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[0:14] Robert W. Schneider: Hi, I'm Robert W. Schneider, and welcome to Fifty Key Stage Musicals: The Podcast, a companion piece to the Routledge Press publication Fifty Key Stage Musicals, which is available for purchase by going to Routledge.com or clicking the link below in today's show description.

[0:33] Robert W. Schneider: Today's episode focuses on chapter 23, Company. And with us today is the author of that chapter, Rick Pender.

[0:41] Robert W. Schneider: From 2004 to 2016, Rick edited The Sondheim Review, one of my favorite magazines. In 2017, he launched EverythingSondheim.org. His book, please get this book, The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia, was published in 2021. He has written about theater for Cincinnati CityBeat since it began publishing in 1994, and he was the paper's arts and entertainment editor from 1998 until 2006. Ohio's Society of Professional Journalists recognized him as the state's best arts critic in 2002 and 2017. He's contributed theater interviews to public radio station WVXU's weekly arts magazine for 15 years, and he is a past chair of the American Theatre Critics Association. Rick, I am so excited that you're with us here today to talk about Company.

[1:30] Robert W. Schneider: So my first question for you, Rick, is what makes Company a key musical?

[2:46] Rick Pender: Well, I think that there are a couple of reasons, but perhaps the most obvious is that it's almost nothing like musicals that went before it. The traditional musicals from the golden age were sort of, in general, happy stories, love stories, things like that. And this isn't even really a story. It's more about people dealing with marriage, love, relationships, concerns about commitment, and that sort of thing. And it's much more a study of a topic. That's not to say it's not entertaining. In fact, it's a wildly entertaining show, but it is quite different in that approach. Some people call it a concept musical because it deals with that kind of idea. Sondheim didn't like that description particularly, but I think it's an apt one and helps people to better understand sort of the nature of the show.

[2:46] Robert W. Schneider: And for our listeners who might be unfamiliar, what exactly is a concept musical and how does it differ than, I don't know, say My Fair Lady or Guys and Dolls, which are not considered to be concept musicals?

[2:46] Rick Pender: Well, I think that in general, a concept musical is one that is built around a theme rather than a particular story or a singular character who is being presented. So it is an exploration of the theme of issues and that sort of thing.

[3:05] Robert W. Schneider: Do you remember the first time that you actually saw a production of Company?

[3:12] Rick Pender: I do. It was a long time ago, early 70s. I was living on the west side of Cleveland near Baldwin Wallace College, and Maria Summer Theater, which was how they used their theater facility in the summertime, did a production of it. It would have been about 1972 or three, so the show had barely been out. And I remember going to see it there and thinking, wow, this is really different than other shows that I had seen. I wasn't a theater critic yet; I was just an avid theater goer, but it sure seemed like something different to me.

[3:53] Robert W. Schneider: Can you tell us a little bit about where Sondheim was in terms of his career when Company emerged? Just a little history on where he was in his artistic career at that point.

[4:06] Rick Pender: Sure. Well, when Company came out, he was 41 years old. So still relatively young by artistic standards, I guess, but he'd already had a great start more than 10 years earlier. He worked with Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins and Arthur Lawrence to create West Side Story. He had to be coaxed to do it, in part because he really wanted to be a composer and a lyricist. And well, Leonard Bernstein already had that composer job lined up. But he decided, with Oscar Hammerstein encouraging him, that this would be a great experience to work with some well-established people. Those three fellows, Lawrence, Bernstein, and Robbins, were all about 10 years older than Sondheim and already had really excellent credentials for Broadway.

Encouraged by that, the next step, Arthur Lawrence asked him if he'd be interested in working on a musical that was to star Ethel Merman. That was Gypsy. Ethel didn't want an untried fellow to be her composer, and Sondheim was again disappointed, but Hammerstein said to him, you know, this is your chance to write for a star to really learn how to craft music around a particular performer. And so Sondheim sort of grudgingly again said, all right, all right, I'll do it. And he had a ball doing it. They wrote that wonderful musical Gypsy, with Jule Styne as the composer, who he had worked with and cared very much for. And they had a blast putting it together. It took about three months, which is a remarkably short time for something that's considered to be one of the great classics of musical theater.

The next thing that he did was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And that was really his opportunity to do a show where he was both the composer and the lyricist. He worked with two guys who knew how to be funny, that would be Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart. They took an ancient Roman comedy by Plautus and decided to make a new story with it, put together a lot of very funny kinds of pieces, and really worked and worked. It is a plot that has sometimes been compared to a Swiss watch. It's very complicated farce, but it just works beautifully. And he wrote music for it. Now it's interesting because it was not the kind of music within a show that he had really learned about from Oscar Hammerstein, who mentored him when he was a young teen and in his early 20s. The music that he wrote for that was almost more like interludes between scenes. It was not music really written for specific characters, but it was a great piece of experience for him.

