60 minutes rewind if you don't know the name steven sondheim you know his words and music
sondheim once said that if he hadn't become a broadway writer and composer he would have been
a teacher in a sense he's managed to do both his songs have taught us all something about growing
up getting hurt settling in growing old songs that make you wonder what it must be like to do
what stephen sondheim can do that first moment you know the first the first flush the uh the falling
in love and then you gotta let it cook and see if you're still in love in the morning because
it's a form of showing off it's a but it's also a form of sharing you want to say
hey i caught this moment with people but it's a wonderful feeling it's a wonderful
feeling it's what everybody who writes or paints or composes feels or else they want
to go along with it if you didn't get those moments you couldn't put up with with the
rest of it the loneliness add the tedium and the endless amounts of work you know the sweat
sweat but produce the lyrics for gypsy
funny thing happened on the way to the forum something for everyone everyone our comedy tonight
he's the reigning heavyweight champion of american musical theater don't expect steven sondheim to
give you songs about the moon in june he writes about disappointment ambivalence bittersweet joy
in short songs about the way people really feel
sondheim has been writing on the nerve ending since he was a teenager
his parents divorced he was lonely and spent a lot of time with his next-door neighbor
even asking advice on an original high school show nice when the man next door is oscar hammerstein
i had said to him please treat this as if it just crossed you i was 15 years old as if it
just crossed your desk and pretend i don't know you and i said all right in that case i have to
say it's the worst thing that's ever crossed my desk it's the worst thing i've ever seen it's most
unproducible it makes no sense and i was stunned because i was sure he was going to say well look
with a few changes ticking i would like to produce this next fall and i'd be the first 15 year old
to have a show on broadway he really did say the worst thing i ever wrote worst sounds cruel
and he was not cruel that way but he made it very clear that if i were going to ask for professional
standards he was going to treat me like a professional and he was going to show me this
was inept from the first stage direction do you find yourself paying tribute to him in your lyrics
sometimes do you no i'm a city boy and oscar billy was a city boy wrote a lot of bucolic images and
he did talk about larks learning to pray and whether and he said i believe these you don't
and when i hear your lyrics i know that's not what you feel he said right the way you feel
don't write the way i feel and then he said the key thing he said if you do that
you'll be 90 ahead of the game and 90 ahead of everybody else and as soon as you put it
on a competitive level i thought oh oh i get to be better than everybody else if i write like myself
so i did right from that from that moment hey i'm the brave dollar cannot deploy
so what does a city boy write about in west side story a street kid mocks those bleeding
heart excuses for his delinquent behavior my daddy beats my mommy my mommy clobbers me
my grandpa is a commie my grandma pushes tea my sister wears a mustache my brother wears a dress
goodness gracious that's why i'm a mess
in the musical follies a sondheim character sings a twisted anthem to a dead marriage
from those injured eyes leave the quips with a sting jokes with a sneer passionless lovemaking
once a year leave the lies in a little night music a maid celebrates promiscuity
i'm trying to imagine what it is to be able to sit down and write it's a very short road from the
pinch and the punch to the punch and the pouch and the pension does it make you laugh yeah once i got
the idea of that song well it's true of all the songs i write particularly when they're uh very
verbal songs you make lists is what you do and you start getting into the character it's always
about getting into the character and you start to make lists of what she would talk about and you
suddenly find that certain words either if they don't rhyme with each other relate to each other
and things concatenate it's it's very much about serendipity it's a very much oh i didn't think
pinch punch pension once you get the idea of let's say jowls and you think of pouch say wait
a minute those you know that maybe we can make something out of the similarity of those sounds
so then you think all right let's go to the thesaurus and look up all the words
that begin with p and have a ch sound in them go to the thesaurus the thesaurus i have the most
well-formed thesaurus and rhyming dictionary oh this whole thing this mystique about not using
reference books is nonsense why should you have to sit there for five days and try to think of all
the words that begin with p that have a ch well you've got a nice book that gives you all words
i guess i'll live oh come on this is really nice occurred to you before this no i have to
tell you it didn't my goodness i was sure you sat there and they tumbled out oh my goodness
no i was imagining you you imagine that kind of encyclopedic mind you'd have to have to know all
the work you know rhymes trick rhymes you have to think up yourself but to rhyme bay do you know how
many rhymes there are for that how many dozens of words you can't think them all up yourself
and that's and looking down the list will give you ideas tell me what happens at the moment
when you have the words that go with the music that go with the emotion what is that like oh
the answer will disappoint you all it does make me want to call my collaborator and say i got it you
got to come over here the song wait you hear what i've done when you hear what i've done i got it
