‘Fresh Air’ remembers Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim (Part 3)

Today, we’re concluding our multi-day tribute to Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who died last week at the age of 91.

I was visiting as part of a high school theater class from Florida, and “Company” blew me away so completely that it began a lifelong love of musicals in general and Stephen Sondheim in particular.

Stephen Colbert interviewed Sondheim, too, on TV back in December 2010, when Colbert was still hosting “The Colbert Report.” He emerged from that interview with an unexpected bonus – a role in a “Company” revival by the New York Philharmonic.

And Neil Patrick Harris’ character is the single guy in this, and all of his friends are, like, married couples, and they’re actually all miserable, but they’re trying to convince him he needs to get married.

Why look for answers where none occur? You always are what you always were, which has nothing to do with – all to do with her.

And it has not been, and I love what I do, but to be asked to do this and then to accept the challenge of it, I had to start taking voice lessons again because I can la-di-da my way through a lot of music, and I’ve done so on my show, and – but to sing Sondheim is a completely different beast.

And I looked up from my desk one day, and I saw on the grid a few days ahead of me, it said Stephen Sondheim.

And the canon of Stephen Sondheim is devastatingly beautiful to me, and I was so thrilled to have him on the show, so I did something I never do with my guests.

It was very hard for me ’cause I didn’t want to go in attacking Stephen Sondheim or really even be that ignorant about Stephen Sondheim, which is another sort of tactic on the show.

GROSS: I love that because, like, at the end, you really genuinely tell him how much you like him.

COLBERT: And I love “Sunday In The Park With George.” I saw that when I was just starting theater school.

And then we got a call that Lincoln Center was going to do “Company,” and would I want to play a part in it? And my agent so wisely said, no.

And then a couple of days later, I got a letter from – a hand-typed letter from Stephen Sondheim saying that he – against his instincts, he had a good time on my show and would I consider playing Harry in “Company”? And he ended the letter with the sentence, you have a perfect voice for musical theater.

Lin-Manuel Miranda won the Tony Award for his first Broadway musical, “In The Heights,” which was set in a Latino neighborhood in New York.

GROSS: You got to be in a production of “Merrily We Roll Along,” which is a great Sondheim musical that always needs to be revived because the original Broadway run was so very short.

And the lyricist now has come to think of the composer, instead of just being his friend and collaborator, Franklin Shepard, he thinks of him now as, like, Franklin Shepard, Inc.

Mutter mutter, mutter, mutter, that’s his lawyer, Jerome.

Will you tell him to wait? Will you wire the car? Will you order the coast? Will you send up the bank? And the telephones blink.

But what are some of the things you feel you learned either from talking with Sondheim – because I know he also gave you feedback on “Hamilton” before you actually put it onstage.

I – the first time I met him to work on those translations, he said, what else are you working on? What comes after “In The Heights”? And I said, I think a musical about Alexander Hamilton.

MIRANDA: And that moment kept me nourished for months, you know, when the writing was tough, when I couldn’t figure out how to end those first four lines of “My Shot.” The notion that Sondheim threw up his head and said, that’s a fantastic idea, you know, kept me sane.

Remember Paul, you know, the man I’m going to marry? But I’m not, because I’d never ruin anyone as wonderful as he is.

And the words are so – just kind of, like, dense and funny and rhymey .

There’s so much precedent for the work in both, quote, unquote, “hip-hop” and not in terms of patter for the stage.

It’s about being able to say it in one continuous breath and getting out of the way and choosing words that do not require any extra air or any extra tongue or jaw work.

But I also knew that intuitively because of the hip-hop artists I liked who rapped fast.

BIANCULLI: Lin-Manuel Miranda speaking to Terry Gross in 2017.

A wedding – what’s a wedding? It’s a prehistoric ritual where everybody promises fidelity forever, which is maybe the most horrifying word I ever heard of, which is followed by a honeymoon, where suddenly he’ll realize he’s saddled with a nut and want to kill me, which he should.

Now we hear from one of Sondheim’s most important collaborators, James Lapine, who wrote the books for the musicals “Sunday In The Park With George,” “Into The Woods” and “Passion.” He also directed the original Broadway productions.

GROSS: It’s interesting that the opening song is from the point of view of the Bernadette Peters character, the model who is in the sun, very hot, very uncomfortable in modeling for the genius painter Georges Seurat.

