Jonathan Biggins:
You also covered that with a fairly pragmatic introduction to the theatre working as a stage manager.
Stephen Sondheim:
Well Oscar Hammerstein, when I was 17 years old, he wrote a show called ‘”Allegro” which was the first flop that he and Rodgers wrote. They’d written “Oklahoma” and “Carousel” and because the rehearsal schedule coincided with my college vacation. I came as assistant and gopher, I typed the script and got coffee during the rehearsal period and out of town tryout in New Haven until we got to Boston.
That was where I learned how NOT to put a show together. I learned the mistakes, which can be so easily made. It was a very experimental and very daring show, but it didn’t quite work. I think it’s one of the reasons I got interested, whether you make a joke about it or not, in the non-linear style.
Cameron Macintosh says I’ve been trying to fix the second act of Allegro all of my life.
JB: You extended your writing beyond the theatre to television. This is something I didn’t realise until I did my extensive research. You wrote sitcoms for CBS.
SS: It was my first paying job. I had got a music scholarship when I got out of college and I studied composition for two years and then I had to earn a living. I got a job as an assistant writer on a television series called Topper which was based on some popular novels and a couple of popular movies. But that’s the only time I wrote for television. I wrote for five months until I accumulated enough money to rent an apartment in New York and pursue what I wanted to pursue.
JB: It made you realise that your first love was the theatre.
SS: Yeah, but you know it was very valuable. When you have to write an episode as we did, that takes 22 minutes because there are 8 minutes of commercials. You have to have a teaser, then you have to have a first act, a second act and a little epilogue. It teaches you a great deal about structure, about economy and about how you make a point as concisely as you possibly can. It teaches you how to tell to joke and how to write for actors. Our leading lady had a very bad sibilant ‘s’, so we had to avoid all plurals. That’s very good discipline.
JB: And it was not long after that – it’s interesting that September of this year marks the 50th anniversary of West Side Story.
SS: Indeed.
JB: Writing the lyrics for that was a big break by any standard. How did it come about, and why you?
SS: I had written a number of shows. Oscar gave me tutelage. When I was sixteen years old he said I should write four shows. I should write a show first that was an adaptation of a play that I liked and then second an adaptation of a play that I liked but I thought was flawed, that I would fiddle around with and try and improve. Third an adaptation of a non-dramatic work, but still not my story, not my characters and finally an original.
“By the time you’ve done all four of those things, you’ll have learned something,” he said.
And by the time I’d gone through that I was ready to be a professional. I wrote a show, I got permission to do a show called Saturday Night, which David (Campbell) starred in.
…I spoke to Oscar Hammerstein about it (WSS). I said, “I don’t want to just write lyrics”.
He said, “If they offer you the job, you should take it because you get a chance to work with three really good professionals – Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins. You’ll learn something by application instead of just by teaching.”
So – I took the job.
JB: Was it fairly intimidating to work with Leonard Bernstein? I remember watching the documentary when he was taking Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras though the recording. I wanted the earth to swallow me up and I was watching it five years later!
SS: First of all he was doing that for the cameras, he was above all an actor.
No it was very easy, we had a lot in common. We shared a passion for crossword puzzles and word games. We never had a tense moment, because whenever there would be any tension, we would play a game of anagrams.
We played a version called cutthroat anagrams, which is really – there is no luck involved – it is really mono-a-mono. That got out any of the tension. It’s not just a two person game, it’s with other people.
He liked to work together in a room and I liked to work separately so we worked one day out of every three in a room together and the other two on the phone for the other two days.
…JB: Looking back on it with 50 years hindsight is a privilege not many artists have traditionally.
SS: I will shock people because I’m not very fond of the lyrics of west side story. I find them very self-conscious. It’s partly because Lenny wanted it to be a poetic show. His idea and my idea of poetry are different.
His idea of poetry is my idea of purple prose. Partly because I had been brought up by Oscar, I believe in under-writing lyrics, I think the simpler the better.
I think ‘Maria, Maria, I just met a girl called Maria’ is more poetic than ‘today the world was just an address, a place for us to live in’.
Lenny kept pushing me to writing poetic lyrics.
I’m afraid that that show is studded with self-conscious lyrics
My favourite example that I’ve quoted many times is when Maria, this Puerto Rican girl sings a song called ‘I Feel Pretty’. She sings ‘It’s alarming how charming I feel’ which is a lyric which would not be unwelcome in Noel Coward’s living room.
His idea and my idea of lyric writing were somewhat different. So there are a couple of lyrics in West Side that I do like. I like “Something’s Coming” very much and I like the “Jet Song”, but most of the others make me wince.
JB: I quite like your rhyming of ‘punk’ll’ and uncle.
SS: Yes, but that’s in the Jet Song