[7:11] Rick Pender: A few more things came along over time. He and Lawrence did a show called Anyone Can Whistle, which actually was kind of a flop. It was almost too avant-garde for its time. It was a musical about mental health and political power and very satirical, and audiences just pretty well walked out on it. It only ran for nine performances. It has acquired some interest in latter days because, well, Sondheim did the music for it. But it's a very strange story. And again, I think he felt it was a learning experience, but he said sometimes that he and Arthur Lawrence, they were like the smartest kids being smart Alex in the back of the classroom when they created that show. So it didn't go over real well with audiences back then.

Beyond that, he did a TV musical called Evening Primrose, which was only about an hour long, sort of a Twilight Zone kind of story that got some viewership, but of course it was just broadcast one time; it didn't have like a long Broadway run or anything like that. And then George Furth came to him with some scenes that he had written. George Furth was an actor who Sondheim had met working on a review back in the 60s, and they'd become friends. Furth came forward with this; it was a series of scenes in which he had envisioned using a singular actress to play roles in each one of these shows. He did a workshop of it, and it just wasn't coming together. So he brought the material to Sondheim and said, what do you think?

Sondheim said, well, I don't know, it's not really my cup of tea to figure out something like this. But my friend Hal Prince would be a good one to talk to about this. And that's the birth of Company. They took it to Hal Prince. He looked at it and said, hmm, I think this could make a good musical. Now, what it evolved from bore only the slightest relationship to Furth's original little playlist, but that's where it all came from.

[9:25] Robert W. Schneider: And so it seems like, if I understand correctly, that Sondheim actually started off quite successfully with very, very big successful pieces. And then right before Company, it seemed like there was a decline in terms of audience appreciation with Anyone Can Whistle. Do I hear a waltz? Was he discouraged at all by these reactions, or was he still interested in pursuing musical theater?

[9:51] Rick Pender: Oh, he was still interested in pursuing musical theater. His disenchantment came about 10 years later when Merrily We Roll Along was another unsuccessful piece, which has subsequently actually been sort of reinvented in some very positive ways. But these shows, I mean, the first couple of things that he did, because he was only the lyricist, he was impatient to become a composer and a lyricist. And I think he was a little miffed, particularly with West Side Story, because reviews of the show didn't pay much attention. The other three names on the show were big names, and he was 26 years old. And you know, who is this Sondheim guy? People hadn't heard from him, so there was not very much comment.

More notice was made with Gypsy. The lyrics of that are such wonderful things, and numbers like Rose's Turn, which really is a sort of an example of his ability to write character-driven music, is really a foretaste of what came after in many of his other shows. But again, he wasn't writing the music yet, so, you know, and then when he and Lawrence did Anyone Can Whistle, I think he was quite pleased. They were both pleased with the show. They just realized that, well, maybe the audience wasn't quite ready for a show like that. Through the 70s, he had ideas for things, but it just was having a hard time getting traction for them until he came along with it. And actually, this is a bit of an interesting story.

He had also been working at the time that the idea for Company was being kicked around, a show called The Girls Upstairs, and that show is the germ from which Follies sprung. The Girls Upstairs were a couple of Ziegfeld Follies girls, and it was about them and their boyfriends. Hal Prince was going to produce and direct both this and Company. Sondheim wanted him to do The Girls Upstairs first. Prince said, no, I'm ready to do Company. I've got ideas for people to play the roles. We've got a designer, Boris Aronson, was already lined up to design, and he said, work with me, get this one done, and then I will work with you to do Follies. And so that's how that came about. But I don't think he was ever feeling disillusioned. That came later in his career.

[12:29] Robert W. Schneider: And let's talk a little bit about Hal Prince at this time. Can you walk us through a little bit about who he was and what was his career trajectory prior to Company?

[12:41] Rick Pender: Sure. He and Sondheim had become friends in the late 40s, early 50s. Prince was just two or three years older than Sondheim, so they were both still pretty young guys. But when West Side Story was in the pipeline being worked on, they were struggling to raise funding for it. It was a show that didn't immediately take off with people coming forward and saying, oh, this is something I want to support. The producer that they had backed away after a while. Sondheim said, you know, I know this Hal Prince, who I think might be somebody who could do this. And Prince came on and became the producer for that, helped raise money to put that on. So that was one of Prince's first steps into the theater world, really in that role.

