The West End And Broadway Is Full Of Commercial Crap!

[MamasDoin'Fine]

Posted: 3/5/12 at 7:44am

Not my words (though I do agree to a large extent), but those of a certain Mr Stephen Sondheim!!!!
'whenever I scan to see what's on, my heart sinks to my boots,I just the West End full of commercial crap!'



Updated On: 3/6/12 at 07:44 AM

[devonian.t]

Posted: 3/5/12 at 8:53am

Hello, welcome to commercial theatre!!!

If you want non-commercial material, go to a subsidised house.

Mr S has lived a somewhat charmed life: how much money has he lost while people have fallen over themselves to fund his artistic expressions? And actually, a lot of people have put money into producing all his shows in London- without a great deal of return!

As an independent producer, nobody is there to give you a little helping hand and a refund. If you don't appeal to the public- as it is, not as we would like it to be- you don't survive.

When theatre rents are £0, top actors work for £1 a week and TV is clamouring to cover the latest production of Beckett starring 2 actors nobody has heard of, we will have the arty, intellectual West End of our dreams.

Until then, we'll have to do what producers have been doing since Ancient Greece: give the audience what it wants!

[MamasDoin'Fine]

Posted: 3/5/12 at 9:00am

Here! Here!
Well put, maybe you can pop him a note.

[devonian.t]

Posted: 3/5/12 at 9:14am

I'm not on his Christmas list...

[Phantom of London]

Posted: 3/5/12 at 11:28am

Well said Devonian.

Mr S, certainly wasn't complaining when Sweeney Todd was going into New York's and London's biggest commercial theatre, the Uris and Drury Lane

[mallardo]

Posted: 3/5/12 at 12:27pm

Still, I know what he means.

[binau]

Posted: 3/5/12 at 4:33pm

I think it is a bit of a cycle though..people want 'commercial crap' so producers give it to them but only giving 'commercial crap' will make people expect 'commercial crap'. People are growing up thinking WE WILL ROCK YOU and WICKED are what musicals are...

Updated On: 3/5/12 at 04:33 PM

[Owen22]

Posted: 3/6/12 at 1:15am

Its kinda disturbing you people are complaining about this statement, when one would think people who care enough about theatre to post on theatre boards would be defending the great man. Agreeing with him. Wow. I mean, wow.

[fingerlakessinger]

Posted: 3/6/12 at 1:30am

But really? How do we define "crap"?
I know plenty of people (myself included) that think WICKED and other various successful shows are far from crap.
If one of his shows became a massive hit like that...would people call it crap merely because its successful? Because it seems like that is what makes people on here define it as a bad show if it simply does extremely well and get's butts in the seats. If I'm not mistaken...isn't that the goal of every show?

[mallardo]

Posted: 3/6/12 at 3:02am

In the first place, he said Broadway and the West End, not just the West End. It was not a criticism of London theatre which he is well known to adore.

And in the second place, there IS a lot of commercial crap out there. It's just a statement of fact from a man who takes the theatre seriously. I'm sure he knows the economics of it as well as anyone here but there has been, in the past couple of decades, a kind of dumbing down of popular taste (Reality TV anyone?)due to many factors and it is reflected in the theatre. He didn't put the emphasis on musicals, btw. Plays are included.

[devonian.t]

Posted: 3/6/12 at 3:15am

Well the samer applies to Broadway.

It's a bit like complaining that there are too many kids at Disneyland or that Stringfellows doesn't play enough classical music.

And Mr Sondheim, of all people, ought to have the historical perspective to realize that there has always been a lot of "crap" around. I don't believe there was ever a Golden Age when everybody was dressed nicely, spoke beautifully and watched only high-brow theatre.

On the contrary, thanks to the subsidized theatre transfers, we are lucky to have Warhorse, Pitmen Painters and One Man Two Guvnors flourishing in the commercial sector.

It's not about attacking Sondheim because we're proud of the tourist bait; it's just a pragmatic understanding of why it exists.

