Sunday in the Park Without Stephen

Oh, the joys of a Sondheimmusical! But I’m actually talking about another Stephen. You see, I’m newlyback from a writers’ conference in New York City. On a beautiful  Sunday afternoon, I waited in Bryant Park fortwo hours to meet with  a fellow writer.Alas, he never showed. (Later I found out he’d been hospitalized. Of course Ihope he gets well soon!)

 But Sondheim is much in mymind right now because I’ve just seen a terrific revival of the great man’swaltz operetta, 1973’s A Little Night Music, at the Pasadena Playhouse.What does this have to do with movies? Quite a lot, actually. This complicatedstory of thwarted and consummated love was based by Sondheim and book authorHugh Wheeler on the rare Ingmar Bergman romantic  comedy, 1955’s Smiles of a Summer Night. Asin the Bergman film, events transpire on the midsummer evening when, in the Swedish countryside, darkness neverquite comes, but lovers strongly feel the urge to merge. Once Sondheim’smusical version became a worldwide stage hit, Hollywood came calling. Sondheim,a great lover of film, was all for it.

Stage director-producerHarold Prince signed on to direct the 1977 film version, which was distributedby my former boss, Roger Corman, a B-movie guy who in that era was looking to participatein classier projects. 

 Unfortunately for filmgoers,much of the casting tried a bit too hard for Hollywood pizzazz.. While maleactors like Len Cariou reprised their stage roles, the all-important women’sparts were given to actresses popular with TV  and movie fans. That’s why Diana Rigg, wellknown in that era for playing Emma Peel on TV’s The Avengers, was giventhe key supporting role of  CountlessCharlotte, the bitter wife of a philandering dragoon. And the leading part,that of a glamorous but ageing actress who has discovered she longs for truelove (and who gets to sing “Send in the Clowns”) went to no one but ElizabethTaylor. I’ve never managed to see the whole movie, which was roundly panned bycritics and shunned by audiences. But the YouTube clip of Taylor stifflytalk-singing through that dazzling song (see below) is easy to ridicule.

 A Little Night Music was not the only Hollywood film based on a Sondheimmusical, but it was one of the first. In the Sixties, two Broadway musicals forwhich he’d provided lyrics, West Side Story and Gypsy,  became big-budget films, with varying degreesof success. His knockabout musical comedy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Wayto the Forum, became a frenetic Zero Mostel vehicle in 1966.  Seven years later, Sondheim—a great fan ofmysteries and word games—collaborated with actor Tony Perkins on the script fora twisty, bitchy non-musical called The Last of Sheila. For WarrenBeatty’s comic-strip spinoff,, Dick Tracy (1990), Sondheim was hired tocontribute five songs. One of then, “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)” wasseductively sung by Madonna, in the role of Breathless Mahoney: it ended upwinning Sondheim his one and only Oscar.

 Of the two major Sondheimmusicals that have been made into movies thus far,  Sweeney Todd (a 2007 film starring awell-cast Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter) has its moments, notably adeadpan droll “By the Sea,” with a scowling Sweeney on the sand at Brighton,fully dressed in his funereal black suit. An all-star Into the Woods (2014), with Meryl Streep as the Witch, approaches the power of the original. Butfantasy, which works beautifully on stage, is much harder to carry off at themovies. 

 

 With best wishes to S.M. Silverman