How Sondheim Found His Sound

5 Sondheim the Cinéaste

5 — — — — — Sondheim the Cinéaste In this chapter, which traces Sondheim’s cinematic loves and ‹nds vestiges of them in his musicals, two ideas intertwine. First, while Sondheim did not propose most of the stories that he and his collaborators set to music, the stories bear striking similarities to ‹lms that he knew and loved. This suggests that Sondheim as collaborator favored stories that were familiar to him and helped to shape these stories in ways that were familiar to him. Second, Sondheim as composer borrowed concepts from the language of ‹lm and translated these concepts into the music. Thus, to talk about the music of Sondheim, one must use the language of ‹lm to describe musical processes. Sondheim and ‹lm: some observations In the audio commentary to Sunday in the Park with George, Sondheim marveled at William Parry, who played Texan curator Charles Redmond in act 2. “He looks like Teddy Roosevelt! And he has a voice like Teddy Roosevelt, too! He should do Arsenic and Old Lace.” When Mandy Patinkin (“George”) asked why, Sondheim reminded his fellow commentators (and those listening to the commentary) about the part of Theodore Brewster, the brother of the lead character Mortimer. Theodore thinks he is Teddy Roosevelt and is always charging up and down the stairs. In saying that Parry should play the part, he was referring to the Joseph Kesselring play that opened on Broadway in January 1941. But one can hardly think about Arsenic and Old Lace today and not also recall the 1944 Frank Capra movie starring Cary Grant as Mortimer and John Alexander as Theodore. Sondheim’s offhand remark thus ties together his two dramatic apprenticeships and hints at how completely both apprenticeships suffuse his thinking. Sondheim’s fascination with ‹lm is well known. One reads how, in 1953, Sondheim traveled to Europe as hanger-on and clapper boy for John Huston’s Beat the Devil, during the course of which he played chess with Humphrey Bogart and poker with David O. Selznick. Selznick encouraged Sondheim, who owned a 16mm Ciné Kodak movie camera and was eager to learn ‹lm techniques. (Sondheim lost track of the ‹lm he shot on the set; some decades later, unbeknownst to him, some of his footage was used in a PBS documentary on Bogart.)1 Sondheim later conspired with Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre, to “remake” Golden Boy, Humoresque, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? In addition , the trio re-created the last ten minutes of act 2 of Puccini’s Tosca, in which Montealegre played the titular heroine and her husband was the evil chief of police, Scarpia. Sondheim: “It was really fun. Franco Zef‹relli . . . said it was the best opera ‹lm he ever saw.”2 Then there was Sondheim’s sojourn in Hollywood in 1953, when (with George Oppenheimer) he cowrote scripts for the television series Topper. His love of ‹lm carried over to his work on Topper. In the episode “George’s Old Flame,” a subsidiary character is a movie star, disdained by a matron who remarks that the last movie she bothered to see was Birth of a Nation (made in 1915). If his apprenticeship with Hammerstein had caused Sondheim to have second thoughts about his capacities as a “playwright in words,” his experience with Oppenheimer seemed to con‹rm his general unsuitedness to such literary pursuits, though the deadlines in television and the theater are similar. Nevertheless, from the beginning of Sondheim’s career, ‹lm encroached upon his music. In Saturday Night, the song “In the Movies” compares and contrasts the glamorous lives on the silver screen with the humdrum existence of life in New York. With the musical set in 1928, the reference to Rudolph Valentino is timely, as is that to Stella Dallas (the eponymous ‹lm was ‹rst released in 1925; the sound version appeared in 1937). Sondheim’s immaturity as a “playwright in song” shows in his choice of silent ‹lms and ‹lm stars over the talkies. One imagines that, in 1928, savvy young men and women would attend talking pictures and would be less rapturous about silent ‹lms and their stars.3 Yet what is more striking than the name-dropping is Sondheim’s cinematic technique, as the song is a montage of scenes, alternating back and forth between the bickering of the men, the sycophantic rhapsodizing of the women for the screen stars, and the A-to-B comparisons of the movies and Brooklyn. This type of crosscutting will appear...