Like with Jimmy Webb, who grew slowly in my mind and in importance from seeing his name printed on record albums, so did that happen for me with Stephen Sondheim. I was amazingly slow in understanding the force that Stephen Sondheim's musical creations would have on me.
The very first long-playing record album I ever got was the cast recording of the Broadway play, West Side Story. It was one of my Christmas presents I got from my parents. I saw the movie West Side Story (music composed by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim) on one of those Saturday morning movies that I got to go see after I got my haircuts, which I mentioned earlier in the notes for this series of Especially Wonderful Songs.
The youngest people today with their cell phones probably don't have much in the way of music on any solid medium, it is all "rented" on-line via various music services. But it is possible that they do know "vinyl", and there was a time when "vinyl" was a new and wondrous creation. It was a medium in which an entire "album" of songs could be contained on just the two sides of a long-playing record album. The word "album" came from what was had previously, literal albums of records that held one song per side, all kept together in individual sleeves collected in an album, similar to a photo album. Gosh, writing this, I feel like I have suddenly gotten stuck in Ray Bradbury's distopic novel (about a fascist government burning up all printed media), Fahrenheit 451, which is one of several such books that it seems we are on the very brink of living in right now.
The favorite album of my best friend growing up was Stephen Sondheim's Gypsy. He played that album so much I feel that I have those songs permanently etched inside my ear anal. Peculiarly, I never saw Gypsy on stage or in film. The closest I came to that was to go with a college friend of mine to see Ethel Merman (the female lead in Gypsy) in the play, Call Me Madam, which is not a Stephen Sondheim creation. Ethel Merman had such a powerful voice that she escewed the use of a microphone, which she had to continue to bat out of the way when she sang, because it hung down in in the middle of the stage in front of her face.
After that play was over, my ballsy friend said, "Let's go find her dressing room and ask her for her autograph". I sheepishly followed him through a warren of hallways until we found a door with a star on it. My friend locked and Ethel Merman who actually was in there, said, "Come in!". There she sat in her slip in front of a mirror with cold cream all over her face. She said, "Not now, boys, go meet me in the lounge." Okay, so we found our way to the lounge, but a guy at the entrance wouldn't let us in, "No minors allowed!" So we waiting guide the entrance and after a while, down the hall came Ethel Merman with a man and she saw us and said to the guy at the lounge, "They're with me," and thus we all marched in and took a table together! It was so much fun, she completely welcomed us and told us some funny stories and we all talked and when it was time for us to go, she gave us her autograph on our programs. That was an amazing experience.
In the first year I lived in Los Angeles, my girlfriend and I bought season ticket to the Los Angeles Music Center downtown, and one of the plays in that series was Sondheim's Pacific Overtures. It was that play where I first experienced Sondheim's technique of expanding and surprising your emotions by having what I think of as an apparent "mismatch" in mood between the music and what is really going on. Pacific Overtures is about the force-opening up of Japan to trade with the West, breaking open the way isolationist Japan had been for so many centuries prior, and making it transform into being an industrial powerhouse. The second to the last song in the play is a sweet, beautiful, touching song sung by three sailors in uniform, each one from a different Western country, singing of their loneliness and desire to a young Japanese girl sitting in a garden. But when she shyly rejects them, they rape her and kill her father who came out to protect her. Then, following that is the final song, which is wildly triumphant about all the industrial achievements of the new Japan which, in many ways, have actually done better than the various western countries. But your psyche realizes the mismatch, that pose of happiness and success musically depicted coupled with the violence after the previous love song, the twist makes you want to burst into tears, or vomit. Such remarkable talent to use the power of music and drama to make you grasp ahold of your brain and heart.
Later in that year, a friend of mine invited me to come over to his apartment for dinner and he had me sit down down on the living room floor and listen to the music from Sondheim's play, Company. Since then, I have seen Company on stage twice, and many years later before she died, I saw saw Elaine Stritch's one woman show downtown at the Disney Music Hall. Elaine has a lead in Company, and by the way, early in her carrer, had been an understudy for Ethel Merman in her other plays.
