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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African-Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong, and this is the second part of my conversation with Ben Francis in regard to his very compelling new book entitled CAREFUL THE SPELL YOU CAST, How Stephen Sondheim Extended the Range of the Broadway Musical. If you missed Part 1, you may want to catch up with that episode before listening to this one. As always, this episode is made possible in part through the generous support of our Broadway Nation patron club members, including producer-level patrons Steve and Paula Reynolds.

If you would like to help support the work of this podcast, I'll have information at the end of the episode about how you too can become a patron. Here we go! So we were talking about Sweeney Todd, which leads us to the next chapter, which is about Hal Prince, who of course is the only person who's not a writer in your group of collaborators. Talk a little bit about that. Why does he write a chapter even though everybody else is a principal creator, and some people would say the director is an interpretive artist, but that probably is not true in Hal Prince's case.

[1:23] Ben Francis: I don't think it was. It's interesting that both Sondheim and Prince had absorbed a lot of European models, but also Broadway. Prince had learned his job through working with George Abbott, and Abbott was straight down the line Broadway man, did musicals, did farces. In an essay I wrote about the Shakespearean musical, how Prince had quoted George Abbott as saying, well, you know, Shakespeare was just a smart theater man. Play the guts, not the fancy verse. Like he was just a rooting, tooting old boy, you know, shooting up the Malamute Saloon. Abbott was somebody who thought you light it, you make it clear, you stage it, you don't fanny around with interpretation or, you know, sort of motivation.

You put it on. You can learn a lot from people like that because they have technical know-how, but Prince learned from that, but also wanted to do something that connected back to the world, cabaret. And Kander and Ebb said that he had a lot to do with the way cabaret was structured. So you actually had the Kit Kat Club and Sally Bowles' sort of private life, sort of balanced. So it became more abstract. The term that got used, actually Prince and Sondheim both got fed up with, was concept musical. You started with a metaphor, like, you know, you've got the collapsed theater in Follies. You've got this sort of blank stage with backdrops of New York for company. You've got something that steps back from just a sort of representational view, but is more abstract, is more clearly about the idea behind the show. Where the idea is more important than the story itself.

[2:46] David Armstrong: Yes, in a way, or I mean, the idea sort of is the story. I mean, he was influenced by Meyerholtz, much more than by Brecht. Both Sondheim and Prince weren't very keen on Brecht. Prince said, well, you know, Brecht fills the stage with white lights. I like shadows. Brecht was about sort of telling you what was wrong with the world, whereas Prince, he wanted to suggest things. Again, he said the metaphor is there. I mean, like he had this huge factory for Sweeney Todd. And Sondheim said that affected how I wrote the songs. The whole thing was about the industrial age and how people get ground down. That kind of grinding rhythm, I think, affected the way that Sondheim wrote the songs. That was it.

I mean, the thing was, they often worked together. It wasn't that Sondheim would turn up with a script and Prince would put it on. They would discuss things. I mean, it was Prince's idea to actually do Company. And Sondheim was going, oh, well, I'm not sure. Well, I'll think about it. It was actually, it's quite often the case is that Sondheim himself might be unsure about something. It was Goldman who suggested doing Follies. And then he'd be sort of persuaded into it. Another thing to remember is that Sondheim said that Hal was the ironist and I was the romantic, which is why our collaboration works so well. You look at a lot of Prince's shows, it's like Fosse, not as black as that. They're saying, well, you know, showbiz, but that's kind of propping up something that's false, like in Cabaret, they're not looking at the world.

And again, he wanted to draw explicit parallels of the civil rights movement. I think with Prince, he was aware of how things didn't work out in the way that you want them to. I think that, again, that influenced Sondheim a lot. They kind of, they already agreed on that. Yeah, it was Prince who managed to envisage it in stage terms. Whereas before that, I mean, Gypsy's fairly straightforward, West Side, funny thing is Vaudeville, directed by George Abbott, who Sondheim didn't actually think was, I mean, he thought he's okay, but he wasn't particularly impressed with him as a director. I've heard some very nasty things he's been quoted as saying about George Abbott. Abbott was, again, very sort of, it was pure entertainment.

