Just a Broadway maybe

In 2001, when Barbara Cook was preparing a show featuring Stephen Sondheim songs, she asked the composer how he chose the subject matter for his musicals. “I said to him that so many of his decisions seemed bold and risky,” the veteran Broadway star recalled recently. “He looked at me with that quizzical look of his -- I think he was surprised by the question -- and said that he just does what seems to be the right thing for him to do. The notion of risk never even occurs to him.”

Indeed, “risk” has never been part of the personal lexicon of one of America’s premier wordsmiths who, more than any of his peers or even his predecessors, has so single-mindedly pursued his maverick artistic vision without regard to popular taste. That unimpeachable integrity will no doubt come up again and again in the myriad all-star tributes swirling around Sondheim’s 75th birthday on March 22. These include two gala benefits, one for the Young Playwrights Inc. at the New Amsterdam Theatre on March 21, followed by the Roundabout Theatre’s annual fundraising gala April 11; and two retrospectives, a Saturday “Wall to Wall Stephen Sondheim” 12-hour marathon at New York’s Symphony Space and a series, “Good Thing Going,” at the Museum of Television & Radio, in New York and L.A., from Friday through July 3.

Apart from helping causes he holds dear -- particularly, nurturing young artists -- Sondheim takes a dim view of what he calls “being iconized.” He’d gladly trade in the encomiums for what matters most to him: “All I care about is that the show should get on,” he recently told an English journalist. “I’m knocking on wood as I talk to you, [but] I’ve never written anything that hasn’t gotten on.”

And that is what makes this landmark such a bittersweet moment in Sondheim’s career. For although he can look back on a peerless body of work, his present is more precarious, at least in commercial terms. The American musical theater’s greatest living composer can’t seem to get a new show on Broadway. And that sad fact says as much about his own musical complexity and imperviousness to risk as it does about the changing economics and tastes of the art form he has both challenged and influenced.

This long-aborning development came to a head in November 2003 when “Bounce,” a musical germinating in Sondheim’s imagination for nearly half a century, failed to reach Broadway as expected. After respectful but lackluster reviews greeted the musical in its out-of-town tryouts in Chicago and Washington, D.C., the commercial producers announced there was more work to be done on the show about Addison and Wilson Mizner, brothers whose real-life exploits in the course of the 20th century exemplified America’s promise and its corruption.

Not only would “Bounce” have been Sondheim’s first new commercial production on Broadway since 1994’s “Passion,” it would have also marked the return, after 22 years, of his collaboration with director Harold Prince -- the pairing that yielded such classics as “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures” and “Sweeney Todd.” The failure of “Bounce” to make it to New York not only signaled the end of an era but also the collapse of an important nexus of art and commerce on Broadway.

“When Steve and I started working on ‘Pacific Overtures’ in the early ‘70s, he and Hal were at the center of the commercial musical theater and at the center of the artistic musical theater. That was unique,” says John Weidman, who has collaborated with Sondheim on “Pacific Overtures,” “Assassins” and “Bounce.” “That is no longer true. What is true is that nobody can occupy those two at the same time anymore.”

Sondheim chose not to comment on his relationship to the commercial theater. But there’s no question that the issues surrounding his prospects are all the more poignant coming as they do on the heels of the recent deaths of lyricist Fred Ebb (“Chicago”), Cy Coleman (“Sweet Charity”) and perhaps even more aptly, in terms of artistic integrity, Arthur Miller. While critics viewed Miller’s later plays (“Resurrection Blues,” “Finishing the Picture”) as inferior to his early work, that does not appear to be the case for Sondheim, whose recent songs for “Frogs,” presented earlier in the season at Lincoln Center, and “Bounce” received largely positive notices.

“The good news is that Sondheim’s writing better than ever; it’s the shows that are disappointing,” says Ethan Mordden, a longtime Broadway critic and chronicler (“Coming Up Roses,” “One More Kiss”). “They don’t have the satiric showbiz snap of the early shows. Characters like Fosca [in “Passion”] and the Mizner brothers just aren’t appealing to an audience. I’m not surprised ‘Bounce’ didn’t come in.”