And I think looking back at it – and a lot of writing is unconscious – I think it was a smart move for us to learn about the artist Georges from another point of view and particularly, you know, his mistress, with whom he was, you know, so intimately involved.

There are worse things than staring at the water as you’re posing for a picture being painted by your lover in the middle of the summer on an island in the river on a Sunday.

And now he has a new book called “Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim And I Created “Sunday In The Park With George.” So in what you had written – correct me if I’m wrong here – You had written the words like for her character, a dribble of sweat.

And then he – then I would learn the, you know, the genius that goes behind setting words to music and rhyming and all the intricacies that go in into creating a song.

Why do you like this one best? And would she say this, would she say that? And it was really, looking back at it, a process where he was really trying to get into my head to sort out who these characters were so that he could know them intimately before he could write anything for them.

But what people don’t realize in the way Steve works is – and why he didn’t write a song until the first act was finished is because he melds the two.

LAPINE: I would say “Finishing The Hat” is a perfect example of that, of a song that comes at a perfect place in the act, that lets an audience see this kind of cold, distant character and allows us to understand what he’s going through and what his process is and who he is and the pain he feels.

GROSS: And part of what this song is about is how difficult it is to create a work of art.

LAPINE: …Corny city.

Mapping out a sky, what you feel like planning a sky – what you feel when voices that come through the window go until they distance and die, until there’s nothing but sky – and how you’re always turning back too late from the grass or the stick or the dog or the light, how the kind of woman willing to wait’s not the kind that you want to find waiting to return you to the night, dizzy from the height.

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR.

GROSS: And now I want to ask you about “Passion.” And to give the shortest version, it’s about a soldier who’s having a passionate affair with a beautiful woman who’s sent to a remote outpost where the cousin of the commander is a very sickly – I mean, she’s very ill woman who is considered very ugly by the other soldiers there.

LAPINE: Well, there’s a song that was the last one that came in, again another kind of beautiful short song that Steve wrote called “Loving You.” And we were having a horrible time in previews.

Loving you is not a choice and not much reason to rejoice, but it gives me purpose, gives me voice to say to the world this is why I live.

LAPINE: You know, I think that show – and I would say this for Steve, too – it somehow struck us on such a deep level that we couldn’t even articulate why.

But it asks a lot of us to question what love is and question, you know, are we just interested in the surface of people and not actually what their heart and brain is? And I could feel married couples questioning themselves about, are we still in love? Is this passion? Is it love? Whatever – it raises a lot of questions for people, this show.

LAPINE: I’m very lucky.

His recent book about working with Sondheim is called “Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim And I Created ‘Sunday In The Park With George.'” Coming up, we conclude our multi-day Sondheim salute by visiting with his frequent musical director Paul Gemignani.

Paul Gemignani began working with Stephen Sondheim as his music director in 1973 on such musicals as “A Little Night Music,” “Sweeney Todd,” “Sunday In The Park With George” and “Passion.” Terry Gross spoke with Paul Gemignani in 2001, when he was given a Tony Award for lifetime achievement.

He trod a path that few have trod did Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street.

The thing that popped into my mind is those old English factory movies, Dirk Bogarde movies where he’s in a blue-collar section of somewhere in Britain.

And we finally found this actual factory whistle, and we hooked it up to a CO2 canister, and that’s how we operated it.

GEMIGNANI: I have to say “Sunday In The Park.” I have to say when when Mandy and Bernadette sing “We Do Not Belong Together.” That’s a moment that popped into my mind when you asked me that question.

I’m just saying that I feel kind of greedy at this point because I’ve had such great experience and great times in the past and had an opportunity to do so much artistically because of those two guys.

You could tell me not to go.

PATINKIN: You will not accept who I am.

What made it so right together is what made it all wrong.

But finally, Sweeney’s reunited with his razors, and he’s going to use them not only to be a barber, but to take his revenge.

GEMIGNANI: Well, the beauty of the music and the irony of the idea, it gives you something to perform.

You’ve been locked out of sight all these years like me, my friend.

BIANCULLI: And that concludes our salute to Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who died last week at age 91.

On Monday’s show, Kieran Culkin, one of the stars of the HBO series “Succession.” It’s a comedy embedded in a drama about corporate, political and personal wealth and power.

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