An American Shakespeare.
Yesterday there was a massive gathering in Times Square to pay tribute to Stephen Sondheim. I’ve been watching footage of it and it’s overwhelming. My friend Alex was there. It’s not enough to dim the lights of Broadway for one night. Something else has to happen. Something bigger. He has done so much. It’s hard to even get a handle on all of it.
There are so many tributes out there – I’ll point you to Matt Zoller Seitz’s eloquent and detailed essay on Ebert – where he really digs into the lyrics, and Sondheim’s embrace of the complexities of humanity, the complexities of “being alive”.
One of my favorites of Sondheim’s is “Losing My Mind”, and here’s the great Bernadette Peters – one of Sondheim’s muses – performing it:
Not performing it. Living it. Sondheim needs great voices, but he needs great voices not afraid to “ugly” things up. He requires SERIOUS singers – his stuff is very difficult – and he requires SERIOUS actors – because if you make beautiful sounds but you can’t “tap into” the emotions of the lyrics – then you really don’t have anything. Bernadette Peters’ voice is beautiful, but here it is in service of a song about the unrelenting anguish of heartbreak. She allows in cracks, rasps, imperfections … and through those things, the humanity comes out. Heartbreak isn’t pretty. The SONG is beautiful, and the performance is great – but the sounds she makes are not pretty, mellifluous, or “lovely”. It’s raw. (Also, take note of how damn long she keeps her arms crossed – so that when she lets her arms drop, it’s as startling and electric as a massive kick-line.)
For my small tribute here, I’ll write a little bit about his beautiful score for Warren Beatty’s Russian-Revolution-magnum-opus Reds. It’s a beautiful score, but it’s not all that intricate, and not overtly “sweeping”, which seems counterintuitive for what is a very sweeping film, the Platonic ideal of “sweeping”. Instead of leaning in heavily to orchestration, he instead wove out a couple of different threads, the popular music of the era – those tinny little piano tunes – plus “I Don’t Want to Play In Your Yard” – a song dating to 1894 – which one of the “witnesses” sings, spontaneously – I may be misremembering but I think he even busts out a ukulele! So Sondheim takes that song, and others, to create what sounds like a contemporaneous score – emerging from that actual time period, as though John Reed or Louise Bryant would play these songs on the victrola in their Greenwich Village apartment. Like:
For the 25th anniversary deluxe-DVD release of Reds, everyone involved was interviewed, from Beatty to Dede Allen to Stephen Sondheim to people like Paul Sorvino who played small roles. (The only one not interviewed was Diane Keaton. Classic Keaton.)
Sondheim’s interview is a wonderful glimpse of his process, not just as a composer, but as a collaborator. He needed to realize Beatty’s vision here, not his own. So it’s a different kind of skill.
In the interview, Sondheim walks you through the whole thing: the meeting with Beatty, the experiments, all the conversations, leading up to Sondheim’s light bulb “A-ha” moment: of taking that old song “I don’t want to play in your yard” – and weaving it throughout the whole film – allowing it to become a theme, THE theme. And from THAT comes the achingly romantic music which infuses the film with such bittersweet aching tenderness.
Coming to that, though, took a lot of back and forth. Sondheim listened to the voluble Beatty talk about music and the movie for a couple hours. Sondheim took notes. But he finally realized what Beatty was really saying, and what Beatty really wanted, even though Beatty didn’t boil it down into simple words: Sondheim said, “I realized that what he wanted was a love theme.”
The job of a good composer! To translate vague feelings and moods expressed by the director into music. It’s such a beautiful aspect of collaboration.
Music is so crucial to Reds, and the love theme pours everything into the central love relationship. A whole Revolution happens, but you never lose sight of the central relationship.
Sondheim’s “love theme” never lets the love part of Reds out of sight.
R.I.P. to a giant.