He was also, in fact, back in the late 40s, he did some stage management and assistant direction for the legendary theater director George Abbott. And that was really how he got his foot in the theater door to do some of those kinds of things. And so he was also involved then as the producer for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. So they had had some of that kind of work together. But in the 60s, Prince began to develop as a director.

[14:14] Rick Pender: That was what he was really interested in, things he had learned from George Abbott. And so he did a couple of shows then, like Oh, Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret that were shows that were already pretty good things to have on your resume. And so he was already into that. But this, so Company was the first show that he and Sondheim did together. But then for the next decade, they were like a team. He directed and produced everything that Sondheim did in the 1970s. What do you think they gave one another that made their team so successful? What did Prince give Sondheim and what did Sondheim give Prince?

[15:02] Rick Pender: You know, that's an interesting question because they were rather different personalities and they didn't always agree about things that they were doing. Prince was a very forthrightly decisive guy in the theater. He had an idea and he was ready to go with it. And Sondheim apparently was always ready to second guess and say, well, I'm not so sure, you know, should we be doing this? And Sondheim was notoriously slow about writing music for shows and it often sort of drove Prince crazy. I mean, I mentioned a few minutes ago about that working on the two shows about the girls upstairs and Company. Prince was impatient. He said, I'm ready to do Company. Let's get that done, and then we'll turn to Follies.

So there was that. There are also lots of examples along the way of them having different ideas about things. Perhaps the best example I can offer up is Sweeney Todd. Sondheim wanted to do a show that would just scare the bejesus out of people. And he envisioned it as this sort of claustrophobic kind of production. Prince saw it as a condemnation of industrialization on British society and made it into this immense production, which worked very well. I mean, my gosh, they won Tony Awards for it and all of that sort of thing, but it was not exactly what Sondheim had in mind. Now he didn't object to it. He said it was Hal's concept and it worked really well. So I think that they fed off of one another, and that might be the best way to describe their relationship.

[16:45] Rick Pender: What was different about Company that made it stand out from other musicals of its era? Was it the score? Was it the script? Maybe it was all of it. Can we elaborate on that?

[16:58] Rick Pender: I think all of it would be my quick answer. The score was different. This was not a lot of sort of sweet love songs and that sort of thing, which were numbers that you know were more expected in musical theater at that time. This score was sort of infused with sort of pop rhythms and melodies, some jazz kinds of numbers and that sort of thing that were just unlike anything that people had heard before. It was also the first show that Sondheim did that Jonathan Tunick orchestrated, and Tunick became his orchestrator for virtually all the rest of the shows that he did. And so he gave the score a very jazzy sound. For instance, at the beginning of Company, the first song has sort of background music that sounds like telephone dialing and the clicks and beeps of an answering machine.

Now I know those are all kind of antique sounds now, but you know, that's they were worked into this initial number. And nobody had ever done things like that with the music. The lyrics were quite interesting and different. Again, they were things that were rooted in many cases in character. The best example to give probably is Elaine Stritch played a character, Joanne in Company, who is an older woman, very cynical about marriage and life in general. And of course, she made the song, The Ladies Who Lunch famous. And today hardly anyone even reviews the show without saying, well, so-and-so sang this song very much like Elaine Stritch once did. So, but Sondheim wrote that song with Stritch in mind, her voice, her the persona that she projected on stage.

And this was again something that he kind of learned when he worked with Ethel Merman in Gypsy. So that was sort of a growth from that learning experience for him. But you know, he had other songs for other people. The song Another Hundred People was actually written. It's a little different number in the show. It's not so much an outgrowth of character per se. It's more about young people coming to New York City. But he wrote that song for a young performer named Pamela Myers, who was fresh out of college. She had actually taken the bus from Cincinnati and gone to New York City and went to this audition, and they fell in love with her. And he wrote that song with her in mind. And it's about, it's a fast-paced number.

It was actually in the show, and then it got bumped out briefly because they were concerned that the show was running too long. And Sondheim said, Pam, don't worry, we're gonna get this back in again. And like in a day or two, they had broken it up with a scene with the three girlfriends that Robert has and the Another Hundred People sort of is used as interpolation and transition between each of those little scenes. So again, it was very much written with Pam's voice and persona in mind.

[20:32] Rick Pender: One of the things that you had mentioned, and I think it's something we should explore, is this idea that scenes, traditional book scenes were being interrupted by characters who weren't even in the scenes? Can we talk a little bit about Prince's staging techniques and the impact and effect of sort of that Brechtian style in coming into musical theater?

