Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

248 Chapter 9 The American Musical Theatre
Michael Bennett (1943–1987) was of a later generation,
and his artistic goals were somewhat more conceptual:
his masterwork was A Chorus Line (1975), a
musical about musicals that Bennett conceived, staged,
and choreographed. Taking place in a dance audition,
and consisting largely of dances interspersed with
“interviews” of the auditioning dancers, it was initially
developed off-Broadway with a series of improvisations
with selected performers, many of whom landed
in the show itself. A Chorus Line became Broadway’s
longest-running show, lasting for fifteen years and
6,137 performances.
At the top of the twenty-first century, Susan Stroman
practically seized control of the Broadway
musical stage, winning every award in sight for her
extraordinary direction and choreography of the hit
Broadway production of Mel Brooks’s The Producers,
which won a record-shattering 12 Tony Awards,
two for Stroman herself. She then received Tonys for
her choreography of the wordless, all-dance Contact,
which she also conceived, and for a remarkable
revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!—all
within a three-year period! What is remarkable about
Stroman’s choreography is its combination of humor,
exuberance, inventiveness, and down-to-earth accessibility
across an enormously wide-ranging stylistic
palette. The clever deployment of “dancing props”
is as close as Stroman comes to having a trademark:
rustic mining implements in Crazy for You, hurtling
trays of dishes in the restaurant scene of Contact, eyepopping
rope tricks in Oklahoma!, tap dancing by old
ladies hanging onto metal walkers in The Producers,
and a “Putting on the Ritz” chorus dressed in top hats,
tails, and rugged combat boots in the 2008 Young
Frankenstein. Yet Stroman resists such easy characterization:
her 2010 The Scottsboro Boys, treating the
1931 arrest of nine African American men and boys
arrested for rapes they never committed, and staged
by the director-choreographer with huge irony as a
mock-minstrel show, displayed a profound sensitivity
to cultural divisions in American culture of that
time—and employed a setting mainly composed of
simple silver chairs. Stroman’s subsequent Broadway
productions, the 2012 Big Fish and the 2014 Bullets
Over Broadway (written by Woody Allen) ran only for
a few months, but her latest production to date, Little
Dancer, which portrays ballet dancers in the Belle
Époch era of Edgar Degas was reviewed as “transporting
and magical” in its Washington, D.C. premiere,
and will almost certainly have opened on Broadway
when you read this.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
While choreographers have exuded a powerful influence
over musical theatre, no figure has had greater influence
on the genre than the composer and lyricist Stephen
Sondheim (born 1930), whose first important work was
the composition of lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s 1957
West Side Story. After one more assignment as a goldenage
lyricist (for Jule Styne’s Gypsy), Sondheim turned
composer as well, winning high praise and success for
both the lyrics and music to the songs in the highly original
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,
drawn from the Roman comedies of Plautus.
In his work from 1970 onward, however, Sondheim
departed from the standard formats of those early shows
to develop a radically new style, marked by disturbing
plots, an ironic and sometimes even cynical tone, brutal
skepticism about conventional morality, and highly sophisticated,
adult, and intricately rhymed lyrics integrated
within a score which brought surprising new rhythms to
popular music. Sondheim’s first works in this style include
Company (1970), a devilishly shrewd and incisive look
at sexual pairings and partings in contemporary Manhattan.
While ironic and seemingly anti-romantic, however,
Sondheim’s tone remains amusing and surprisingly goodspirited.
Somehow he has managed to leaven his gloomy
message with buoyant music, penetrating observation, and
fiendishly clever rhymes and rhythm breaks, as in Company’s
“The Little Things You Do Together:”
JOANNE: It’s the little things you share together,
Swear together,
Wear together,
That make perfect relationships.
The concerts you enjoy together,
Neighbors you annoy together,
Children you destroy together,
That keep marriage intact.
(Refrain)
It’s not so hard to be married
When two maneuver as one
It’s not so hard to be married,
And, Jesus Christ, is it fun.*
Sondheim’s subsequent Follies (1971), set at an
onstage reunion of able but aging musical theatre performers,
also set in Manhattan (“I’m Still Here” is the
famous number from this show); and A Little Night
*“The Little Things You Do Together” music & Lyrics by
Stephen Sondheim. Copyright © 1970 by Stephen Sondheim.
Lyrics from Compay used by permission of The Herald Square
Music Company.