By Bill Hirschman
Florida Theater On Stage’s summer reading list worth for a few evenings encompasses three looks at our venerated Stephen Sondheim including a fresh off the press biography. Plus we dissect a detailed look at Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’s evolution from play to film, plus a look at the bloodiest plays of the early 20th Century, plus a newly prefaced edition of Raisin in the Sun with post-script analysis, and a collection of in-depth interviews with theater critics of the 20th and 21st Century.
Stephen Sondheim (Art Isn’t Easy) by Daniel Okrent, Yale University Press, 297 pages, $35 from publisher, $21.78 Amazon, also Kindle and audio.
Like any Stephen Sondeim fanatic, I have who knows how many books spread around the house like his Finishing the Hat, biographies such as the definitive Meryle Secrest, analyses and published scripts of almost his entire oeuvre.
So it’s a legitimate question why another. The answer is Okrent’s effort is a both fascinating non-judgmental step back documenting the passage of his life and work, but with an unusually detailed dissection of his work habits, his reasoning and his creative process – something few people can adequately describe about any artist.
For instance, he lays out the creation of “Send in the Clowns.” The inspiration for Company’s acerbic “Ladies Who Lunch” apparently comes from recreating his famously beyond-difficult mother with her friends at an upscale establishment. He discusses his intense reworking of then words and his math-inspired construction of the music.
It also, as most reviews mention, this is both justifiably admiring of the artist yet clear-eyed that Sondheim was a very complicated human being who spent much of his life acknowledging his ambivalence of most things. He could be terribly close to people, then explode in anger at the same people, be adulatory about someone then cuttingly snipe later. He once evaluated Ethel Merman on a tape recording as “a loud vulgar cheap small-eyed lady.” Okrent charts each phase of Sondheim’s on again-off again on again-off again relationship with Arthur Laurents.
Yet the volume scrutinizes his mutually supportive bonds with his string of collaborators like James Lapine and Hal Prince. As a gay man, he was still in love with Lee Remick, and forever friends with Hal Prince’s wife and Mary Rodgers among others. For much of his life he was seeking a “connection,” an almost unconscious drive secreted in much of his work such as Sunday in the Park With George.
The admiration here is clear for his genius and his willingness to help young colleagues, yet it discusses how he was an alcoholic, a sometime coke user and how he wrote a good deal of Sunday stoned.
His research in addition to fresh interviews with today’s contemporary figures line Lin -Manuel; Miranda, includes a couple of bookcases filled with previous works, articles, letters from and to him and 1982 taped interviews that were not to be released until after his death.
The book was commissioned as part of a series of biographies, Jewish Lives. Indeed, one of the topics examined is Sondheim’s tenuous connection to Judaism.
Bottom line, if you’re a Sondhead, there are scores and scores of little tidbits, stories and insights that you didn’t know and are glad to discover. (Not only was he a fan of Laura Nyro but Talking Heads and Radiohead).
If you are only a casual fan or don’t know much about him, this is a fine way to be introduced.
Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Philip Gefter, Bloomsbury Publishing, 368 pages, $10 hardback, $17.58 paperback (go figure)
One clear lesson from the book Cocktails with George and Martha: Transmuting a masterpiece play into an acclaimed film is not arcane magic.
It’s simply hard work.
Its complex labor goes beyond the inherent boons of genius and skill. The challenge both in theater and movie-making involves the clash and cross-pollination of distinctly non-artistic issues from egos, finances, gifts for the leading lady and a laundry list of other frills not taught at Julliard or the American Film Institute.
Philip Gefter’s insightful portrait microscopically details Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’s evolution from playwright Edward Albee’s youth through the film’s tumult of Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Nichols to the movie’s ultimate impact on 20th Century denizens’ definition of marriage.
Gefter’s exhaustively-researched yet smoothly written exploration succeeds something few volumes do that purportedly track the process of a play OR a film. He depicts the through-arc of the creation of one, the creation of the other, the handoff between the two and how they integrated with each other.
Plus he contributes a personal epilogue examining how the work has affected and helped evolve the modern perception of marriage.
Of course, the 1962 Virginia Woolf was Albee’s first universally acclaimed full-length play although he had earlier wins like The Zoo Story. The intense tale of two couples drunkenly sparring as they venomously scrap and scrape into each other’s relationship. Albee, director Alan Schneider and leads Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill all took home Tony Awards. It was nominated for the Pulitzer but authorities refused to give the prize to the raw play filled with obscenities.
But this is a story a journey that traces the evolution of the play for the first three chapters then dives into Hollywood with numerous interviews stretching across years.
No surprise, there was furor on and off among many parties as the two near geniuses Mike Nichols in his very first film assignment and producer/screenwriter Ernest Lehman were working in opposition as well as together in a yin and yang synergy combining mutual admiration and opposition. It sank so far down the foods chain that the veteran cinematographer was let go, enabling the rise of soon to be famed Haskell Wexler, and a veteran composer was replaced after he had written a score in favor of Alex North.