it's my best friend he got it all right and the critical acclaim that goes with it
he's won five tony awards and the winner is
older and older not that sondheim suits everyone's taste sometimes the audiences show up sometimes
they don't sometimes he startles them with musicals that don't bother to have a story at all
like company and follies which are more like musical essays about love and marriage and
fading dreams and then there are plays with stories no one else would touch
even a horror musical called sweeney todd at last my arm is complete again
what's the process for you the emotional process for you as a play gets headed toward broadway
oh i get terrified because for me the fun is the writing once it gets into rehearsal i just want to
go away most people look forward to the rehearsal process i feel just the reverse i start to feel
embarrassed frightened that that's where i start to think oh people will hate this oh my goodness
they won't think that song's funny and the actors will think oh god we gotta sing this
terrible song but we gotta earn a living i get that's where i get really neurotic
slightly different
i just think there are too many notes in this
we followed him to london where he was worrying over the london production of follies
which is two bars less now first of all did you put those left passes in
because i didn't put them in uh anyway you're gonna run this uh this part of it at the end of
the afternoon or something because what i'll do is i'll work on some music and then see
how it feels okay okay once more house lights are out
if sometime lyrics are complicated sometimes so is sondheim music
not always a tune you hear once and sing one more time but now with confidence because the
with you is is really the climax of the phrase don't drop your voice at the end of it obviously
room might be filled with you that's the you is the
is the climactic word and so don't drop your voice on it but push up one more time too many mornings
the story will continue after this
you is the worst word in the english language humble oh no uh that the whole thing about
homobility has to do with familiarity uh well but there are songs that you do leave
the theater humming only if you've heard something very similar before which is most
most of the time they say the tune is vaguely familiar or it's been played a
lot during the evening music is very difficult to take in on the first hearing unless it's
the familiar is wide and bright it's exactly like prose writing or any kind of writing
it's express the emotion and express the character
i've often used the image that you know if you ask me to write a love song i don't know what
to write but you say now write me a love song about a girl who's just been jilted by a guy and
she comes into a bar and she's in a red dress and she orders a grasshopper that i can write
because you've started to characterize and give me specifics to write about now i know there's
a drink to write about there's a bar to write about there's a dress to write about why did
she choose that dress who was the guy who jilled her but say write me a torch song well what kind
of torso do you want you know how about a torch song for a middle-aged woman who realizes too late
that her old love is the real one the song is from a little night music it's sung by glennis johns
the whole song is composed of those hesitations and then coming back and
it's like almost like a hesitation walls
the whole point of using words like rich is to make the word short so it doesn't sound
like the singer has to sustain and can't the word itself cuts off as opposed to
isn't it blue which you'd wonder why she doesn't go isn't it blue but glennis was short breath so i
try to pick words that would cut themselves off and also because the character is afraid
to go forward and so she would pull back all the time so it made it active for her
but the song comes out of the character in the act and the actress i would not have
written the same song it wasn't glinis and where are the clowns there or to be clowns
well maybe next year
now sondheim who has written so much about middle age has a new musical on broadway into the woods
this time the characters from the fairy tales teach about the responsibilities
parents have to their children and children to the future but as always with sondheim
the lyrics are so flashy and funny you don't stop to think about the meaning until later
take the rap about zapping vegetables sung by bernadette peters a tangle of tongue twisters even
the author has trouble getting it right but remind me you too it's what raiding my arugula what
uh writing this video ripping up the ramping and reading my arugula
into the reverse it's uh oh because it's ready my arugula ripping up the rampion um
you can't just take it did anybody here sing or write this lyric i mean could we have somebody
here you're taking the middle of the lyric you gotta go back to the beginning of the whole r
sequence uh he was robbing me raping me rooting through my rutabaga raiding my arrow and ripping
up the ramp he and my champion my paper but i should have laid a spell on him right there
put a ladder spell on him pause right there because that's why she needs her breath give
me a phrase from into the woods that you think is quintessential sondheim which feels when you
sing it more song time than anything it's a song no one is alone and he says careful and i went
that steve i hear steve saying it i used to use voice saying that careful careful no one is alone
people make mistakes fathers mothers people make mistakes the show is about parents and children
did you want them children yeah i'm sorry i didn't have any yeah it's it's uh it's it's uh i am
but art is the other way of having children teaching i believe that very firmly
side my sidelines