Not much scope for the classicist, it would appear, at the BBC promenade concert on 31st July 2010 celebrating the 80th birthday of Stephen Sondheim. To most, Sondheim is a composer of Broadway musicals featuring numbers like “Send in the Clowns”, “Broadway Baby” and “Side by Side by Side”. This view does not take full account of his highly varied output which stretches well beyond the popular stage musical to the Bergman-inspired “A Little Night Music” to the operatic “Sweeney Todd”, the Seurat-based “Sunday in the Park with George” and (for the classicist) versions of Aristophanes and Plautus. Sondheim’s version of Aristophanes’ “The Frogs” is best known for being first performed in the Yale University swimming pool with Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver in the chorus. It is not often performed although a CD exists, but the opening fanfare and “Instructions to the Audience” began the evening at the Proms. Simon Russell Beale and Daniel Evans formed a double act calling on the gods to look down on the actors (in both senses), and in a really Aristophanic way combined religious solemnity with informal addresses to the audience, telling us what not to do (sing along, clap in the wrong place, and so on) and particularly to switch off our mobile phones (not something Aristophanes had to worry about). The breezy dialogue and the deceptively simple music gave an idea of what kind of atmosphere might have been created by an Aristophanes comedy where action, song, dance and dialogue would have combined to give the overall effect, much more than the concentration on the text which some Aristophanic study seems to consist of. I have always thought that Aristophanes’ metrical ingenuity and variations greatly influenced W S Gilbert’s verse in the Savoy operas, and these have always been recognised as influencing the lyrics of American musicals. Is there scope for a study of the “Influence of Greek Comedy on the Broadway Musical”?
Then there is the case of Sondheim and Plautus. “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” is a conflation of several of Plautus’s usual plots involving a young man in love with a slave girl who turns out to be the free born daughter of the absent master who comes back to be told he cannot enter his own house because it is haunted (but really because the young man in inside with his girl-friend). The central figure is the clever slave who eventually sorts out all the misunderstandings and all ends happily. The featured number here was the patter song “Everybody ought to have a maid” delivered by Simon Russell Beale and Daniel Evans with Julian Ovenden and finally the great Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel, who was last seen on the same stage as Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Meistersinger. (The comedy always comes after a long dose of the serious stuff.)
Sondheim draws on many traditions in his work: fairy tale, film, art, horror story as well as the conventions of musical theatre. But these two examples show that he is fully aware of the origins of his craft which stretch back to the stages of Athens and Italy. I think Aristophanes could well have sat in the audience, tapping out the rhythms and enjoying the show, while thinking at the same time how he could write a piece that would send up Stephen Sondheim something rotten.
