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4 Sondheim the Dramaphile
- University of Michigan Press
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4 — — — — — Sondheim the Dramaphile The received story reexamined Let’s start at the very beginning, and let us hear it from Sondheim’s mouth. Oscar Hammerstein gradually got me interested in the theater, and I suppose most of it happened one fateful or memorable afternoon. He had urged me to write a musical for my school (George School, a Friends school in Bucks County). With two classmates I wrote a musical called By George, a thinly disguised version of campus life with the teachers’ names changed by one vowel or consonant. I thought it was pretty terri‹c, so I asked Oscar to read it—and I was arrogant enough to say to him, “Will you read it as if it were just a musical that crossed your desk as a producer? Pretend you don’t know me.” He said “O.K.,” and I went home that night with a vision of being the ‹rst 15-year-old to have a show on Broadway. I knew he was going to love it. Oscar called me in the next day and said, “Now you really want me to treat this as if it were by somebody I don’t know?” and I said, “Yes, please,” and he said, “Well, in that case it’s the worst thing I ever read in my life.” He must have seen my lower lip tremble, and he followed up with, “I didn’t say it wasn’t talented, I said it was terrible, and if you want to know why it’s terrible I’ll tell you.” He started with the ‹rst stage direction and went all the way through the show for a whole afternoon , really treating it seriously. It was a seminar on the piece as though it were Long Day’s Journey into Night. Detail by detail, he told me how to structure songs, how to build them with a beginning and a development and an ending, according to his principles. I found out many years later there are other ways to write songs, but he taught me, according to his own principles, how to introduce character, what relates a song to character, etc., etc. It was four hours of the most packed information. I dare say, at the risk of hyperbole, that I learned in that afternoon more than most people learn about song writing in a lifetime. He saw how interested I was in writing shows, so he outlined a kind of course of study for me which I followed over the next six years, right through college. He said, “Write four musicals. For the ‹rst one, take a play you admire and turn it into a musical.” I admired a play called Beggar on Horseback by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly , and we actually got permission to do it for three performances at college [as All That Glitters].1 Next, Oscar told me: “Take a play that you don’t think is very good or that you liked but you think can be improved and make a musical out of it.” I chose a play called High Tor by Maxwell Anderson—I couldn’t get permission to put it on in college because Anderson wanted to do a musical of it with Kurt Weill (they never got around to it), but it taught me something about playwriting , about structure, about how to take out fat and how to make points. Then Oscar said, “For your third effort, take something that is non-dramatic: a novel, a short story.” I landed on Mary Poppins and spent about a year writing a musical version. That’s where I ‹rst encountered the real dif‹culties of playwriting, which is one of the reasons I am not a playwright. It was very hard to structure a group of short stories and make a play out of them, and I wasn’t able to accomplish it. Finally Oscar said, “For your fourth, do an original,” so right after I got out of college I wrote an original musical [Climb High] whose ‹rst act was 99 pages long and the second act 60-odd. Oscar had recently given me a copy of South Paci‹c to read and the entire show was 90 pages long, so when I sent him my script I got it back from him with a circle around 99 and just a “Wow!” written on it.2 This is the standard story that tells how Sondheim learned about the theater...