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A Life in the Theater: An Onstage Conversation with Stephen Sondheim and Frank Richby Robin Updike Stephen Sondheim and Frank Rich are coming to town, together, to talk. They will appear at Benaroya Hall October 26, 2009 at 8pm. And though the event may at first blush sound like a promoter’s idea of the odd couple – pairing the composer of such gorgeous songs as Send in the Clowns with the columnist who excoriates politicians and fat cats every Sunday in The New York Times -- there is method to this particular madness. Sondheim, of course, is the nation’s most beloved contemporary composer-lyricist. His musicals include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd (1979), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Into the Woods (1987), Assassins (1991), and Passion (1994). He also wrote lyrics to West Side Story (1956) and Gypsy (1959). At 79, Sondheim has spent more than 50 years in professional musical theater. He’s won 7 Tonys, multiple Grammy Awards, and in 1985 his Sunday in the Park with George won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. (The Pulitzer was shared with James Lapine, who wrote the book for the musical). He’s also worked in film and wrote the score to Warren Beatty’s 1981 movie Reds. And having collaborated as a young man with such titans of the American musical theater as songwriter Jule Styne and composer-director Leonard Bernstein, Sondheim is a living link to the mid-20th century artists who made the musical theater one of America’s great art forms. While Frank Rich’s compositions may not be hummable, they are gloriously quotable. Rich is The New York Times columnist who writes the 1,500-word essay every Sunday in the opinion section. Rich gets about twice as much space as any other columnist – no small feat in this era of shrinking newspapers – and he is the guy who causes New York Times readers all over the country to put down their coffee mugs on Sunday mornings and blurt to their breakfast mates, “Jeez, listen to this…” In his column Rich, whose political bent is unabashedly progressive, skewers captains of industry, the media, cultural watchdogs, religiosity, and politicians of all stripes. He has a particular passion for eviscerating the George W. Bush presidency. In his 2006 book The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America, Rich describes in painstaking detail how the Bush administration used publicity, propaganda and an acquiescent media to launch an illegal war and cover-up policy disasters, such as the Katrina debacle. But before Rich became an essayist on the “intersection of culture and news,” as The New York Times describes his current job, he was for many years the paper’s chief drama critic. And that’s the connection that makes an evening of Sondheim and Rich so engaging. The two men took A Life in the Theater on the road last year and it earned rave reviews. Rich asks questions and Sondheim answers them, offering up stories and anecdotes from his decades in musical theater. (It’s probably no surprise that Sondheim is funny and has an actor’s excellent timing.) Having worked with everyone from actor Zero Mostel and choreographer Jerome Robbins to actress Ethel Merman and director Harold Prince, Sondheim’s stories are fascinating glimpses at the inner workings of Broadway. For instance, in past public conversations with Rich Sondheim has described how he had to rework the opening of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum after the musical’s out of town preview flopped. The preview was at the National Theater in Washington D.C., and after dismal reviews Sondheim went back to his hotel room and wrote a new opening song, the delightful and now famous Comedy Tonight. The show went on to Broadway where it was Sondheim’s first big hit. But before it left Washington D.C., a 12-year-old suburban kid fascinated with live theater bought himself a ticket and saw Sondheim’s Roman farce. The kid was Frank Rich. In an interview last year in Vanity Fair, Rich, who is 60, noted that his affair with theater – first as a passionate attendee then as a critic – has paralleled Sondheim’s extraordinary career. Rich told Vanity Fair that Sondheim “is an artist I’ve followed my entire cognizant life, even before I knew his name.” Sondheim told the magazine “there was very little Frank reviewed of mine in which there was what you might call unbridled enthusiasm, but he wrote in a way that made you want to go out and see something.” The Sondheim and Rich show is a bare bones production. There are no props beyond a couple of easy chairs. They men wear their own clothes on stage and they have no script. Yet for anyone who loves theater, especially musical theater, it is a show rich with humor, insight, history and bonhomie. |
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