[20:58] Rick Pender: If Stephen Sondheim were here, he would object to you using the word Brechtian because he didn't like it. But I think it's again, I think it's an apt description for people who know what the term means. But and for those that don't, would you be so kind as to expand a little bit on the terminology?

[21:15] Rick Pender: Sure. It is based on plays that Bertolt Brecht wrote that are they tend to be somewhat satirical, ironic, and more based in concept than character, I guess would be the way that I would most quickly try to define it. But so in Company and the way that Prince used these, so the scenes, there are five married couples who are the friends of Robert, the central character in Company. And each one of them has a scene in which Bob, Robert, Robbie, whatever people are calling him in at that particular moment is the sort of the third wheel. And but they are not done in any particular order. Each one reveals different kind of a relationship. And you know, Prince used those. He also used the wonderful set that Boris Aronson designed, which won Tony Award for Scenic Design that same year that the show, the show was nominated for 14 Tony Awards and won about half of those.

So, but that so it won for scenic design. It was a sort of like a pile of glass and chrome boxes that were meant to make you think of people living in apartments stacked on top of one another. And it had two elevators in it, and people could come up and down in the elevators and go in and out of scenes. And again, that's how Prince handled these transitions. And so many times, you know, a couple of characters would come in, they would start doing something. The song You Could Drive a Person Crazy is sung sort of in the style of the Andrews Sisters, commenting on Robert's fickleness, his unwillingness to commit to any one of his girlfriends. But it also appears in this almost sort of dreamlike kind of context, adjacent to other scenes where there are characters you know who are putting together a little story.

[23:30] Rick Pender: Can we talk a little bit about the scene order? One of the things that people say on Company is that it feels random because the conceptual idea is more important than a traditional linear narrative. Do you think that the way the scenes and songs are revealed to the audience is done in a very deliberate logistical fashion? Or do you think that the criticism, and maybe it's not even a criticism, that there's this randomness to it is actually probably more in line with what the creators were looking to go after?

[24:02] Rick Pender: I don't think that there is not a natural random, it's not like you could juggle the scenes around and it would work. There are things, you know, we meet all of the characters in the opening number, all of the married couples, learn little bits about them, and then we begin to delve into some of the relationships. There's a pot smoking episode. There is one where the wife has been taking karate lessons, and the husband is somewhat disdainful of that, and she proves to him that she really has learned something, throws him a couple of times. And so, but again, these are sort of exploratory moments. The scene that comes close to the end of the first act, however, is the song called Getting Married Today.

And it's the character Amy and her fiancé Paul, and it's her expressing all of her reservations about, you know, am I really going to get married? Am I do I really want to do this? It is an incredible sort of patter song delivered at a high rate of speed, tongue twisting and all of that sort of thing. The song that actually ends the act in the way that it is arranged now. This was not in the very original production, but it is the way that it is now. It's a song called Marry Me a Little. And again, that is a progression in which Robert begins to say that maybe he would like to have a relationship, but he's not quite ready for a full commitment. So he'd like to be married a little bit. In the second act, you know, we get some bigger numbers with the whole cast.

There's a sort of a vaudevillian number at the beginning of the second act, and it is, you know, it's all the characters talking about, you know, what would we do without you? It's there the role that Robert plays in their lives. We don't get around to Joanne and her cynicism until very late in it. And then at the very end, it's when Robert finally sits down and starts thinking about it, and it's the song Being Alive, in which he realizes that loneliness is something that he can't cope with. There may be challenges with regard to commitment and that sort of thing. But as Sondheim liked to say, marriage can be difficult, but to be alone is really impossible. And so that is the message that comes, comes you come down to at the very end.

[26:51] Rick Pender: And would you talk a little bit, please, about the shows out of town.

[26:57] Rick Pender: There were different endings, I believe, before they settled on "Being Alive," if I remember correctly.

[27:03] Rick Pender: Um, can you talk a little bit about what other songs were in there before they settled on "Being Alive," which is the final message of the piece?

[27:12] Rick Pender: Yes. They did the tryout in Boston, and there are three the Being Alive was the final thing that they got. The two previous numbers both were apparently so dark that audiences were like kind of shocked. And in fact, some of the backers and so on said, that’s a pretty nasty message you're conveying there. And I'm sorry, but I'm not coming up with those two song titles right now.

[27:38] Robert W. Schneider: Well, what we know that one of them was Multitudes of Amy.

[27:42] Rick Pender: Yes. I think if I remember correctly, the idea was that Amy did not get married at the end of the first act to Paul, and that Robert pursued her. And the end was he realized he had been in love with her the entire time. And I think they felt that was too sacred and too traditional. And then there was Happily Ever After, which I'm sure we know is very dark and very cynical. I feel like Marry Me a Little was also in there at some point, and then they now use it for the end of Act One, but then finally getting to Being Alive.

