Stephen Sondheim
On Sunday, March 22nd, I got to go to one of my favourite places- brunch at The Carleton, to celebrate the shared birthdays of Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, at Kyle Gillis’ Broadway Brunch: Sondheim vs. Webber show.
It strikes me that I haven’t written about Stephen Sondheim since his death on November 26, 2021. I was so devastated when it happened, shocked, because I hadn’t heard any reports of him being in ill health and I had seen him, albeit live streamed, on August 3rd when he took part in Putting It Together: An Evening with James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim to promote Lapine’s excellent book of the same name about the development of the musical he and Sondheim wrote together Sunday in the Park With George. During that conversation, moderated by Christine Baranski, which included special guests Mandy Patinkin, who originated the role of Georges, and Bernadette Peters, who originated the role of Dot, Sondheim seemed, yes, perhaps, weaker than he’d been when I listened rapt to him speak at an event in Toronto a decade earlier, but just as sharp and just as deliciously specifically Steve.
So, I was shocked when he died and I didn’t have the words then to write about how much he meant to me, and how much his work has shaped the way I engage with the theatre and think about the theatre and how much he has enriched my love of it. I have this weird clown that my Aunt Joan bought for me when I was an infant that I still have, and its head is porcelain and its body has a music box inside and its limbs are soft like a stuffed animal. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized it plays “Send in the Clowns.” Its head is also perpetually too heavy and so it tends to slump over to one side. Kind of like Sondheim used to do.
In Grade 4 it was the Sacred Heart School of Halifax’s High School’s production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, that made me fall head over heels in love with musical theatre, and that prompted my mom to take me to see Anne of Green Gables: The Musical at the Charlottetown Festival for the first time and to Neptune Theatre to see Les Misérables, which both cemented the art form in my heart forever. In the summer between Grade 7 and Grade 8 we did Selections from Joseph in my musical theatre summer camp at Neptune Theatre School, which was where I met Rhys Bevan-John and Marla McLean, who were two of the people who influenced me the most when I was a teenager. My earliest memories of having a disc man are from, I think, the same summer, being at my grandmother’s house and listening to the Original Canadian Cast of Joseph on a loop.
In Grade 10 I remember getting the Original Broadway Cast album of Into the Woods for Christmas and in rapid succession I had the albums for the Original Broadway Cast of Sunday in the Park with George, Sondheim a Celebration at Carnegie Hall, and, my favourite, Anyone Can Whistle Live at Carnegie Hall starring Bernadette Peters and Madeleine Kahn and featuring Angela Lansbury. These CDs, along with Bernadette’s 1981 solo album Bernadette, the album for her concert Sondheim Etc. Live at Carnegie Hall, and Rent, with a few other shows thrown into the mix (Chicago and Cabaret certainly and Les Misérables and Song & Dance) and Idina Menzel’s album Still I Can’t Be Still were absolutely the main soundtrack to my High School experience.
In Grade 11 I snuck into Neptune Theatre’s Fountain Hall for the first and last time at intermission to catch the second act of Jesus Christ Superstar (which I had seen the whole way through a few days earlier) so I could see Heather Rankin’s performance again as Mary Magdalene. Seeing Rankin perform in this show was the first time I got to see her perform live after having grown up listening to the Rankin Family on cassette tape.
In Grade 12 I saw Charlotte Moore play Mama Rose, Marla McLean play Louise, and Raquel Duffy (another most influential person for me as a teenager) play Mazeppa in Gypsy at Neptune, and I knew I’d seen one of the best productions of this ‘best book musical ever written.’ Even after I saw Gypsy on Broadway two years later, I knew the show I’d seen here had been just as good. This was the show that made me want to shift my focus away from Broadway and to focus more on the theatre that was happening here in Canada. Then, in a full-circle moment, I played Simeon in Joseph in my last musical at Sacred Heart School. I got to sing my favourite song from the show- the absurd “One More Angel in Heaven,” and I had a blast.
The last musical that I performed in was Jesus Christ Superstar, which Raquel Duffy directed beautifully at St. Matthew’s United Church in 2005 starring Mike Tremblay as Jesus, Roy Ellis as Judas, and Sarah Letcher as Mary Magdalene. I was in my third year at Dalhousie and I was going through a dark time and being part of the ensemble for that show was really the buoy that I latched onto to get me through that particular year.
I have certainly been one of those musical theatre nerds who has been snobby in her time about the superiority of the works of Stephen Sondheim over that of his birthday twin Andrew Lloyd Webber, despite the fact, that, as you can see, there are certain Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals that are deeply nostalgic and formative for me. I fell in love with Jesus Christ Superstar when I was working on it with Raquel. I remember sitting in the church one winter night at the beginning of the process and talking through the various historical contexts for the show and what we knew about each of the characters from different sources, and it made me look at the show (and the religion I’d been raised sort of adjacent to) in a completely new and exciting way. There are a lot of Lloyd Webber shows I have never seen, including, I will admit, one that seems quite popular: Phantom of the Opera. I have only ever seen Evita as the 1996 film starring Madonna once and I was probably about twelve at the time. I much preferred my copy of Donny Osmond in Joseph, which I owned on VHS tape. Conversely, I think there’s only four of Sondheim’s major works that I haven’t seen either live onstage (in some cases multiple times) or in the case of Follies, from the National Theatre Live at the movie theatre. So, it’s possible I don’t even have enough evidence to judge.