Years later, another friend of mine insisted that I come over to his apartment and listen to his recently bought album, Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. Peculiarly, I have never seen Sweeny Todd in any medium, that is one major hole in my Stephen Sondheim experiences. However, I had worked as an extra in movies and television for quite a few months and was in a scene with Angela Lansbury in one of her "Murder She Wrote" made for TV movies after the end of that television series. It was just her and me in a scene together, so that was fun. She had been one of the leads in Sweeney Todd on Broadway. Later, when I got a job at a private elementary school, she had a grandchild who was a student at that school, so I got to see her at various school events.
Some other Sondheim plays I have seen in various local theaters were, A Little Night Music, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday In the Park With George, Into The Woods, and Follies. I saw Barbara Cook who had been a lead in Follies, in her one-open woman show at the Music Center. Years later, I went by myself to Bernadette Peters's one-woman show at the theater at CSUN (California State University at Northridge) in the San Fernando Valley.
Speaking of Sunday In The Park With George and Into The Woods, Bernadette Petes had been leads in those two shows and she also played the part of the Ugly Stepmother in the "interracial" cast of Cinderella that was made for Disney studios. That was the Cinderella with Brandi as Cinderella, Whoopie Goldberg as the Queen, Victor Garber (a Sondheim actor) as the King, Jason Alexander as Lionel (among his countless achievements, he had been in Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along), and me, ha ha, as an extra. While that was not a Sondheim play, it was great to be with so many performers who had been in Sondheim plays. That experience was one of my favorites of the very many parts I had as an extra. It certainly was not being a "movie star", although sometimes strangers would recognize me from something I had been in. If you knew what I looked like, you would especially see me all over the place in that Cinderella movie. I was on set every single day during the filming of that. I got to work up close with countless actors and singers that I have enjoyed and admired over the years.
So it is clear that I am huge and dedicated Stephen Sondheim fan, and as I wrote at the beginning of this series, I could do a whole series of just Stephen Sondheim masterpieces, but I preferred to present just a smattering of his songs of various genres that had particularly stopped and grabbed me. This selected song for today was the second time I had seen Company, separated from each other by about a decade, and presented in very different venues. I had very good seats and one of the cast members was a woman I knew whose talent I greatly admire, so I felt closer to this production than I even normally would be.
As usual, I had heard "Another Hundred People" countless times, and I had liked it, but it wasn't until this particular production that it really hit me with its full impact. It was the way various cast members were positioned in various locations on the set from the front of the stage up the rafters, not a lot of them, but enough to characterize different kinds of citizens of New York and animating the concept of those who choose to come in to live in the city, and those who leave, and refers to the ins and outs of various perspectives, dreams, and disappointments. And as I have shown here in this series, I was one of those people, who came to New York at the very beginning of my adulthood, loved it, and then later went back out again and inserted myself into other locations, cultures, and experiences. As people, most of us are nomadic to various levels, it's a major human characteristic, and along with the places, we have met and known people that we loved, and people that we drifted away from and lost track of. Being essentially solitary in this LockDown, I feel this keenly. My number one personal characteristic is being an extrovert, to the extent that almost no other person in a crowded room is as extroverted as I am. So while I am comfortable by myself alone and sometimes crave that, primarily what makes me come alive is being with people and I could stand alone on a stage in front of thousands of strangers and simply talk to them and entertain them for hours without let-up. So yeah, this LockDown is like a gateway to Dante's inferno and I wonder why I had stepped inside the entrance to that.
My heart would be open to each and every one of you reading this if only I knew you in even the slightest way. Interestingly, this specific song is, I think, the ONLY one I have chosen for this series that has not a single comment on the YouTube channel it is sitting on. Every one of the other ones has rave reviews from those listeners--"the best song ever written!" and so on. The other ones surprised me that they had so much impact like the songs had had on me...like we really aren't all that different from each other. Why has this one particularly been ignored? I think it is wonderful and also extremely swell done. To me, it definitely is an Especially Wonderful Song. Maybe today in your current circumstance, you will agree.
24. Song name: Another Hundred People
Artist: Pamela Myers
Lyrics and Music by Stephen Sondheim
No comments:
Post a Comment