You didn't worry about what the world was like. Whereas Prince was, again, more influenced by also European cinema, I think. I mean, in his book, there's Contradictions and then Sense of Occasion, he talks about Eight and a Half being an influence on Follies. In Eight and a Half, you've got the main character, who's a bit like Ben, he's somebody with kind of creative impotence. You're sort of always going between his memories, his fantasies, and the reality of what's happening now. And sometimes he's sort of, the edges are blurred, you're not quite sure whether something is reality or fantasy, and it doesn't matter. And I think that was important to Sondheim and to Prince, that what was actually happening wasn't so important as what was happening inside the character.

It was about states of mind, rather than events. I mean, that's a bit of an artificial distinction, but it sort of moved towards that and also a sense of alienation, which was quite common even in popular music. You know, like there's The Beatles, A Day in the Life, or The Sound of Silence, or Simon and Garfunkel. I mean, the pop singers, instead of just singing about falling in love, they were singing about feeling alienated and lost in a hostile world. It was something that was sort of in the air. All part of that post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era.

[5:46] David Armstrong: Yeah, that's it. Suddenly, you know, you're not the good guy, you're not the heel. Or rather, you were the heel at that point in Vietnam. That's it. I mean, in Follies, there's no mention of Vietnam, no mention of race riots or anything. But there's just this sense that sort of somehow America is not the good guy anymore. It's not Audie Murphy. You know, it's not standing up and doing the right thing. They've gone completely wrong. And then, of course, the whole specter of Nixon, which just kind of gets mentioned in merrily. Again, they rejected that kind of, I was going to say optimism, isn't it? But it's that kind of complacency.

[6:19] Ben Francis: Blind optimism. Yeah, that kind of, you know, that sense that sort of, we're okay in America. It was more sort of, well, let's be a bit more responsible and just do what we should be doing. And they're saying to Broadway, let's look at the world we're in. The New York of companies. It's exciting, but it's also, you know, the rusty trees with the battered barks, people missing each other. And, you know, another hundred people just got off of the train. There's a sense of alienation. As I say, I compare it to the last seven minutes of L'Eclipse by Antonioni. That's set in Milan. But there again, you've got, you know, Monica Vitti and Alain Delon are these lovers, but then they arranged to meet and they don't meet.

And then you've got people, it just occurred to me, it's a little bit like the end of Evening Primrose, and that you think you see them alive and have escaped. And then you realize it actually is two other people. Kind of similar moment like that in L'Eclipse. You think it's them. In fact, it's not. And it's just seven minutes of sort of total strangers walking past.

[7:50] David Armstrong: And they walk together past the poster walls with a cool resolve. And they feel at parties through the friends of friends who they never know. Will you pick me up or do I need you there? Shall we let it go? Did you get my message? Because I looked in vain. Can we see each other Tuesday if it doesn't rain? Google for you in the morning or my service will explode. Again, I think both Prince and Sondheim responded to that. It was Prince who managed to put that in theatrical terms. And that's why Prince was never happy with his own work for Merrily, because he never really came up with a overarching metaphor. I mean, he had this kind of white bleached set, which perhaps you could get away with now.

But you know, people thought, 1981, you know, I'm paying $40 for a seat and I see a blank stage. What the hell is going on? You know, why what my money's worth? You know, I saw that production. I saw the final performance of Merrily. And I think in hindsight, we probably would have accepted that, except it was clear that he didn't have a vision. It was clear that why are we doing the show in this way was not I wouldn't have articulated it at the time. The whole show was enervating. It just felt like until the last 20 minutes opening doors, the show suddenly took off. And part of that was the cast was finally the right age to be playing the characters. But it also was just somehow there was some ebullience about that part of the show. And I think it's really more of a sense of purpose that was clear than that was not clear for the previous two hours of the show.

