Answering The Sondheim Challenge
By Heidi Waleson
Aug. 21, 2002 12:01 am ET
Could Stephen Sondheim be our modern Mozart? In the second trio of musicals of the Kennedy Center's revelatory "Sondheim Celebration," seen on an August weekend, themes of darkness and light, tragedy and comedy, are twisted together, and songs burst out when speech will no longer serve. Nothing is obvious. The audience leaves the theater disturbed and moved, a more complex result than the easy uplift of the ordinary happy ending.
All three shows deal unconventionally with the theme of seduction. In "Passion" (1994), a sick, ugly woman seduces a handsome young captain away from his voluptuous mistress by the sheer strength of her desire for him. In "Merrily We Roll Along" (1981, revised 1985), a talented composer is seduced into prostituting his gifts for fame and money. Only in "A Little Night Music" (1973) is the central self-seduction -- middle-aged Fredrik Egerman's delusional bid to recover his youth by marrying a young girl -- thwarted by a gentle process of natural selection.
The Kennedy Center "Merrily," directed by Christopher Ashley and conducted by Eric Stern, does the best job of capturing the show's essence, a rueful chronicle of wrong turns that tries to answer the question "How did you get to be here?" "Merrily" scrolls backward, beginning in 1976 with the composer Frank Shepard (Michael Hayden) discontented and confused as a successful movie producer and ending with his starry-eyed start 20 years earlier. Though much debated, this reverse trajectory gives the songs more punch, infusing the bright optimism of those at the end of the show with the sad knowledge of how everything turned out. One of the saddest is "Not a Day Goes By," sung bitterly by Frank's wife Beth (Anastasia Barzee) as they divorce in Act I, and blissfully as they marry in Act II.
As is the case with Mr. Sondheim's "Company," the people around Frank are more strongly drawn than he is, and they were powerfully cast here. Raul Esparza, so poignant as George in Kennedy Center's "Sunday in the Park," brings an entirely different range of sarcasm and disappointment to Frank's friend and lyricist Charley, abandoned along with Frank's composing. Emily Skinner is lush and larger than life as Gussie, Frank's leading lady and second wife, the devouring demon who tempts him into fame, and Adam Heller is brilliantly Mephistophelean as the producer Joe, who does the same.