Thoughts on the Stephen Sondheim/Frank Rich Conversation

Posted by Gail M. Burns - January 2010

When I first heard that Stephen Sondheim was coming to speak at Williams College – less than a mile from my home – on January 23, 2010, I was royally unimpressed. After all, I grew up in New York City where people like Stephen Sondheim live. You can meet them in the supermarket or while crossing the street. I met the famous composer and lyricist Howard Dietz in the store on York Avenue where I bought my underwear. These things happen and you can’t get all in a sweat about it.

And you might think that seeing Stephen Sondheim in Williamstown, Massachusetts, was no big deal either because he is an alumnus of Williams College, class of 1950. But in fact the town was in a tizzy because Sondheim has been notoriously scarce around his alma mater, making only two truly public prior appearances in sixty years. A mythology had grown up that he was miserable at Williams either because he was gay or because he was Jewish, or both. In the days Sondheim attended the college it was all male, daily Christian chapel services were compulsory, and the thirteen fraternities fed and housed almost the entire student body. After the Second World War, discontent with the fraternity system began to brew – Williams abolished them completely in the early 1960’s – and they agreed, grudgingly, to rush Jews in order to appease the malcontents.

When Frank Rich, former chief theatre critic of the New York Times who acted as host and interviewer for Sondheim’s appearance, tackled the question head on and opened the evening by asking Sondheim about his Williams days, he almost immediately choked up and spoke with real emotion about professors Robert Barrow (music) and S. Lane Faison (art history) and how what they had taught him about art and the creative process had really changed his life.

He also shared happy memories of friends, work with Cap and Bells (The still-functioning college drama club. Although the college had just built the handsome Adams Memorial Theatre in 1940, there was no academic theatre department in those days), and a walk through the snow down West Main Street to meet Cole Porter at his Williamstown home. If there were painful times when his religion or sexual orientation made life at Williams difficult for him that is not what he took away from his college experience. I would imagine it wasn’t easy to be gay and/or Jewish in many places in the world back then, as is sadly still the case today even though Williams College and Williamstown have made considerable progress. (Despite what many Williams people think, neither the college nor the town is the center of the universe.)

The conversation progressed through the 79-year-old Sondheim’s long and varied career, touching on what might have been controversial topics such as his response to his various “failures” – many of which have gone on to become considered as classics – and the not-so-veiled attacks on the original 1970 production of Company insinuating that the central character of Bobby is gay.

I say that these might have been controversial questions and the answers revealing and enlightening, if Sondheim and Rich hadn’t done this dog-and-pony-show many times before, and if Sondheim’s career wasn’t the most over-documented in history. There was no doubt that it was, if not scripted, extremely well rehearsed. Sondheim knew everything Rich would ask, and many of the questions were blatant cues for him to launch in to the kind of creative behind the scenes tid-bits that rooms full of theatre geeks just lap up.

In fact the evening may well have been a warm-up for future, identical events promoting Sondheim on Sondheim* a multi-media revue of Sondheim’s life and career conceived and directed by his frequent collaborator James Lapine scheduled for a March opening to coincide with Sondheim’s 80th birthday, at New York’s Roundabout Theatre. That production, in which the composer/lyricist serves as “host” and talks directly to the audience on video via dozens of plasma screens, was plugged during the Williams event.

Everyone who packed Chapin Hall was extremely anxious to please Stephen Sondheim. The Hall has an official seating capacity of 1,100, but I heard a number more like 1,500 in attendance that night, which may include the folks watching the simulcast in adjacent, 279-seat Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall. The process of getting hold of one of the free tickets became increasingly competitive during the week or so between the (very soft) announcement and the event. Unfortunately, many in the back half of Chapin Hall had a very hard time hearing as Sondheim kept pushing the standing mike away from his face.

I was blessed with a fabulous seat at stage level mere feet where Sondheim was sitting. And I enjoyed the evening thoroughly, even though I was aware throughout that this was but a pale imitation of the wonderful Lyrics and Lyricists series I had attended at the 92nd Street Y during my teens. The pleasure I felt was one of nostalgia for those events – which featured guest singers and performances of the lyricists’ work as well as conversation and anecdotes, much as Sondheim on Sondheim will – and the joy of once more sitting in the presence of kindred spirits, men who love words and language and music and theatre as much as I do. That was what made my heart sing at Lyrics and Lyricists, and that was what made me happy in Chapin Hall that night.

But in hindsight, my initial reaction was the correct one. This evening was only a big deal for people who have never been out of Williamstown, the one place Stephen Sondheim is NOT ubiquitously over-exposed and over-examined. I was glad I went – it was one of those “I was there then” moments and I could hardly have held my head up amid my fellow theatre geeks if I hadn’t bothered to go, but my life is not much richer for it. The one epiphany I experienced was realizing that my teenaged dreams that I would grow up to become a world-famous composer/lyricist (I used to sit starry-eyed in the first row of the balcony at the Y, clutching whatever musical I was writing at the time to my bosom) had morphed into ones of sitting in Rich’s chair. That made me laugh…and it made me want to write songs again.

I hope that there were starry-eyed young men and women in the audience at Williams who will be inspired to follow their theatrical dreams. That was clearly Sondheim’s reason for coming to speak at his alma mater after all these years – to teach and inspire.

* Reviews of “Sondheim on Sondheim”

San Francisco Chronicle