[MamasDoin'Fine]

Posted: 3/6/12 at 4:07am

Here's the article in full from The Times.
@Go get a cup of coffee!@


Sondheim decries modern Broadway.
"Most interesting plays are done off-Broadway because there isn't a public any more for plays, unless they feature a star, in which case they will go to see the star; it doesn't matter what the play is.
The same is true of musicals.

There is an anodyne homogeneity that governs Broadway musicals, so I don't see many. There's nothing wrong with having a lot of commercial crap as long as you have something else. You want a supermarket. Unfortunately, nearly everything on
Broadway is commercial crap. The same is true of the West End. When I scan
what's on, my heart sinks into my boots."

As 'Sweeney Todd' opens in London, its author explains why he thinks that
musical theatre is in terminal decline

In the room where Stephen Sondheim composes, in his Manhattan townhouse, are
awards on a mantelpiece, a MacBook Pro on a day-bed, a frayed dictionary on
a lectern, a line drawing of Sondheim, a collection of brass letter "S"
ornaments and a stained-glass window looking out on communal gardens
surrounded by skyscrapers. Most apposite, for a lyricist noted for his
fiendish use of words, is a block of stone with the epigram: "Nothing is
written in stone." On a black piano sits sheet music with crotchets, quavers
and phrases in pencil. Almost ten years after his last new musical, Sondheim
reveals he is writing a new piece.

All Together Now, which he is composing with David Ives, playwright of the
Broadway hit 'Venus in Fur', is based on a "small moment" in a past Ives play
and focuses on "two people and what goes into their relationship", Sondheim
says. He began working on it in 1991; similar in structure to Sondheim's
'Merrily We Roll Along', it follows the story of a relationship backwards:
from the present to the first meeting. "I'm a procrastinator," Sondheim
admits with his affable growl. "We'll write for a couple of months, then
have a workshop. It seemed experimental and fresh 20 years ago. I have a
feeling it may not be experimental and fresh any more."

Sondheim, 81 and winner of an Oscar, multiple Tonys and Grammys, is compact
and white-haired, his black standard poodles - Addie and Willie, named after
characters in 'Road Show' - at his feet. "I'm writing very slowly. It's hard
to get back on the bicycle," he says.
His last new musical, Bounce, opened in 2003, a revised version, titled 'Road Show', appeared again in 2008. "I have spent the past four years writing books, 'Finishing the Hat' and 'Look, I Made a Hat', so I'm rusty. As you grow older your energies deplete. Only supreme geniuses like Stravinsky and Picasso worked into their eighties and nineties with vigour and freshness. Look at George Bernard Shaw's later plays: it's like, 'Shut up and lie down.' " He seems avuncular, but sharp. "I'm not a retiring type. I'm not a golf player. I can't imagine sitting in front of the television. Painful as it is, writing is still fun and I don't have anything else to do."

Sondheim calls his home "the house that 'Gypsy' built", referring to the hit
musical for which he wrote the lyrics. While the productions entirely
created by him have not been vast commercial successes, they are theatrical
totems, including 'Company', 'Sunday in the Park with George' and 'Assassins'.
Critics haven't always hailed him - his musicals, like his songs, are lush
but complex, peppy but difficult, playful and painful - yet alongside his
best-known standards (Send in the Clowns, Losing My Mind) they spikily
endure.

New York recently hosted revivals of 'Merrily We Roll Along' and 'Follies', both
peppered with those stab-in-the-solar-plexus songs about love, loss and the
passing of time; this summer the London revival of 'Into the Woods' will play
in Central Park, while the much-hailed Chichester Festival production of
'Sweeney Todd' is about to open in the West End. Based on Christopher Bond's
play about the homicidal barber and influenced by the unsettling film scores
of Bernard Herrmann and a desire to "scare audiences", Sondheim's musical
was adapted for the screen by Tim Burton (with Johnny Depp in the title
role) in 2007.

