Stephen Sondheim and Frank Rich couldn't be resisted last night at UCLA's Royce Hall. Aside from spotting Michael Kors, the Michael Kors (Jeff Weinstein eat your heart out! wink wink kiss kiss), other fascinating moments turned on Sondheim's re-telling of Jerome Robbins hearing "Maria" from West Side Story the first time.
"But what's Tony doing, when he's singing? Robbins asked.
An uncharactertistically dumbfounded Sondheim, 25 at the time, suggested the scenery was changing behind him.
Robbins wasn't impressed. From this Sondheim learned the value of always, always plotting a song -- if not within the song itself -- but in one's own imagination. Know what the singers are doing when they are singing, is his on-going advice to composers and lyricists.
Sondheim in buoyant spirits raved about Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd," because it moves the story along and behaves as film by definition of its medium must behave, according to him. Sondheim distinguishes film as "reportorial," whereas the stage is "poetical." He said perfection is film's strength and it is also its weakness. (We all know he doesn't like the film version of "West Side Story," but it was fun to hear him explain convincingly why.)
He and Rich touched on critics. Sondheim bemoaned them because most who review his work are not musicians, they don't have musical backgrounds -- they come from theater and have no idea what goes into constructing a song, a musical. And speaking of why musicals are they way they are, his anecdote about wanting to flip-flop West Side Story's Act 1 "Gee, Office Krupke" for Act 2's "Cool," because he couldn't' see the logic in the gangs having killed two people and then breaking into comedy, shed light. Robbins agreed with Sondheim's idea. Leonard Bernstein agreed. Arthur Laurents agreed. "Cool" made better post-stabbing sense for the Jets and Sharks. But, Robbins said he couldn't make the switch, because the choreography for "Cool" needed the whole stage and the "Krupke" moment occupied only the very front stage zone, while the set was changed behind the dancers.
Robbins eventually made Krupke/Cool switch in the film version. Cool!
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