A Precious Fancy

"Broadway is rebuilt every time Stephen Sondheim writes a musical," says Producer Alexander Cohen. Such extravagant praise, from a man who has never backed a Sondheim show, is increasingly frequent these days. The reason is obvious. Sondheim has composed the three best Broadway musicals of the 1970s: Company (1970), Follies (1971) and now A Little Night Music (TIME, March 12).

The latest is Sondheim's most brilliant accomplishment to date. That includes the lyrics for such past hits as West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959) and the music and lyrics for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). Night Music's success rests on Sondheim's precious fancy, which allowed him to dare to compose the entire musical in 1/4 time--or multiples thereof (6/8 and 9/12 are some of the other meters employed). For good measure, in both senses of the word, Sondheim has also thrown in such ancient techniques as canons, fuguettos and Greek chorus. What makes it all work, aside from Producer-Director Harold Prince's stagecraft, is Sondheim's uncanny ability to put a softly dimpled melody at the service of a sharp-chinned lyric. As when the middle-aged widower Fredrik Egerman ponders the seemingly insurmountable virginity of his young second wife:

Now, there are two ways of broaching it: A, the suggestive And B, the direct. Say that I settle on B, to wit, A charmingly Lecherous mood.

A, I could put on my nightshirt or sit Disarmingly, B, in the nude. That might be effective, My body's all right, But not in perspective And not in the light...

The essence of a Sondheim song is its theatrical Tightness for the evening's dramatic tone. In Company, he wrote 13 or 14 songs that dealt mostly with one-to-one relationships--thoroughly appropriate to the show's concern with marriage. In Follies, the songs did not move the play along so much as they suspended moments in time and savored them, following the practice of tunesmiths in the era nostalgically evoked by the show: the 1920s and '30s. Night Music is devoted predominantly to what Sondheim calls the "inner monologue song," in which characters sing of their deepest thoughts, but almost never to each other.

Based on Ingmar Bergman's 1956 sex comedy Smiles of a Summer Night, imbued with a kind of mocha fantasy more typical of France's Jean Anouilh, Night Music is a masquelike affair, tailor-made to fit Sondheim's flair for depicting confused people experiencing ambivalent thoughts and feelings. Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm flaunts his amours openly in front of his wife, but at the barest hint that she may be following suit, he sputters out:

She wouldn't... Therefore they didn't... So then it wasn't... Not unless it... Would she?

As for the Countess Charlotte, she is found later on sipping tea and discussing her husband's unfathomable hold on her:

I'm before him On my knees And he kisses me. He assumes I'll lose my reason, And I do. Men are stupid, men are vain, Love's disgusting, love's insane, A humiliating business!

Couple such lyrics with Sondheim's comparatively rarefied musical sources --Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Brahms (the music of the Greek chorus is inspired directly by Brahms' Liebeslieder Waltzes) --and you have a composer born to the musical stage. (Early training with Composer Milton Babbitt and an apprenticeship with Family Friend Oscar Hammerstein II helped, of course.) Opera turns him off, even those by the same Mozart whose Eine Kleine Nachtmusik gave Sondheim and Prince their show title. "I know it's my loss, but Mozart's whole body of music doesn't get to me gutwise."

Sondheim does not consider himself a pop writer, and although he and Actor Tony Perkins have written the screenplay for a forthcoming Warner Bros, murder mystery (The Last of Sheila, starring James Mason and Raquel Welch), he has no desire to write music for films. There is no symphony or concerto kicking around in his brain, no great play or sonnet.

No Respite. Instead, at 42, Sondheim is totally caught up in the furious activity of composing musicals. "All I ever really wanted," he says, "was to make enough money from the theater to be able to write for the theater." Sondheim seems to work best at the edge of a precipice. For Night Music he was still writing songs at the eleventh hour, after the sets were already onstage and the staging set. Last week there was no respite. Lyric sheets had to be corrected for the forthcoming Columbia recording of Night Music. Rehearsal followed rehearsal for A Tribute to Stephen Sondheim, booked for the Shubert Theater at week's end with such stars as Angela Lansbury, Alexis Smith and Jack Cassidy.

These days dark circles ring Sondheim's eyes. A mere haircut will no longer salvage the graying mop atop, aside and below his daedal pate. The waist bulges. He lumbers like a benumbed bear shaking off a winter's sleep. "You ask about my life-style!" he cries aloud. "I'll tell you about my lifestyle. I have no lifestyle. Since 1969 I have done nothing but write, write, write. I mean, I haven't even had a game party in my house in three years."

There will be plenty of game parties in the days ahead. Games are Sondheim's greatest passion outside the theater. His bachelor town house in Manhattan bulges with them the way other well-appointed homes do with paintings and sculpture--game boards by the dozen, penny-arcade jackpot games, a slot machine, Skittle-Pool table, mammoth chess set peopled by bitches, idiots and 1984-style proles. When friends like Leonard Bernstein (composer to Sondheim's lyrics in West Side Story), Perkins or Actress Phyllis Newman come to call, it is usually for what Sondheim calls "cutthroat anagrams." Says Sondheim: "You don't take turns. You just turn up letters, and the first person to see a word yells it out. Lennie Bernstein is a terrific anagram player. All during the work on West Side Story, we would blow up our tensions at the anagram table."

Since Sondheim is obviously a happily possessed man, what might the letters of his name spell out in such a game? Voila! "His demon."

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