse that he was “raised to be charming, not sincere.” Who expected an illicit seduction in a fairy tale?Many theatergoers might have been anything from surprised to shocked, but by INTO THE WOODS’ 1987 debut, anyone who’d been following Sondheim’s work would have expected that he’d be attracted to a darker story than the one Hammerstein had embraced. More impressive still, Sondheim and Lapine had the courage to give this far less familiar version and presumed to make an audience shed its pre-conceived notions of CINDERELLA.
Indeed, millions have done just that in thousands of cities and hundreds of towns. There have been untold numbers of INTO THE WOODS productions in addition to the video, the film and, of course, the cast albums.But that Best Score and Best Book Tony winner will probably never surpass Hammerstein’s audience in sheer numbers. CINDERELLA wasn’t just seen by a mass audience but a massive one: 107 million viewers tuned in to the CBS special that starred Julie Andrews as the Princess-to-Be. Its recording is still available, too, and it’s superb. So is the 1965 one.
So, too, are the many, many recordings of INTO THE WOODS. All will be here for decades to come, keeping alive Oscar Hammerstein as well as his admirer and rewriter, Stephen Sondheim.
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.
