Sondheim and Weidman’s unintended trilogy

In November 2023, Pacific Overtures opened at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a ‘comparatively pocket-sized’ South London theatre famous for producing musicals.1 While serving as a tribute to Stephen Sondheim who had died three months earlier, the revival of his 1976 play had been planned for a long time: the intention – as the theatre announced – was to complete ‘the Menier’s trilogy’ of Sondheim’s collaborations with John Weidman. Their three plays had been staged there in reverse order of their writing: Road Show (2008) ran in 2011, followed in 2015 by Assassins (1990), and rounded off by Pacific Overtures (Figure 1). In each case, Weidman wrote the libretto, and Sondheim the songs. But this essay does not simply draw attention to their shared authorship; rather it takes its cue from ‘a playwright friend’ of Weidman’s who pointed out that they had, however unintentionally, created a trilogy about the United States: ‘its aggressive tendencies, its culture of disenfranchisement ... its pioneering inventiveness and economic fecklessness.’2 The three shows were written over the course of more than thirty years, and the collaborative experience was very different in each case. Pacific Overtures developed out of a play that Weidman wrote in 1972 while a law student at Yale. He had realised that he didn’t want to be an attorney and thought he might try writing. His father, Jerome Weidman, was the author of many novels, most famously the Runyonesque I Can Get It For You Wholesale (1937), the 1962 musical adaptation of which launched the career of nineteen-year-old Barbra Streisand. He also co-wrote Fiorello! (1960), a Pulitzer-winning musical about New York City Mayor La Guardia. John too wanted to pursue political themes. As the war in Vietnam escalated, he had been an undergraduate at Harvard majoring in modern Japanese history. The story of Commodore Perry’s diplomatic expedition to Japan in 1853 seemed a good subject for a play, not least because of its resonances for America’s latest incursion into the region.3 He pitched the idea to the producer Hal Prince, who offered him $500 to write a draft.4 Weidman went back to law school and, as Nixon bombed Cambodia, completed a ‘naturalist ... historical drama’.5 Prince liked it and started working on the production, even to the point of casting, but eventually decided that it needed ‘a kind of epic theatre expansion’. That ‘meant music’, and music meant the man he’d recently worked with on Company (1970), Follies (1971) and A Little Night Music (1973): Stephen Sondheim.6 Company is often referred to as the archetypal ‘concept musical’ because of its rejection of a linear story (a ‘book’) in favour of vignettes grouped around a particular theme – in its case, marriage.7 But with Pacific Overtures, the concept musical reached a kind of apotheosis. While it was mainly chronological in structure, the show was hardly about characters at all; every aspect of the production was there to serve the story of ‘the clash of two cultures’.8 Most strikingly, and in deliberate contrast to mid-century shows like South Pacific (1949) and The King and I (1951), it presents that clash from the point of view of the Japanese, or rather, as Sondheim put it, from the point of view of ‘a mythical Japanese playwright ... who has come to New York, seen a couple of Broadway shows, and then goes back home and writes a musical about Commodore Perry’s visit to Japan.’ In fact, the reverse is what happened – Sondheim and Price visited Japan for a ‘two-week crash course’ in its theatrical traditions.9 Pacific Overtures was intended as a big Broadway show, a commercial rival to Hello, Dolly! which was ‘playing down the street’.10 But the reviews were ‘brutal’ - the consensus being that it was a ‘pretty bore’ - and the show closed after just five months, losing its entire investment.11 There were several revivals during the 1980s, but Sondheim worried that watching it ‘still felt like an assignment’.12 More disturbing, given the fact that the show featured a wholly Asian-American cast, were the accusations of ‘Japonaiserie’.13 These persisted even after 2000 when the Japanese director Amon Miyamoto mounted a much revised production at the New National Theatre in Tokyo, which later transferred to New York, first in Japanese and then in English.14 But the production that Sondheim and Weidman finally liked best was the 90-minute off-Broadway ‘chamber’ version directed by the Scottish director John Doyle in 2017.15 Since then, Pacific Overtures has continued to cross the ocean in ‘both directions’.16 In the spring of 2023, Doyle’s pared-down script formed the basis of a Umeda Arts Theater revival in Tokyo and Osaka; at the end of the year, it transferred to the Menier. If the development of Pacific Overtures was a ‘three-cornered’ affair, with many of the key ideas coming from Prince, Assassins emerged from a prolonged dialogue between librettist and songwriter