[28:22] Robert W. Schneider: But it's hey, I looked it up in a really useful book that I have here.

[28:27] Rick Pender: What's the name of that book, Rick?

[28:29] Rick Pender: That would be the Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia.

[28:32] Robert W. Schneider: And you are absolutely right about multitudes of Amy's, and then the other one was "happily ever after," which was the last line of it is about being happily ever after in hell.

[28:46] Rick Pender: And so, you know, again, it was just too dark, too dark for words, and too dark for audiences, apparently. And then he came around to this one, which I think Sondheim felt ultimately was more really what the message of the show was intended to be. Now let's talk a little bit about critical and audience reaction to the original production. What were the reviews like and what was the box office like?

[29:14] Rick Pender: Um, very interesting. The, of course, the New York Times often sets the tone for such things, even 50 plus years ago. And Clive Barnes was the lead critic for the Times, and he was pretty lukewarm about the show. He felt that the scenes were repetitive, and he seemed to think the music was okay, but he very curiously ended his review saying, "Well, this is a show that deserves to be seen in a rather weak season." I don't know what all was around it at the time, but so he didn't say don't go see it, but he was not very enthusiastic. About two weeks later, Mel Gusow, who was another writer for the New York Times, wrote a much more enthusiastic review. And that really more or less set the tone for many, many of the other reviews.

There were very few negative reviews beyond that point. Um, Hal Prince told a story, though, that after he read Clive Barnes' review, he thought, "Oh my God, we're sunk." But then somebody said there was a big line outside the theater, and they went out and he said everybody was standing in line reading the New York Times, and they were lined up around the block to buy tickets for the show. So what do you think accounted for that?

[30:40] Robert W. Schneider: Well, I don't, I guess I don't rightly know. I think that Clive Barnes did enough description of it that people thought, "Well, this sounds kind of interesting, a show about marriage, and you know, there is some humor in it, and well, maybe we should give this a try." And then other reviews came out that were more positive and enthusiastic endorsements in the other New York papers at the time. And so I guess that there was enough positive buzz around it that people wanted to see the show. And if you saw it within the first month, I believe you got to see the original star of the show, Dean Jones, and then afterwards Larry Kurt popped in. Can you talk a little bit about why the leading man of a hit musical left?

[31:33] Rick Pender: Yeah, that's an interesting story. Dean Jones was, his marriage was dissolving as they were rehearsing and opening the show. And it was not an easy subject to be singing, you know, eight times a week about, and talking about the ups and downs of marriage when his own marriage was on the rocks. And Hal Prince went and talked to him and said, "I can see you're having a hard time with this." And there had been some rumblings that Jones might want to step out of the production. And so what Prince said to him was, "I will let you out of the production, but please stay with it for our initial review period and for the cast recording. And then we will, you know, we'll have Larry Kurt." Larry Kurt was his cover, was Dean Jones' cover.

So he was in a position could easily step in for the performance. So Jones did it for about two weeks. They recorded the cast recording, and then Larry Kurt took over the role. Larry Kurt also played the role in London when the production opened up over there. And interestingly, Larry Kurt was nominated for best actor in a musical for that. But people remember Dean Jones in part because of the original cast recording, and also because of D.A. Pennebaker's film that documented the cast recording. And you know, we really got to see Dean Jones sing that number with incredible passion and camera angles that just about let you see his tonsils while he was singing. So it's nice to have it documented. I mean, it really he delivered the ideal of that number, I think. Not that Larry Kurt didn't do a good job with it, but the part was, you know, Jones was really the one that they worked with.

[33:34] Rick Pender: Now, Jones was not the person that they originally envisioned. In fact, Warren Beatty was who George Furth had in mind when he was creating the role of Bobby. Beatty and Furth had known one another from college, I believe. But Beatty wasn't a singer, wasn't somebody that they could get for that. But Anthony Perkins, who people mostly remember for Psycho, but he was a very capable performer, and he and Sondheim were very good friends. And that was who they were angling to get in the first place. But Perkins had decided that he wanted to direct films and was moving off in that direction, didn't want to get tied up with the stage production. And that was when Dean Jones, who was mostly known for doing a couple of Herbie the Lovebug movies with Disney, he wasn't a well-known actor and wasn't someone who was immediately envisioned for a role like this, but took it on and did a great job with it, even though it was only briefly on stage.

Can you tell me a little bit about then after this? And you had mentioned this a little bit earlier, but the rest of the Sondheim-Prince collaborations in the 1970s and what elements from Company did they then expand upon in their future collaborations together?