All this to say that on Sunday afternoon at the Carleton at Broadway Bunch it was a special treat to get to see some of the work of these two icons of the musical theatre- both American and British- Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber- as interpreted by a team of local musical theatre performers. The premise of Gillis’ cabaret series is that each month he assembles a different group of mostly local musical theatre performers and they choose different songs to sing connected to that month’s theme. Like the Broadway Cares Equity Fights AIDS fundraiser show in New York Broadway Backwards part of the fun of this format is seeing folks sing songs sung by characters they might not typically be cast to play, as well as seeing the way they have cast the ensemble numbers to highlight each person’s unique talents.
It was fun to see some unexpected choices from folks. Henna Matharu, who was delightful as Dorothy last December in The Wizard of Oz at Neptune Theatre, sang a gorgeous rendition of “Giants in the Sky” sung by Jack, of Beanstalk fame, in Into the Woods. Tamara Fifield treated us to “Heaven On Their Minds,” from Jesus Christ Superstar, which was an especially fun and unexpected twist given the story they shared about meeting Andrew Lloyd Webber when they took part in the reality TV series How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria (2008) where they were vying for the part of Maria in The Sound of Music.
Other song choices were the perfect pitches that this actor needs to someday play this part. Garry Williams needs to play Buddy in Follies. His performance of “Buddy’s Blues”- a frenetic patter song that explores the push and pull of intimacy in a couple over time- was the perfect showcase for his unique talents. Like Mandy Patinkin Williams really shines when he is given the opportunity to play pathos but with a little twinkle of madness- of danger, of something interesting and unexpected brewing just below the surface.
It was apt then too that rather than opting to sing an Andrew Lloyd Webber song, instead he wrote his own birthday song for Lloyd Webber, which was a cheeky ode to how perhaps pedestrian his music can be, and yet at the same time how culturally enduring. Williams pointed out that earlier on his career, in the 1970s with Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Evita (1976), which was directed by frequent Sondheim collaborator Harold Prince, Webber was taking creative and political risks with the subject matter that he was interested in adapting. Indeed, the evening ended with the entire group of singers performing a lesser-known song from Evita: “And the Money Kept Rolling In,” a song about alleged financial mismanagement within Eva Perón’s charitable foundation. Matharu also sang “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” beautifully, a song that sort of mixes Lloyd Webber’s penchant for sweeping passion with a more nuanced narrative context.
These songs seem at odds with a more seemingly sentimental ballad like “Memory” from Cats, a musical about cats, which highlights two sort of extremes of Lloyd Webber’s career and legacy in musical theatre. This can be contrasted with Stephen Sondheim’s oeuvre which you could argue is more consistent in the way that each one of his musicals seeks to really probe the depths and the nuances of the human condition through some specific new lens. Yet, when you hear a song like “Memory” from Cats sung by someone like Laura Caswell it is hard not to get swept up by the sheer emotional power of it, which is obviously a large part of the reason why these songs have had such a lasting impact. It was fun then to see Caswell channel a different sort of iconic older dame with “The Last Midnight” from Into the Woods.
Jake Emmett Robitaille also chose two of these very contrasting songs from disparate Sondheim and Webber. From Webber he sang the iconic “Close Every Door To Me” from Joseph, a song that Joseph sings while imprisoned for being wrongly accused of sleeping with Potiphar’s wife. From Sondheim he chose the very politically apt “Everybody Says Don’t” from Anyone Can Whistle, one of Sondheim’s notorious flops that has since found a cult following. This show is an eviscerating satire of McCarthyism. I don’t understand why every theatre company that exists isn’t producing it simultaneously this season. Robitaille gave a masterful performance of both songs, which, again, is an excellent showcase for his range not just as a singer but as an actor as well.
Amanda LeBlanc sang “Tell Me On a Sunday” from Lloyd Webber’s Song & Dance (1982). The Song part of this show, which is divided into a more typical musical theatre story in the first act and then a tangentially related ballet in the second, is similar in tone and theme to Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, although there is only one actor on stage and we see the dissolutions of a few different relationships as her heartaches continue to compound. LeBlanc’s unique sense of earnestness really works beautifully for this song. She then got the chance to showcase even more of her acting ability with Sondheim’s “The Miller’s Son” from A Little Night Music (1973). The maid, Petra, imagines the future with three prospective but imaginary husbands. The song has a strong emphasis on lyric and story, giving us an insight into the innermost thoughts of this character which oscillate from slow and deliberate to racing denoting a sense of anxiety about the future.
Our host Kyle Gillis treated us to the bright and energetic “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story (1957), which Sondheim wrote with Leonard Bernstein, and then introduced many of us (including me) to “Evermore With Out You” from The Woman in White (2004). Both of these songs suit his beautiful voice so well, but my favourite performance of his of the day was one I have seen from him before, playing the John Hinkley Jr. role in “Unworthy of Your Love” from another of Sondheim’s politically all-to-relevant musicals Assassins (1990). Matharu played the Lynette Fromme role and the two complemented one another very well.
Stephen Sondheim has a reputation for being cerebral and clever, Lloyd Webber more for evoking emotional responses and awing with spectacle, but the Broadway Brunch Bunch didn’t let us go without fully embracing their silly side with a rousing rendition all together of “Jellicle Cats,” complete with purring, batting yarn, meowing, and grooming.
The way that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim have shaped the American and British musical theatre over the last seven decades is immense, and while they do tend to get pitted against one another for their contrasting styles, both of them have served as the foundational building blocks for more contemporary musical theatre composers, in the United States and in the UK and here at home. It was a truly lovely way to celebrate them both at the Carleton for Broadway Brunch.
