Richard Corliss’ recent article on Stephen Sondheim reminds me that for Broadway composers, younger (up to a point) is generally better. As I think back over some of my favorite Broadway composers, I can see that very few of them wrote particularly memorable work when senior citizens. In that, they’re unlike their “classical” counterparts, who often enter a period of rare enchantment as gray hair turns to white—as those glorious late-period works by Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, and Verdi attest. (Just for the sake of clarity: senior-citizen doesn’t have to mean eighties. Beethoven was in the full flush of his late period when he was my age, and I don’t consider myself senior by a long shot. In other words, it’s all relative.)
I present Richard Rodgers as Exhibit A. His career spanned half a century; along the way he collaborated first with Lorenz Hart, then Oscar Hammerstein II, to create some of the most durable and well-beloved Broadway shows of all time. The Rodgers & Hart shows have mostly faded but their songs live on: “Where or When”, “Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered”, “I Could Write a Book”, “My Funny Valentine”, “Blue Moon”, “With a Song in My Heart”, “Mountain Greenery”, “Manhattan” and tons more. Most of the shows with Oscar Hammerstein II have entered the national treasure-chest: Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. A few lesser attempts (Allegro, Me & Juliet, and Pipe Dream) have gone completely inert. Two oddball pieces—Flower Drum Song and the movie State Fair—have never faded away altogether; State Fair received a (disastrous) movie remake in the 1960s and a successful Broadway version in the 1990s, and Flower Drum Song still gets scraped up off the pavement from time to time.
But Oscar Hammerstein II died after The Sound of Music. For the next decade, Rodgers tried working with a number of other partners with varying results, none particularly good. With Stephen Sondheim as lyricist he came up with Do I Hear a Waltz, and a stranger mismatch between composer and lyricist cannot be imagined. Sondheim’s crackling cynicism might have struck sparks with the debonair young Richard Rodgers of the 1930s whose jazzy tunes perfectly matched Lorenz Hart’s hard-edged glitter, but post-Hammerstein Richard Rodgers: The American Cultural Monument, wealthy and powerful, was another matter altogether. The score has its moments, and to give him full credit Rodgers made a game attempt to match Sondheim’s modernistic glint. But it was a poor choice for a musical (the same plot as the movie Summertime with Katharine Hepburn, about a spinster having an affair with a Venetian gigolo), the casting was off, and the author (Arthur Laurents of West Side Story fame) was no more sympatico to Rodgers than was Sondheim. Judging from Rodgers’ autobiography, he seems to have been unaware that he was the only heterosexual in the room.
Rodgers was own lyricist in one of his better post-Hammerstein shows, No Strings with Diahann Carroll and Richard Kiley. At least the show offered superb singing (especially from Kiley) and benefitted mightily from the audience-grabbing notion of an inter-racial romance. Still, apart from “The Sweetest Sounds”, little from the show is remembered. Rodgers provided his own lyrics for the TV musical Androcles and the Lion, notable for Noel Coward as Julius Caesar and not much else, and two extra songs he contributed to the film version of The Sound of Music — “I Have Confidence” and “Something Good”, both vintage Rodgers songs proving that he hadn’t lost his skill.
Rodgers teamed up with a newcomer, Martin Charnin, for the dismal Two by Two, starring Danny Kaye and featuring no music worth remembering. Charnin went on to write Annie with Charles Strouse, a much happier and more productive experience; he also served as librettist for Rodgers’ swan song I Remember Mama, a show unlikely to have ever reached a Broadway stage without Rodgers’ name on the playbill. There is nothing offensive about I Remember Mama, to be sure, but nothing memorable either.
Rex is the odd-man-out musical of Rodgers’s late years, written with Sheldon Harnick (who had earned Broadway immortality with Fiddler on the Roof). The score interweaves terrific moments with passages of such banality as to leave one wondering if they are the work of an unimaginative pre-teen. It flopped, but a reworking that Rodgers and Harnick made a year later has shown some glimmers of life.
So Richard Rodgers’ later career was marked by small-scale stuff and a few modest successes; when you get right down to it, the two extra songs for The Sound of Music were his most memorable achievements.
Exhibit B: Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner. Lerner & Loewe were the authors of Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Camelot, and the movie Gigi, all acknowledged masterpieces of the American musical theater. They also wrote the less-remembered Paint Your Wagon and the completely forgotten The Day Before Spring. But after the trials and tribulations of Camelot they went their separate ways, Lerner teaming up with Burton Lane for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (modestly successful), and André Previn for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (laid a presidential egg), while Loewe enjoyed his riches at the tables in Monte Carlo. Nonetheless, they collaborated again twice—first for a Broadway version of Gigi for which they wrote a number of new songs (all instantly forgotten) and, worse, a droopy movie version of The Little Prince that qualifies for a Golden Turkey Award in the category Lousy Movies By Very Gifted And Experienced People. The skinny has it that the director, producer, and studio are to blame for eviscerating Loewe’s score, but in the absence of any other information, we’ll never know.
Exhibit C: John Kander & Fred Ebb. When you get right down to it, Kander & Ebb gave us two major shows: Cabaret and Chicago. The earlier Zorba is really quite good, but after Chicago only flashes occurred here and there. Probably their biggest post-Chicago hit was the song “New York, New York” for the eponymous movie with Liza Minnelli and Robert DeNiro. Kiss of the Spider Woman enjoyed a long Broadway run, but not due to the score. Several shows (The Rink, The Act) were ephemeral star vehicles. Curtains, a minor, and modestly successful, piece from a few years back has its moments but is hardly worth reviving or even re-hearing. Apparently we have a “trunk” Kander & Ebb musical on the way next season; I doubt it will be anything monumental.
Exhibit D: two legends—Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. Both hit their peak at middle age (Porter for Kiss Me Kate and Berlin for Annie Get Your Gun) followed by a slow decrescendo. Porter came up with a few interesting movie songs (for High Society and The Pirate) while Berlin’s very last Broadway show Mr. President—torpedoed shortly into its run by the JFK assassination—featured a perfectly serviceable, but hardly memorable, score.
So I’m not particularly surprised that Sondheim’s later shows haven’t had much staying power. That said, I can’t keep from feeling that Passion is an extremely fine piece of work that may well wind up being considered one of his best efforts, despite its depressing book. Assassins has its partisans; I am not among them, although I recognize some very good musical moments. The show itself is incoherent, however, and far too self-consciously clever for its own good. I haven’t seen Bounce (or whatever they’re calling it now), but the original cast album fails to make much of an impression. Sondheim’s glory days appear to be past, unless he has something up his sleeve we don’t know about yet. It will be an irony, however, if he winds up best remembered for West Side Story and Gypsy—shows featuring his lyrics only, and not his music. My vote goes to Sweeney Todd as his masterpiece, with Sunday in the Park With George running a very tight second place; honorable mention goes to Follies and A Little Night Music, tossing in perhaps a Miss Congeniality Award for Into the Woods. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Anyone Can Whistle, Merrily We Roll Along, and Company belong, in my humble opinion, in the “lesser” category, but not in the odds-‘n’-ends box along with Saturday Night, The Frogs, or Evening Primrose.