[34:59] Rick Pender: Um, so let me run through what those shows are so that you have a good picture of it. The next thing after Company was Follies, a much remembered extravagant production about a theater being shut down where follies had been performed some 30, 40 years that was set in the 70s, but these were all people who had been in a Ziegfeld-like production over the years back in the 20s and 30s and 40s. Two couples whose marriages came out of this. They were two boys and two girls who were in the shows, but they are married now and not very happy. But that show is full of what Sondheim called pastiche numbers, which are numbers sort of in the style of various composers from that follies era. And so those are some of the qualities of that show. It was a wonderful show, and many people remember it, but it didn't do especially well. It was sort of a downer of a story. Excuse me. But the next production that they did. I'm sorry, let me take a swig here.

[36:21] Robert W. Schneider: No, no worries. You're doing all the heavy lifting for us.

[36:25] Rick Pender: So the next show that they did was A Little Night Music. And the idea for that, well, the inspiration for that was that they decided they wanted to do something that would be a little more, I don't know, lighthearted and melodic, and that people would really run in, you know, enjoy that would have some more comic elements to it. And they had originally tried to talk to the playwright Jean Anouilh, a French playwright, about adapting one of his plays, and he was dithering about whether or not they could do it, and then they moved on to other things. And then Sondheim said, "What about Ingmar Bergman's film Smiles of a Summer Night?" And Prince looked at that and thought, "Oh, that would be perfect," and so that became A Little Night Music set in Sweden in the very early 20th century.

The central character is an actress who's slightly over the hill, had an affair with a man when they were both younger, he's now married to a very young woman, and that marriage has not been consummated yet. They cross paths and there's a spark there, but there's a couple of other kinds of relationships. He has a son who's actually got a crush on his young wife. There is a fellow who is a very stern soldier who thinks he's having a relationship with the actress, but not really, not very profound, let's say, and then his wife who is just another real cynical one, a little bit like Joanne in Company. And it's all this sort of mix and match kind of story, and everybody ends up with somebody else than who they started with.

And so it's a lot of fun. It's also a lovely show because it's full of waltz tunes. One description of it that I've always enjoyed was that Hal Prince said that his overall concept for the show was "whipped cream with knives," and that's kind of, there's lots of sharpness in it. Oh, there's another very cynical character in it, and that's the actress's mother, Madame Armfeld, played by Hermione Gingold in the original production. And she's this sort of salty old Madame who was a courtesan in her younger days, and so she gives another perspective on that. That's an interesting show since you asked about things that might have come forward. It is a show about relationships and marriage and love and that kind of thing.

Very different perspectives on it, but again, exploring some of those kinds of things. The next show in 1976 was perhaps the most unusual of the shows, and that's Pacific Overtures. John Weidman, who was the book writer for that, had come to Hal Prince with a play that he had written about Commodore Perry's incursion into Japan in the 1850s to sort of open up Japan. And Prince had said, "Well, work on this and we'll see." And he came back with a script that was very much like a piece of historical theater. Prince said, "Not quite. I think this needs to be a musical," which I think sort of surprised Weidman. "What? How are you gonna make this a musical?" But he said, "You know, I've been working a lot with Sondheim, and let's involve him in this conversation."

Now, Sondheim said, "I don't know anything about Asian music or about Japanese history," but Weidman educated them about that. Sondheim figured out how to write music with tonalities that sound like Asian music. And it's really, it's quite a fascinating show. So again, this to me demonstrates how, you know, from one thing to the next, from Company with sort of contemporary music to Follies with music from a different era to A Little Night Music, which is all waltzes, and then to Pacific Overtures, which is a wholly different kind of music. It is exemplary of how Sondheim made music and lyrics that were appropriate to the stories.

[41:07] Rick Pender: Now the next piece is the one that most people are perhaps most familiar with, and that would be Sweeney Todd. And Sondheim often didn't come up with the ideas for his shows as I've described here. You know, they've come from works by other people or whatever, but he saw a production of the Sweeney Todd story as a play by a man named Christopher Bond in London, and he thought, "I love this." He loved that this kind of, you know, bloody scary stories. And so he said, "I'd like to take this and adapt it into a musical." And there was some negotiation, and Bond said, "Okay, I'll let you do that." He still gets a credit on the title page when people are, you know, using having a program for the show.

But so they did that, and that show is almost like grand opera. In fact, Sweeney Todd is often produced by opera companies. It is a through-sung piece like many operas. It's a tragic story. Just, it's a fabulous piece of continuously operated music. I mean, it has underscoring, like we think of movies as having, you know, that where the music flows from one scene to another. It has crazy characters. I mean, the central character is essentially a serial killer and disposes of bodies by collaborating with a woman who makes meat pies, which become quite the taste sensation in London.