Sondheim is used to such carping from critics and the public. Indeed, he has long chronicled the woes of the iconoclastic artist, from his 1966 TV musical “Evening Primrose” about a disaffected poet (“Ruin another career / When you wake up / With one genius less....”) to 1984’s “Sunday in the Park With George” with its groundbreaking Impressionist hero, Georges Seurat.

In 1981’s “Merrily We Roll Along,” he saved his most withering criticism for the character who sells out, composer Franklin P. Shepard, who tramples his early ideals on the road to material success and honors. At one point in the musical (whose crushing failure brought the Sondheim-Prince juggernaut to a halt), he even sends up his own dissonant style when a producer asks, “Why can’t you throw them a crumb? / What’s wrong with letting ‘em tap their toes a bit? / I’ll let you know when Stravinsky has a hit. / Give me some melody....”

Weidman, however, says the perception that Sondheim is perversely adventurous or cerebral is off base. “It’s not that Steve is such a brave and defiant artist, it’s just the way he works,” he says. “The fact that critics and audiences weren’t having ‘Assassins’ [a musical about presidential assassins] in 1991 was shocking to the two of us because we found the stories so compelling. We never said, ‘Let’s do this because it’s different, difficult and it’ll make the audience uncomfortable.’ We never once had a discussion about how this was going to play to a theater audience.”

Never a big hit

Sondheim’s unyielding suspicion of the easy choice has nonetheless taken a toll with audiences and producers. One would have to go back more than 25 years, to 1979’s “Sweeney Todd,” to find a Sondheim musical that recouped its investment on Broadway -- even though subsequent shows like “Sunday in the Park” and “Into the Woods” had respectable runs and garnered Tony Awards. Despite winning the 1994 Tony Award for best musical, “Passion” ran for only six months, a fact attributed to audience disaffection for its story about an ugly and unhappy woman obsessively in love with a handsome young captain. During previews and beyond, there were walkouts.

Yet Sondheim has still managed to find a producer to, as he put it, “get the show on.” When it comes to the man’s stature, one should never underestimate the lure of winning Tonys as well as being part of musical theater history. His search for a producer, however, has become much more difficult as the cost of musicals has skyrocketed.

Roger Berlind, a producer on both “Passion” and “Bounce,” said that “Bounce” was simply not ready for Broadway. Today, he says, he would even have second thoughts about the $4.5-million “Passion” “because it would be twice as expensive to produce the show.”

“I can’t understand how you can get your money back on a $12- or $15-million production these days, unless you’re ‘Mamma Mia!’ or ‘Wicked,’ ” Berlind says. “Steve has brought the musical into deeper emotional and intellectual terrain, which I think is more infinitely rewarding to theatergoers, though it does manage to exclude those who are only interested in simple-minded entertainment. The dilemma is, if we don’t take these kinds of risks then we’re just going to end up with Beach Boys musicals.”

Using the example of the much-castigated “Good Vibrations,” the producer has a point. This musical season is not exactly dense with serious fare. Only Adam Guettel’s “Light in the Piazza” offers a sober respite from the jocularity of “Spamalot,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and the Elvis fantasy “All Shook Up.” And Berlind is all too aware of the risks. After all, he was one of 20 producers last season on “Caroline, or Change,” a musical that, with its dyspeptic African American heroine, was every bit as challenging as a Sondheim show. Though the Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori work received Tony nominations and some positive reviews (with the exception of Ben Brantley in the New York Times), it ran a mere three months on Broadway and was clobbered at the Tonys by the one-two punch of “Wicked” and “Avenue Q.”

Weidman explains there’s been a demographic shift on Broadway that’s now driving what’s being produced. In 1976, when he and Sondheim were creating “Pacific Overtures,” the ratio of New York theatergoers to tourists on Broadway was about 3 to 1. That’s now been reversed -- and with it, expectations have changed.

The rise of other genres

Since the early ‘80s, Broadway has come to be increasingly dominated by the expensive “event” musical -- ushered in by “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera,” both by Andrew Lloyd Webber, who coincidentally shares the same birthday as Sondheim (he will be 57 on March 22). Those spectacles have been followed by the “jukebox” musicals, inspired by the phenomenal success of the ABBA musical “Mamma Mia!” Both genres are squeezing out the more intimate story- and character-driven shows, a tradition out of which Sondheim emerged and which many feel is now endangered.