[9:24] Ben Francis: I really like that show. I think it works now.

[9:27] David Armstrong: I agree with you.

[9:27] Ben Francis: A bit heavy handed. It does rather labor the part. But again, because so many people missing it first time, they kept telling you, this man is selling out. This man is selling out. We get it. We get it. People didn't at first. Who cares about him?

[9:39] David Armstrong: You're exactly right. That was not clear that we were supposed to focus on that in that original production. And I don't know whether it's because everything was so amorphous. It's hard even to remember exactly what the show was. But I remember the feelings that I had sitting there just being sort of like, oh, my God, why is the show not any good? It's all my heroes doing it. And yet it's not working. Let's continue through our list. This is fun. Shevlov, Burt Shevlov.

[10:33] Ben Francis: Burt Shevlov, a name that is probably less talked about, although certainly was a significant figure in many things, but especially in Broadway musicals. What's the defining aspects of their collaboration?

[10:46] David Armstrong: Well, I call the chapter nothing that's grim. I mean, that was it. Shevlov was a comedy writer, wrote for Red Buttons and directed some shows, Art Carney. I mean, Larry Gelbart, they collaborated on the book for Funny Thing. I mean, that was it. I mean, Funny Thing is a nostalgic show for vaudeville and also for burlesque. I mean, it's quite a clean kind of burlesque. It's not a strip. The women kind of come on and do a bump and grind, but they don't actually sort of strip. It's a family friendly burlesque. It's saucy. I mean, there's never really been an American equivalent of the Carry On movies. That's the closest it gets, I think. And that's what it was. And also The Frogs, which is a bit later, which is the show that he and Shevlov did from the play by Aristophanes.

They both have classical antecedents, but neither of them are particularly serious. I mean, The Frogs, its message, ironically, is kind of anti-didactic. It's saying you can't lecture an audience. You have to make them feel things, which I'd go along with generally. But also, Funny Thing, it's actually that it's celebrating tattiness. I mean, there's a sort of throwaway gag in Comedy Tonight, hundreds of actors out of sight. It's a show that can work in a community centre. You're making a joke about how it's not a great sort of Hollywood spectacular. It's a Hollywood spectacular, but you can't actually see any of it because you can't afford it. I think that's it. I mean, Shevlov did a revised version of No, No, Nanette, which was a big hit in the 70s. He was a professional comedy writer, sort of slick and funny, not somebody who had any particular interest in sort of analysing why the world was what it was.

But clearly obsessed with early forms of theatre. So in some ways, I sort of look at Funny Thing, Haven't Done the Way of the Forum as something that's showing us that you don't need anything to have an effective show. Theatre, at its essence, is a bare stage. I mean, the way it sort of ties into, it's maybe stretching it, but ties into Peter Brook in a way that that sense of let's go back to the basics here.

[13:01] Ben Francis: Yeah, I think it's almost like taking the Mickey out of spectacle. I mean, Follies is a kind of ironic spectacle. It's like the spectacle has collapsed. Whereas here, if she plays Medea later this week, it's like sort of, you know, and please come and see and tell all your friends, it's a rather desperate touring company, one step ahead of the Sheriff, just trying to get people to come in and see their shows. And it's about acting and how actors who live tenuous lives trying to raise a smile.

[13:24] David Armstrong: Yeah, it's so interesting because it's nostalgic for the vaudeville era of their parents or their youth of Shevloff and Sondheim. I guess they were both born in the 20s, probably. So it's this distant memory of what came before them, but it's really a distant memory of a thousand years ago as well, of two thousand years ago. Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone, a comedy tonight. Something appealing, something appalling, something for everyone, a comedy tonight. Nothing with kings, nothing with crowns. Bring on the lovers