Awarding the Chichester revival five stars last October, Libby Purves said
in The Times that though a Sondheim masterwork is familiar, it is "never so
thrilling, dark, wild and truthful as under Jonathan Kent's direction". Even
the set of the production, originally mounted in New York in 1979 (when it
won eight Tony awards), hums with a furious energy: Mrs Lovett's (Imelda
Staunton) infamous pie oven is at first a subtle glow before blooming into
"the fires of hell". Michael Ball's Sweeney is "intense, pitiable, real",
Purves said.

Sondheim was hugely impressed with Ball and Staunton at a cast recording of
the production last week. "It's gratifying," he says of the flurry of
revivals. "It means the shows have lasting value. But posterity doesn't
interest me. I want to enjoy it while I'm here; I can't after I'm dead. If I
can't see or hear an audience's reaction, what's the point? Maybe the minute
I'm dead nobody will do any of my shows again, maybe they will do them every
day of the year. It's irrelevant to me."

He thinks some of his shows have been "unfairly maligned", particularly
'Merrily We Roll Along' , which received brickbats at its premiere in 1981. "It was perceived
as a bigger failure than it might have been," Sondheim says. "When a show is
a failure the first time, it is never forgiven, even though we did a lot of
work on it." For every good review "there's one that says you're a piece of
****".

This is said evenly; he doesn't regret not becoming a Broadway darling. "If
you're writing experimental work, you can't expect to be popular, in the
sense of having large audiences. Very few shows of any real freshness are
hits. The most popular work is not the best work: that's true of 500 years
of Western theatre."

He would like a big Broadway hit "providing I can write the stuff I like,
and they don't usually go together. When people ask would I like to write a
blockbuster, my answer is, 'Providing I don't have to sign my name to it.' "
Despite his dark lyrics, haunted characters and unusual structures and
melodies, Sondheim denies challenging the traditional musical form. "Never
consciously. I just wanted to write something I haven't seen before. Follies
is a dour, experimental work. The nun doesn't escape from the Nazis in the
end."

'West Side Story', for which he composed the lyrics (his big break), and 'Gypsy'
were not considered successful until hit movies were made of them, he says.
"They made their money back, which is my definition of a hit. 'A Funny Thing
Happened on the Way to the Forum' was my biggest hit." [He wrote music and
lyrics but not the book. "That was experimental but in the tradition of
vaudeville, which the audience latched on to. I hardly consider myself a
starving artist. I've made a very good living, just not a blockbuster one. I
don't have a private jet."

Is the condition terminal? “I think so. Commercial theatre will only get
more narrow as time goes on. There are so many forms of entertainment,
theatre is becoming more marginalised. It’s become ‘an event’: you see
Wicked on your anniversary. I don’t think commercial theatre can fulfil a
function as a constant feeding ground for emotions and thoughts.” Broadway’s
most talked-about success, 'The Book of Mormon' (by the makers of South Park),
is a “fun college show”, he says dismissively.

When a customs form asks where he lives, Sondheim would like to write “the
past”, though his own past wasn’t much fun. He grew up on the Upper West
Side, the only child of Herbert, a dress manufacturer, and Etta, who
designed the dresses. He doesn’t remember feeling lonely, though, aged 10,
when his parents divorced — Herbert left Etta, nicknamed Foxy, for another
woman — “life became unpleasant and scarring”. Mother and son moved to
Pennsylvania. “I felt unhappy. She was difficult. She was traumatised by my
father leaving and took it out on me: not an uncommon situation, the
overbearing, grasping, voracious mother who both loves and hates her child.
I’m afraid my mother never loved me. I don’t think she wanted children. She
was a career lady. I think I was an accidental birth. She said my father had
forced her to have two abortions. Since she was a compulsive liar I don’t
believe that, but I’ll bet the basis of truth was that she didn’t want a
baby. She was certainly no mother to me when they were married. My father
was more of a father, he took me to ball games. I think he loved me.” He
sought custody of Sondheim, but was refused — he had left his wife for
another woman. “My mother had no time for me, but the minute my father left
she focused on me because she needed someone to beat up.”