“There has been a lot of talk about the ‘dumbing-down’ of Broadway, but in a recent article, someone said we had it backward: Broadway is simply reflecting the dumbing-down of society at large,” says Ted Chapin, president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization and author of “Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical ‘Follies.’ ” “Sondheim has always been an antidote, but it’s obviously getting harder for him to do that. We’re not living in an era where there’s a whole lot of subtext in musical theater. And if we were, I think people would be much more accepting of Steve’s work.”

The real debacle of “Bounce,” Chapin says, was less in the failure of the show to reach Broadway (Sondheim and Weidman will continue to rework it) and more in the possibility that it ended the composer’s collaboration with Prince. That Prince may no longer direct a Sondheim show is bad enough, says Chapin, but he was also crucial to Sondheim’s career as a producer. Starting with “West Side Story,” Prince not only put the financing in place but also played a significant creative role in the development of the musicals. Chapin sees today’s crisis in the theater as one of producing -- which is how it is seen by Sondheim, who has often denigrated the myopia and inexperience of today’s crop of producers.

“Hal is a great visionary, the one in the room who could say, ‘This is a good idea, this is not a good idea,’ and then go out and get that show done,” Chapin says. “Now Sondheim has to go out and find a producer, and that is not a good position for him to be in.”

What that means, for now at least, is that the works of Sondheim are the province of regional and not-for-profit theater, where they pose less financial risk, or the occasional opera company. The Roundabout Theatre in New York, for example, has presented major revivals of “Company,” “Follies,” “Assassins” and “Pacific Overtures.” Lincoln Center Theater was the producer of “Frogs,” Nathan Lane and Susan Stroman’s elaborate reworking of a 1974 Sondheim one-act, based on the Aristophanes classic. (A March 31 Lincoln Center concert version of “Passion,” starring Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald, will be broadcast on PBS.) And the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., presented six Sondheim musicals in repertory three years ago. In this milieu, along with college and community theaters, it is arguable that the sun never sets on a Sondheim musical.

These revivals also provide an opportunity for constant critical reappraisal of the shows. In general, they have fared well in the revisit. “Assassins,” which was received with mixed to negative notices in 1991, garnered almost unanimous raves and won the most Tonys -- five, including best revival -- last year for the nonprofit Roundabout’s production, directed by Joe Mantello.

But if the critics may be coming around on certain Sondheim flops -- “Passion” and “Merrily” were also positively reappraised during the Kennedy Center Festival -- the public is still somewhat resistant. At least that was the case with “Assassins,” which despite the acclaim, eked out only a four-month run at the Roundabout. “I thought we’d run for nine months at least,” says Todd Haimes, artistic director of the Roundabout. “To my mind, ‘Assassins’ was as close to perfection as you could get. I can only assume that the idea of seeing a musical about presidential assassins was unpalatable.”

Sondheim’s fortunes will be tested anew next season when one of his most popular hits, “A Little Night Music,” is to be revived with Glenn Close starring as Desiree Armfeldt. But perhaps more intriguing is what impact a planned film of his “Sweeney Todd” may have on his appeal -- that is, if it is ever made. Martin Richards, who won an Oscar for “Chicago” and who was a producer of the original Broadway production of “Sweeney,” is eager to make the transfer to screen, confident that it would reintroduce Sondheim to a mass audience.

“Not only is this show highly stylized, it’s also very commercial,” Richards says. “It’s so bloody, frightening and hysterically entertaining. And if it were done like that, I think it would attract audiences of all ages.”

To keep moving on

Whatever the speculation about his career -- and he still inspires reams of print -- Sondheim will continue to loom large over the marketplace. Weidman says he and Sondheim are already working on yet another new musical, even as they retinker “Bounce.”

Like George in “Sunday in the Park,” Sondheim believes the artist must shut out background noise and simply put brush to canvas. He must “keep moving on,” as one of the loveliest songs in the show puts it. And there is little doubt, at least among some in the theatrical community, that Sondheim’s greatest show may yet be before him. The lingering question -- of critical importance not just to Sondheim and his collaborators but to the future of the commercial theater itself -- is whether Broadway’s greatest living composer will have that chance.

Contact Patrick Pacheco at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.