[42:39] Rick Pender: And so it's a strange story. I remember when I first heard about this, I thought, how could you possibly make a musical out of this kind of story? And yet it's been a fabulous, fabulously successful and constantly reinvented show, and was a wonderful musical with Johnny Depp and Tim Burton directing. And so again, the next thing that they did together was Merrily We Roll Along, which was based on a play from the 1930s by a couple of well-known playwrights back then, and was they've actually very much followed the sort of the concept of it, which was to start with some artists who were at midlife and rather unhappy and then sort of peeled backwards in time to find out, you know, where was the kernel of how they got started?

Did they were they happy with one another and that sort of thing? And that's basically the way the story runs, backwards in time. Now, instead of the people that were in this original play, they created several people who were involved in the theater world, a man who was a composer and a playwright who they were working together on things, and ended up rather unhappily moving in different directions. One found fame, and one was too much of a serious dramatist to want to do some of the things that the composer wanted to do. That show, and this is perhaps another example of Sondheim and Prince and their working relationship. Prince got this idea in part because his wife thought that he should do a show with young people in it.

And in fact, he cast the show with almost totally inexperienced young adults. Almost some were teenagers and some were young adults. Very few people had done any kind of professional theater work. And they were okay playing the young parts, but when they were playing the characters at an older age, they kind of looked like kids doing dress up. And a lot of it didn't work. Prince ultimately said that he never quite got his arms around the concept for it. I mean, they did crazy things like they were having a hard time sorting out who characters were, so they gave everybody sweatshirts with their characters' name or their role, like, you know, best friend or something like that on it. And audiences just did not like it.

Prince felt bad about that because he felt that, and rightly so, that Sondheim wrote a fabulous score for this. It's got a great overture, lots of great songs in it, but the show only lasted for 16 performances. It did have a cast recording made, which gave it a life beyond. And in fact, that show, George Furth worked with him wrote the script for that and so that was a chance for Firth and Sondheim to work together again they'd been very productive and successful with Company and so they did that and they in fact in the 80s after the show failed in the very early 80s they went back and did it again and did some rework on it and changed some things around and felt that they had done a better job with it and that's the pretty much the version of the show as it's done now not quite the original, but that parting of the concepts between Prince and Sondheim sort of marked the end of an era for Sondheim.

They did not do any work together again for more than 20 years. It wasn't the end of a friendship but I think that they both felt that maybe they had sort of exhausted their creative partnership and it was at that point that Sondheim then began to work with James Lapine and did a couple of more pretty good shows, Into the Woods and Sunday in the Park with George came out of that collaboration later. But so that's sort of the course of what happened but the 70s were this period of incredible creativity and success. Now, success is a relative term. None of these shows were tremendously long-running shows. I mean, obviously a couple of them had very short runs, but almost all of them have been revived more than once.

And Sondheim often said that people, you know, his shows were not shows that were always easy to grasp the first time around. But you watched it, maybe you got the cast recording, you listened to it, you got to know the music better, you saw a revival of it, and suddenly, oh, this is kind of a genius show, you know. And so, but it was more of an acquired taste. Do you think that's a healthy thing for a musical to have where it does take repeated listenings or viewings to understand it, or should you be able to understand and appreciate a story right from the first observation of it?

[48:05] Robert W. Schneider: Well, I’m gonna give you my personal response to that, and that is that I much prefer a show that requires some intellectual response and isn't just, oh ha ha, this was fun, what a lovely story. I mean, there are plenty of musicals like that, and you know, and I enjoy seeing those too. But Sondheim's shows, he had really moved the world of theater in a wholly new direction. Subject matter that nobody in the past would have even wildly imagined could be a show. I mean, we look at a couple of things that came up rather quickly after that, A Chorus Line, for instance, and there's an ancestral line that runs through that. Michael Bennett, who created A Chorus Line, was the choreographer for Company and for Follies, very much shaped by those shows.

And if you think about A Chorus Line, it is full of vignettes and songs, rather like Company. So that was in some ways a conceptual inspiration for that show. Or look at another couple of years later at Rent, a musical about people who are drug addicts and that sort of thing. Different kind of material. Sondheim opened the door for all of those kinds of things. I even like to hold up the example of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which is a pretty out there kind of show, about a transgendered fellow who has a botched sex change operation and so on. And it uses pretty much hard rock kind of music, but is that all that different, at least at a fundamental level from Sondheim shows about unusual topics and using music that is appropriate?