Veteran screenwriter Lehman (North By Northwest) took it on doubling for the first time as producer. When Taylor was cast as Martha, she pressured him and the studio to hire acclaimed stage director and comedian Mike Nichols to direct his first film. Then already the ultra-famous Taylor agreed to the film only if her husband Richard Burton (experienced but not quite as famous) was hired to play George.
For all his research – personal interviews plus five pages of bibliography and 27 pages of cites – Gefter is telling a story as he tracks the journey from the writing of the play, its production, the takeover by Warner Brothers studio, taking it from a three-hour play script to a two-hour screenplay, the casting, the filming, its premiere in 1966 and its aftermath.
It spends more time on the film facet which is canny given that a large segment of readers will be more attracted to hearing how Taylor, Burton and Nichols interacted. But few people realize was the integral molding of Lehman as screenwriter and producer. Indeed, Gefter has used Lehman’s daily journal to document what people were thinking inside the cauldron.
It’s a fascinating inside look at a process few outsiders have been allowed inside.
Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: Behind the Bloody Musical Masterpiece, by Rick Pender, Bloomsbury Academic, 264 pages, $34 hardback
For Sondheads like this critic, Rick Pender’s volume answers near every question and explores nearly every aspect you can hope for regarding this epic masterwork.
Featuring both an easy writing style with exhaustive research, he tracks the titular character from its possible real life counterpart in the 13th century, its early theatrical incarnations in the 19th century, through the Christopher Bond play. Then, there’s the meat you seek: a detailed insider’s look at the development of the 1979 Broadway bow. Then it moves on to other notable productions and the film version.
Even further, it analyzes the score including a song-by-song commentary in the appendix and a list of its productions worldwide.
It is an amazing volume geared to those who treasure this work and are fascinated by the evolution of any classic piece of art.
Pender, a fine critic and a friend of ours, is also the author of the Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia.
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life, by Richard Schoch, Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, list price $19 (trade paperback edition, but hardback available)
Despite the cute title and the author’s almost barroom conversational tone, the book is a genuine examination about how a specific artist’s work can influence and illuminate and gift us insight into our lives. How Sondheim Can Change Your Life makes the case that Sondheim’s greatness—beyond the clever lyrics and adventurous music—rests in his ability to tell stories that relate to us all. From Louise’s desire for freedom as Gypsy Rose Lee to Sweeney Todd’s thirst for revenge, we as an audience relate easily to Sondheim’s characters. What is it about such classic songs as ‘Being Alive’ from Company, ‘No One Is Alone’ from Into the Woods, or ‘Send in the Clowns’ from A Little Night Music (to name but a few) that still resonates for so many? Schoch shows how Sondheim’s greatness (beyond the clever lyrics and adventurous music) lies in his ability to tell stories that speak to all of us. His works understand us as much as we understand them.
Bloody Broadway, Plays of Menace, Murder and Mystery Volume 1, by Amnon Kabatchnik, Bermanormedia, 446 pages, $35 paperback
It’s not news that mayhem has been an audience draw on stage going back centuries. But the tireless theater historian Amnon Kabatchnik, who has penned numerous detailed research volumes about everything from Sherlock Holmes on stage to courtroom dramas,
The book’s entries are presented chronologically and include a plot synopsis, production data, opinions by critics, and biographical sketches of playwrights and key actors-directors.
Just as he did with his seven-volume Blood on the Stage series, this one starts chronologically with the years 1900-1930. He starts 1902’s Old Sleuth and ends with 1930’s Dishonored Lady. Of the 30-plus plays, the nest known is probably Elmer Rice’s Street Scene from 1929.
In an introductory essay, he cites novelists you never realized had contributed directly to the theater: August Strindberg, Maxim Gorky, Bertolt Brecht W. Somerset Maugham, J. B. Priestley, Daphne du Maurier, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, Damon Runyon, James Baldwin, Arthur Miller, and William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. Most of these will appear in future volumes.
A Raisin in the Sun/The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (New Edition), by Lorraine Hansberry, Vintage, 342 pages, $17.
The two scripts are amplified with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff, her husband who produced the second title on stage and contributed to the first, plus an appreciation from critic Frank Rich and a critical reevaluation from Amiri Baraka, and the initial forward from Jewell Handy Gresham Nemiroff.
Under The Copper Beech, Conversations With American Theater Critics, Edited by Jeffrey Eric Jenkins, 221 pages,
In-depth interviews with 10 prominent and influential theater critics of the late 20th and early 21st centuries including Otis Guernsey Jr., Henry Hewes, Elliot Nortbn and Julius Novick. Published by the American Theatre Critics /Journalists Association of which I am a board member so ask me if you want a free copy.
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