Stephen Sondheim was taken from us in late 2021, but since his posthumous cameo in Glass Onion, the wildly uneven follow-up to Knives Out, I started to think about Sondheim’s brush with the film industry—specifically the way his musicals became mangled and distorted on the big screen.
While the film versions of Into the Woods and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street have their fans, I mainly look back at Sondheim movies as a series of disappointments, though that was also mostly true of his stage career until the end of his life, when people showered him with praise despite his producing no musicals after 1994, save the ill-conceived Road Show.
As for movie musicals, Sondheim believed only ones written for the screen were truly successful. In a way, he was right. My Fair Lady is a remarkable movie, but it never hides the fact that it’s a stage property whereas Singin’ in the Rain has nothing to hide (and never gets accused of being “stagy”). Sadly, Sondheim never wrote an original musical for the screen, though he attempted one with Rob Reiner and William Goldman, but we have four full adaptations of them as well as a potpourri of other movies touched by Sondheim’s unique stamp.
Only Lyrics
Sondheim’s career never fully recovered from the fact that he began as a lyricist. There are still people, though fewer now, who believe he was a great lyricist and never developed as a composer. This is not true, but the rumor persists among those who felt the man wrote “cold” shows. However, since his lyrics are the best ever written for the theatre, it’s not the worst reputation to have. Of course he wanted to be respected as a composer, but from the late ‘50s til the mid ‘60s, he was known as a wordsmith.
His film career began with Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ adaptation of West Side Story (1961), one of the best movie musicals of all time. Part of its success was how it broke from the mold of the original libretto. The makers of the 2021 remake went back to Arthur Laurents’ original book and found themselves with an overlong and ultimately uninvolving version, save two good performances (Ariana DeBose and Mike Faist).
West Side Story is the most successful film adaptation of Sondheim material (because it is the best film), though Sondheim’s contributions are less than the sum of its other parts. Between Bernstein’s maximalist score and Laurents’ skillful adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, Sondheim’s lyrics come off as purple and naïve. Much of it embarrassed him until his demise.
Gypsy, another Laurents collaboration with a score by Jule Styne, is (except for Fiddler on the Roof) the last great musical of the Golden Age of Broadway. Everything about it is perfect except its 1962 film version, which miscast the blasé Rosalind Russell in the King Lear of roles for musical actresses. Though Natalie Wood was game for her transition into Gypsy Rose Lee, the movie’s shabby production and glacial pace take a lot of the punch out of Gypsy.
Oddly enough, the musical was remade for television with the opposite result. The 1993 version, directed by Academy Award-winner Emile Ardolino and starring Bette Midler, hits every note right. In this case, the medium was better suited to the material. Somehow producing it on the box that killed vaudeville rather than on the big screen worked better.
Primrose Path
It is no surprise that Sondeim’s one big hit stage musical would have a film version. The affable A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is still the longest run Sondheim had as sole composer on Broadway. After its Broadway run, Richard Lester was hired to make a film version. Lester, the director of A Hard Day’s Night, threw in everything but the kitchen sink resulting in a madcap romp where tastelessness of one kind and tastlessness of another collided in a way one can only describe as tasteless. On the positive side, there is the charm of seeing so many big stars of a far-gone age on screen: Zero Mostel (in the part he originated), Phil Silvers (who turned down the stage role because he couldn't wear his trademark glasses), the silent master Buster Keaton, the always funny Jack Gilford, and an early performance from The Phantom of the Opera's Michael Crawford as Hero.
As for the negative: Sondheim’s score for Forum was unique for going backwards in direction from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s scores. The songs were meant to be breathers in between the farcical book scenes rather than songs that arose from a dramatic situation. Any director worth his/her salt knew you could cut any of the songs—really all of them—and a film version would work. Therefore, Sondheim’s score is cut to the bones, leaving only “Comedy Tonight,” “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” “Bring Me My Bride,” plus “Lovely” and its reprise. Lester even had the gall to hire a different composer, Ken Thorne, to score incidental music, though I’d be lying if I said some of that music wasn’t fun in its own way.
While Sondheim never wrote an original musical for film, he did write one for television during this same period. The one-act piece Evening Primrose (with a book by James Goldman, adapted from a fantasy story by John Collier) was produced on ABC’s Stage 67 omnibus program the same year Forum was released. While the only copy is in black-and-white, it is commercially available and has some of the first music Sondheim wrote that you cannot mistake for another composer.
Night Follies
The 1970s saw Sondheim’s most fertile period in the musicals he created with director Harold Prince. The decade began with the prototypical concept musical Company and ended with Sweeney Todd, the pick for some as Sondheim’s magnum opus (I disagree, but I have to fight for my point of view).
Perhaps the greatest director who ever worked on a film involving Sondheim was D. A. Pennebaker, the documentarian who captured the cast album recording session for Company as the pilot for a television series which was never made.
Original Cast Album: Company has become, like Waiting for Guffman, an indispensable DVD in the collection of theatre enthusiasts. Though it only captures snippets and moments of the original performances of the late Dean Jones, Elaine Stritch, and Charles Kimbrough, it is also a terrific example of cinema verité as it immerses you in a hotbox for a very long recording session that produced, inestimably, one of the greatest cast albums of all time.