So he opened the doors, and then you can even come up to much more modern times and look at shows like Next to Normal, about a woman who is dealing with schizophrenia or Dear Evan Hansen, which deals with the impact of social media and that sorts of things. I mean, what Sondheim did, I think, is opened the door wide, wide open for treating any kind of thing seriously in musical theater. You know, we used to call the genre musical comedy. Well, you couldn't call most of what Sondheim did musical comedy, it was musical theater. And I would be remiss in our last few minutes together, not to ask you about the current production of Company that's playing as we're recording this in 2021, which has changed the main story a little bit. Are you able to talk about that at all?

[50:54] Rick Pender: A little bit. I have not seen it yet, but I've paid plenty of attention to it. And you said we are recording in 2021, and it is 2022. So my gosh.

[51:05] Robert W. Schneider: Oh my gosh.

[51:06] Rick Pender: That just shows you where my mind is.

[51:08] Robert W. Schneider: Yes.

[51:09] Rick Pender: We're all sort of stuck in the past, aren't we?

[51:11] Robert W. Schneider: We are.

[51:12] Rick Pender: Rick is absolutely right. This is 2022. I'm sorry. Continue on, please.

[51:17] Robert W. Schneider: I have to. So let me give you the chronology on this one. In about 2017, the British director Mary Ann Elliott approached Sondheim with an idea. Now, Mary Ann Elliott has done a couple of shows that people will have heard of, Warhorse being one and the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. But those are, you know, dramatic plays, they're not musicals. But she came to Sondheim and said, I have this idea about doing Company, but flipping the gender of the central character of Robert, the 35-year-old bachelor who is feeling somewhat allergic to the idea of commitment. And she said, I'd like to flip the gender. We'd call the character Bobby, maybe her name is Roberta, and we will look at it from a female perspective.

Sondheim had been often willing to let people do things with his shows, like John Doyle's productions of Sweeney Todd and Company, with the actors who also played music. So Sondheim was always willing to find, you know, to say, okay, let's give this a new look. He was reticent with Company because he had had people approach him about doing all-male productions. And he was concerned because several of them wanted to make Bobby's character more overtly homosexual. And he said, he's not, Bobby's not gay. That's not the issue. That's not what is holding him back from relationships. But he said to Marianne Elliott, let's give this a shot. I, you know, let's see. So a workshop happened, Sondheim saw it, loved it, thought it was great.

It raised issues of a woman in her mid-30s who's dealing with, you know, more complex issues such as having a child and that sort of thing, all issues that you want to think about that were different, certainly different in the late 60s and early 70s. And so it made it much more pertinent to this moment in time. That show ran in London, won Olivier, you know, the Tony Awards in London, the Oliviers won awards there. Patti LuPone came and played the Joanne character, the Elaine Stritch character in it, and did very well. Often happens with success in London is that it gets carted across the pond to New York City and Broadway, and it was being put together in early 2020. And in fact, it was due to open on Sondheim's birthday on March 22nd in 2020.

And for those of you listening who have some recollection of how calendars work, you will recall that about a week before that, all of Broadway shut down. So that show kind of went into hibernation. Most of the cast stayed with it. It came back together again. They began rehearsing for it again in the fall of '21, and it opened up early in 2022 and is doing very well on Broadway right now. In addition to switching the gender of Robert to Bobby, several other, one of the married couples is a gay couple. And also instead of the three girlfriends, there are three boyfriends now. So there were, and Sondheim worked closely to do what kind of modest lyric changes were needed to make these revisions possible.

He was very, very approving of it. And I suppose that some of your listeners know that Mr. Sondheim passed away last late last November, but he had seen a preview of the show and was telling people, I just love this. This is, it works so beautifully. So if you haven't seen it yet, it's still on stage. I'm sure it's gonna get some Tony nominations. Maybe by the time you're hearing this, it will have some Tony nominations. And it's a great opportunity to see a show that has a really fascinating history and has had an impact. It is indeed a key musical.

[56:01] Robert W. Schneider: Oh, we're gonna end on that. Rick, thank you so much for joining us today. And friends, please make sure to pick up a copy of Rick's book, The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia. It's quite fantastic. And while you're doing that, please make sure to purchase a copy of Fifty Key Stage Musicals by visiting Routledge.com or by clicking in today's show description. If you want to learn more about Company, please also review the links in the below description. I'm Robert W. Schneider, and thank you for listening to Fifty Key Stage Musicals, the podcast. Bye-bye.

[56:28] ♪ Musical number: "Bobby, Bobby, Bobby" — performed by the cast ♪