Later, Sondheim says, she wanted him to support her. Did he mind? “My
analyst once asked that and I thought, ‘I guess I do.’ She bled me for as
much money as she could. She also stole from me.” Once, when she was about
to have surgery, she sent Sondheim a letter saying that her one regret was
giving birth to him. Was there any reconciliation before she died? “No. She
was in a nursing home the last few years. I went a couple of times a year.”

He saw his first musical at 9, but cinema was Sondheim’s first obsession.
Aged 10, he became friends with Jamie Hammerstein, son of Oscar, the
composer who became Sondheim’s “surrogate father” and mentor. “Everyone
forgets Oscar was an experimental playwright. Everyone forgets that Oklahoma
was experimental. It didn’t sell out on opening night. West Side Story was
experimental, but if it had been a disaster I’m not sure I wouldn’t have
slipped back into something comfortable.”

He was drawn to mathematics but studied music because of an inspirational
teacher. “I would have very much liked to have gone into theoretical
mathematics, but music is a mathematical art.” Sondheim’s ambition was to
see his name on a marquee, “as proof of my existence”. This happened with
'West Side Story'. “I saw it, thought ‘Oh my God’, then ‘Now what?’ ”

Some of his musicals, particularly 'Sunday in the Park with George', and his
books are about artistic creation, distilling order from chaos. “I have
German blood in me. I like order. I tend to be a conservative artist, then I
instinctively go for something outré and pull back. My collaborators push me
towards the experimental.”

What pierces in a Sondheim musical are lines such as in Losing My Mind:
“Sometimes I stand/ In the middle of the floor,/ Not going left,/ Not going
right”. He lethally zeroes in on moments. Arthur Laurents, “a serious
playwright with a capital P”, and Hammerstein told him to “be specific, not
general. Oscar said to write things as I saw them. When I took him my first
musical he said, ‘You’re imitating me. Have the courage to be yourself.’
That was a good thing to tell a 15-year-old. It was the seed he planted,
which flowered, then covered my life.”

Sondheim came out in his forties, but he didn’t agonise about being gay. “In
my generation people didn’t talk about it. The awareness wasn’t there and I
was a late bloomer sexually.” He hasn’t formed many relationships and says:
“I didn’t fall in love till I was 60. I’ve always enjoyed solitude. It is
received wisdom to want somebody or want to be with somebody, but I didn’t
until I met Peter [Jones, a dramatist], and if I hadn’t met him I would have
gone on perfectly fine.” He and Jones were together for ten years, now Jones
works with him. “We are very close friends. He is very happy with his
partner,” says Sondheim, who is also happy with his partner, Jeff Romley,
33. “I would miss it [love] if it wasn’t there,” he says. “But I don’t
imagine what life would have been like had I been with someone in my
twenties. There wasn’t that yearning.”

He doesn’t like ageing. “I feel superannuated. Obviously, I think about my
mortality, particularly when your friends are dying — all my collaborators
on 'West Side Story' and 'Gypsy' are dead. I’m the only one left.” He has
arthritis, “or it might be tendonitis”, in his right thumb: “There are some
days when it’s hard to write my signature.” He has “the usual lower back
problems so walking isn’t a pleasure”, and a cataract in his right eye, “but
it’s not bad enough to get operated on”.

On he writes; the challenge is to keep the work fresh. “It’s a very thin,
maybe invisible, line between your style and cliché. If I play my favourite
chord, am I repeating myself or is that who I am?” He avoids such traps “by
picking different subjects”. He could “never” write a rock, hip-hop, pop or
jazz-influenced score. Of the Pet Shop Boys and Liza Minnelli’s version of
Losing My Mind, he says: “It was fine, fun, it didn’t thrill me, didn’t turn
me off. I grew up with movies. Movie music is based on late 19th, early
20th-century music. Start with Brahms and end with Stravinsky — that’s my
period.”