While the Prince-Sondheim musicals were not great fodder for film adaptations, there was considerable interest in preserving them on tape. Pacific Overtures became the first Broadway musical to be televised in Japan and bootlegs of the VHS have been passed around afficionados for years. Like the early-80s recording of George Hearns’ Sweeney, it has become a priceless collectible, though never commercially available. Say what you will about Pacific Overtures’ value as art (and don't say it to my face if it's negative), it was clearly the show where Sondheim and Prince, together and separately, did their most audacious work—work they probably knew would go less appreciated.
It should be noted the Prince-Sondheim musicals were almost all financial failures—only one, the original version of Merrily We Roll Along—was an artistic failure and when Prince was no longer involved in the revivals, it has ceased to even be that and has become, in Sondheim terms, a "hit."
However, they did have one boffo hit—A Little Night Music. Their previous show, Follies, lost its entire investment and Prince needed an injection of cash. His notion was for Sondheim to write something rueful and sweet, but pleasant. Of course, A Little Night Music is a lot more than that. In its darker moments, it’s even caustic, repressive, and a little erudite in a way that makes you want to kick its teeth in. But overall, it is funny, and every lover gets their respective partner, so that usually spells h-i-t.
Onstage, it had a respectable run on Broadway and in the West End and, since it was technically an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, Prince went to Sondheim suggesting it be turned into a film. Sondheim said no and was right, but Prince won out, resetting the piece from Sweden to Austria and acquiring funding mostly from West Germany.
Prince had previously only directed one film, Something for Everyone, which was not for anyone, and the sheer brilliance of his stage pictures are reduced on screen to TV-of-the-week closeups, bizarre angles, ugly color palettes, and shocking lifelessness in his actors.
Watching the film version of A Little Night Music is like watching a robust Collie get sick and die. If you know the stage show, it can only disappoint. For those who don’t, they know they’re watching the musical version of The Room.
I’ll give a brief example. In one scene, Charlotte (played by Diana Rigg) is singing a section of “Every Day Little Death” and her carriage shakes when it runs through a pothole. She interrupts her sung thought and sings, “Mind the road!” I would guess this is Sondheim’s worst lyric, but I haven’t forgotten/forgiven “I Feel Pretty.”
Elizabeth Taylor plays Desireé Armfeldt. Unfortunately, her performance has inspired drinking games associated the film—for example, one is to take a shot every time she appears to fluctuate back and forth in weight during any given scene. While this is cruel, the truth is her career had been in decline since 1968 with increasingly erratic performances and she was clearly too nervous to play the lead in a musical. Desireé, the dynamo who likes schnapps, seems more like she’s dozing on Ambien.
With the advent of Sondheim switching collaborators from Prince to James Lapine, the recordings of his stage works became ubiquitous: Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Passion would all be lovingly produced for public television and home video. The 1980s also saw the West Coast tour of Sweeney recorded as well as bits of the 1985 Follies concert. As for film, it would be thirty years ultimately between A Little Night Music and a film of Sweeney Todd.
No Wait, It Can Work
When Tim Burton announced he would be adapting Sweeney Todd, I was most concerned about the casting of Johnny Depp. Most specifically, I worried I would no longer see ugly, middle-aged Sweeneys and would only see skinny, good-looking, mumbling emo-goth-teens playing the part. But even if I had to put up with that, I hoped Burton would make the story his own.
By making it his own, I think I really wanted him to chop it up, do something disrespectful, have Danny Elfman re-orchestrate it. None of that happened. As it is, the 2007 Sweeney is not opened up, but exists in a claustrophobic, digitally sketched world which exists in a limbo where Burton was not himself and Sondheim’s score was not itself.
Burton would have been better off telling the story straight rather than adapting Sondheim’s version. Like the Rosalind Russell Gypsy, the songs are transposed way too low to accomodate half-singers—bully for them, an ear-grate for us. Helena Bonham-Carter appears on cruise control and, save Alan Rickman, I find more reasons to forget the film every year.
But, ultimately, Sondheim's shows have the same problem as far as being properties for film adaptations. Sondheim’s lyrics only sound right in the theatre, bouncing off walls and into the live audience member’s ear. On film, some of them become pretentious throw-aways. Nowhere can you see this more than in Rob Marshall’s respectful(ly dull) version of Into the Woods from 2014.
This time, unlike Sweeney, it all looked right, but we were mostly assured of things we already knew: Into the Woods has an overcrowded plot (sorry), Meryl Streep is a fine actress and singer (no duh), and Sondheim’s shows don’t work on screen. It is not without its merits for the first half, but the last half is weak and performers who should soar, like Anna Kendrick, remain muted. The first half is not light enough, the second half not dark enough. Sondheim equals complexity and good movie musicals don’t have any.
Conclusions
There have been talks of film versions of Company and Follies for years. Some enterprising director may make something of those, indeed, but they would most likely tell us a lot about the directors and very little of the material Sondheim wrote.
Introspection on film is a great thing. Introspection in theatre is rather different and, when blown up on screen, becomes pretentious. Because Sondheim’s characters are sensitive, literate, intelligent, and feeling in muted ways, they are almost always wrong in another medium.
But maybe all this grumbling goes back to Sondheim’s original point about stage musicals not making good movies. There are some, to be sure, but if you were to write a similar article on the Andrew Lloyd Webber films, it would follow the same trajectory—disappointments, fits and starts, Evita and Cats oh my.
For someone like me who doesn’t live in New York, Sondheim is mostly experienced with headphones. That works because you can concentrate on the music which has layers and depths no other show music has. For now, I’ll stick with cast albums and my old tapes of PBS Sondheim. Those were the media that made me love the man’s work. His films, though I own them, stay on a shelf rarely visited.