TV Museum’s Exhibition Shows Sondheim in His Complexity

Composer, lyricist, Broadway’s prince of ambivalence as well as its boldest pioneer, Stephen Sondheim turns 70 Wednesday. You can celebrate by watching a few dozen hours of television.

Few people think of Sondheim as a television personality. Nor would they associate his five decades of work primarily with TV, even though that medium once made the art and craft of musical theater part of its everyday business.

Well, think again. Beginning Friday, the Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills celebrates some wonderful and often surprising intersections of TV and Sondheim, the songwriter, the scriptwriter and the interview subject.

If there’s something a little off with the title of the retrospective “Something for Everyone: Sondheim Tonight!” it’s the exclamation point. Throughout much of his career, Sondheim has generally resisted conventional exclamation point usage of all kinds: musical, emotional, thematic.

To be sure, he has written emphatically, passionately about an improbable string of subjects, from mid-19th century Japanese foreign relations (“Pacific Overtures”) to the creation of a painting (“Sunday in the Park With George”) to presidential assassins, successful or otherwise (“Assassins”). Yet the exclamation point can’t be a distinguishing characteristic of any lyricist and composer compelled, in any given moment, by what one character in the musical “Pacific Overtures” calls “the part that’s underneath.”

No one in musical theater has imagined so much unsettling, audacious, bracing complexity, song by song.

The Sondheim retrospective is co-sponsored by the Manhattan branch of the Museum of Television & Radio. Continuing through July 2, it offers a series of American and British programs, several making their U.S. premiere.

It’s a collection broad enough to include a jaw-dropping segment of Gypsy Rose Lee’s 1965 San Francisco talk show, on which she interviews (and interrupts, and interrupts) her pal Ethel Merman, who recently wrapped up a tour of “Gypsy,” music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Sondheim. It may be tangential to an understanding of Sondheim, but it tells you a lot about the show-biz personalities the young lyricist (that’s how he was known then) had to figure out.

Sondheim’s own talk-show appearances from the same era reveal a man not terribly comfortable or (apparently) happy to be on camera. Yet his incisive high standards come through unfailingly. “Camera Three,” a 1965 segment devoted to “Do I Hear a Waltz?,” finds Sondheim sitting and smoking around a very 1965 coffee table with librettist Arthur Laurents and scenic designer Beni Montresor.

At one point, after Laurents dishes Katharine Hepburn, you can see Laurents and Sondheim laboring valiantly to contain grins. On the same show Sondheim says he can’t fight it: Audiences don’t “pay much attention to lyrics.”

He helped change that, at least for a time.

These short-form doses of early Sondheim are fascinating, as is the 1971 “David Frost Show” focusing on “Follies.” The long-form entries in the Museum of Television & Radio’s retrospective are even better.

“Sondheim Tonight!” includes taped performances of groundbreaking musicals with music and lyrics by Sondheim, including the original Broadway staging of “Pacific Overtures” (1976), taped for Japanese television, and a revelatory 1996 London revival of the acerbic Manhattan marital survey “Company” (1970), staged by Sam Mendes. It’s the smartest take on “Company” I’ve ever seen, the one coming closest to making a viable protagonist out of Robert (Adrian Lester), here a coked-up, increasingly desperate man on the verge of finding himself if his friends don’t lead him to suicide first.

Sondheim’s career hasn’t been all lyrics and/or music. As recently as 1995 he collaborated with George Furth on an ill-fated mystery-comedy, “Getting Away With Murder.” Forty years earlier, Sondheim wrote several scripts for the TV version of “Topper.”

The “Topper” episode included here is functional at best. More interesting is a short story adapted by Sondheim for the late ‘50s anthology series “Rendezvous,” titled “In an Early Winter,” about an accident-prone family, the newly married son (Pat Hingle) and an increasingly nervous bride (Kim Hunter). The humor of the unsettling always tickled Sondheim, with or without a musical accompaniment.

This episode holds up far better than the notorious “Evening Primrose,” a 1966 ABC-TV musical co-authored by James Goldman. Anthony Perkins plays a nonconformist poet who ends up living among a mysterious band of nocturnal department store dwellers.

What’s amazing about “Sondheim Tonight!” is how few artifacts settle for mere curio status. This is theater history refracted through TV’s lens. Seen in various documentaries, Sondheim acquits himself through the decades as a lively conversationalist and teacher.

There’s a terrific episode of “Camera Three” called “Anatomy of a Song,” dating from 1976. It’s hosted by a longhaired Frank Rich, years before his tenure as the New York Times’ chief drama critic. Film critic for the New York Post at the time, Rich is star-struck by Sondheim in the nicest way, and he guides Sondheim and John Weidman in a discussion of “Pacific Overtures,” specifically that of the development of the song “Someone in a Tree.” Rightly, Sondheim has long considered that song a peak achievement; it’s a thrilling, multi-angled view depicting how a key treaty negotiation between Japan and America might have occurred.

Through hits and flops and ‘tweeners, Sondheim and his collaborators have gone on. Sondheim’s finest work has always come from the perspective of the keen, wry outsider. Like one of many theatrical alter egos, the painter Seurat of “Sunday in the Park With George,” he is used to “watching the rest of the world from our window/While you finish the hat.”

Television cameras caught a great many of his particular hats being made. Good news for us all.

* “Something for Everyone: Sondheim Tonight!” Museum of Television & Radio, 465 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills. Wednesdays-Sundays, 1:30 p.m., Friday-July 2; Thursdays at 6 p.m., March 30-June 29. Programs vary. Free admission with suggested donation of $6 ($4 for students and seniors). (310) 786-1000. For complete schedule, log on to https://www.mtr.org.