His acclaimed books of lyrics, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat, are
full of autobiographical comments — but will Sondheim write a proper memoir?
“No, I’ve not led an interesting life,” he claims, preposterously. “I grew
up upper-middle class. I found a profession early; [one] I became successful
in. There’s very little struggle.” Yet there is a melancholic thorniness
alongside his warmth. Has he suffered from depression? “My general tenor is
slightly below the medium line.” His father worked from 14 “and always
expected to be bankrupt, no matter how successful he got — it gave him a
slightly depressive air, I inherited that from him”. Sondheim only became
“seriously depressed” once, after recovering from a heart attack in 1979. “I
got home, was starting to recuperate, then one morning thought, ‘I don’t
want to live.’ I guess it was a delayed reaction to the heart attack. The
next day I woke up perfectly fine.”

Sondheim knows that Hammerstein would have been proud of him, because he has
been experimental: “Even if he hated the shows he would have appreciated I
didn’t tread the worn path.” In the UK last year he saw Alecky Blythe and
Adam Cork’s London Road “and felt exhilarated in the first 15 minutes”.
Despite bland Broadway fare, “people are using the musical form to do all
kinds of things and I’m proud that, in this country at least, I am partly
responsible for that”.

He admits to being “entirely nostalgic”, adding: “I would love to live my
life again knowing what I know now. I might enjoy things more fully,
appreciating moments for what they were instead of taking them for granted.”
He recalls having Katharine Hepburn as a “very difficult” neighbour,
complaining about the noise as he sang, composing 'Company'. When her
fireplace belched smoke into his house, she charged him half the repair
bill. One day, in the gardens, he glanced up and saw Hepburn looking out of
a window. “Behind her was the shadow of a man hanging up his trousers. He
came forward and put his arms around her waist. It was Spencer Tracy.”

But, as in his musicals, the nostalgia comes spiked, whimsy briskly
subverted. Eyeing his awards, Sondheim says: “When you get to a certain age
they give you a lot of cut glass. The only awards that mean anything are the
ones that come with cash.”







Updated On: 3/6/12 at 04:07 AM

[alterego]

Posted: 3/6/12 at 6:24am

Can't see him cutting his royalties back in order to get his non commercial musicals produced.

[Phantom of London]

Posted: 3/6/12 at 8:23am

I will defend someone when they are right and slate them when they are wrong. Mr Sondheim wouldn't be complaining if he had a show, that run for 5,000 in both in London and New York.

Anyway Mr Sondheim is all the sudden doing many interviews, I wonder why?
Updated On: 3/6/12 at 08:23 AM

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 3/6/12 at 9:44am

controversial lol
He has a point to an extent, but if thats what people are going to see then that's what producers will give them

[MamasDoin'Fine]

Posted: 3/6/12 at 9:58am

He bloody well knows what he's on about....
Broadway’s most talked-about success, 'The Book of Mormon' (by the makers of South Park), is a “fun college show”, he says dismissively.

but you pay $150 for college crap!

[Phantom of London]

Posted: 3/6/12 at 1:12pm

Or $477 (£300+) for the top ticket.

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 3/8/12 at 3:49am

I think it's somewhat taken out of context, though I get the opinions on here...

I give Sondheim the benefit of doubt here, particularly as he has a history of being fairly careful not to openly criticize shows and works by his contemporaries (unlike those who are long gone, lol). The article makes a point, as have some bloggers, of Sondheim using the word "crap", but I think he'd be the first to say that Broadway has always had a high level of stuff created (for lack of a better definition) primarily for commercial reasons, or at least with that the main goal. But there did, it seems, use to be amore diversity (and he's spoken about that too--mentioning how now seeing a Broadway show for families is an expensive event, arguably more expensive than spending the day at Disneyland, so they choose one well known show each year or so).

I don't think he meant to really say that Wicked was a bad show (or a good show for that matter)--it was more the thing about Broadway shows being seen by many as an event now. I know Sondheim has spoken about how cheap theatre tickets when he was a kid were actually cheaper than seeing a first run movie. It was much easier for the average, not theatre obsessed, viewer to try out something on a whim, or that they hadn't heard about for three years previous. Maybe I'm merely placing my feelings here--since I do like a lot of very commercial musicals in their way as much (or almost as much) as the more experimental or, cough, "artistic" pieces, but... I also think this ties into what he's said about the lack of successful non musical plays on Broadway, more anbd more.