Weidman had approached Sondheim with an idea for a musical about Woodrow Wilson and the 1919-1920 Paris Peace Conference (another historical moment pivoting around a diplomatic treaty).17 But Sondheim was not convinced. Instead, ‘in the middle of one of our idea-bouncing sessions about political subjects (John’s favourite kind)’, he suggested something a little different.18 Sondheim had read a piece called Assassins while judging a young playwrights’ competition at Stuart Ostrow’s Musical Theater Lab. While not particularly interested in the central story – about ‘a disillusioned Vietnam veteran who, urged on by a mysterious and symbolic figure called the Fat Man, becomes a presidential assassin’ – Sondheim loved the title, the inclusion of snippets from real journals and letters, and the opening scene set in a shooting gallery where patrons are urged to ‘SHOOT THE PREZ AND WIN A PRIZE’.19 Weidman agreed that it was ‘a terrific notion”.20 And so once they had negotiated a deal with the author, Charles Gilbert, Jr., for the title and premise, they were off. The play evolved slowly; Weidman and Sondheim talked about it for months, gradually figuring out the overall structure, which historical figures to include, and what each scene and song would be about. Both oftenspoke of how much they enjoyed the process of composition as well as the end result. Sondheim described it as the ‘show that came closest to [his] expectations for it’ – that is, close to ‘perfect’ – while for Weidman, it was ‘the best collaboration’ and ‘the most satisfying writing experience’ he had ever had, but also ‘the best thing’ he’d ‘ever written’.21 Like the original play, Assassins opens in a fairground shooting gallery whose Proprietor coaxes passersby with the shocking lyric: ‘feeling blue?/Don’t know what to do?....C’mere and kill a President’.22 As he hands out guns to the ‘gang’ of would-be assassins – four of the nine would be successful23 – he reminds them that living in a ‘free country’ means ‘your dreams can come true’, you can win the ‘prize’. The scene ends with the sound of an offstage shot: their ‘Pioneer’, John Wilkes Booth, has scored a direct hit on Abraham Lincoln. The show then moves through the assassins, although not in chronological order. On the advice of George Lapine, Weidman and Sondheim kept Lee Harvey Oswald for last. This climax – ‘the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century’, in Don DeLillo’s phrase – puts paid to the idea that the show was simply a series of vignettes: Sondheim later described it as a ‘book musical masquerading as a revue’.24 In the final scene, which strikingly doesn’t include any singing, Oswald has gone to the Dallas Book Repository to kill himself, but then the gang arrives and persuades him that by killing Kennedy, he will join their ‘family’.25 The original production of Assassins opened in December 1990 and quickly sold out, but plans to transfer to Broadway were abandoned when, just weeks later, the US government launched Operation Desert Storm. In the resulting surge of patriotic fervour, some reviewers complained that the show was ‘in extremely bad taste’.26 Another production was about to hold auditions in September 2001, just hours before the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. All concerned agreed that it was best to cancel, not least because the show contained a line in which Samuel Byck threatens to ‘drop a 747 on the White House and incinerate Dick Nixon’.27 Assassins seemed doomed, and some wondered if there would ever be ‘an entirely right time’ to produce it.28 But in 2004, with another President Bush in charge of another Gulf war, the show made it to Broadway and won a Tony. The genesis of Road Show was different again: the culmination of a project that Sondheim had been pondering for half a century. The idea was first sparked by a series of articles by Alva Johnson which told the story of two ‘legendary’ brothers, Addison and Wilson Mizner.29 Addison was an architect whose Spanish Revival properties came to define Palm Beach in the 1920s and who tried to turn the tiny farming town of Boca Raton into ‘The First Tailor-Made City in All the World’ created for ‘men of large affairs’.30 (The publicist’s mantra was ‘get the big snobs, and the little snobs will follow.’31) His brother Wilson had a variety of careers (playwright, boxing manager, wit, man about town) all of which, as he boasted, ‘sparkled with larceny’.32 Sondheim described them as ‘the two sides of America – the destroyer and the builder ... They’re just stuck with each other’.33 Convinced of the theatrical potential of the brothers’ story, Sondheim had got as far as producing ‘a detailed scheme of scenes and numbers’, including the use of Wilson as balladeer (a device later used in Assassins), when he found out that the book rights had been sold, and that a script, entitled Sentimental Guy, was being prepared for Irving Berlin (a friend and associate of Addison’s).34 Sondheim ‘gloomed heavily’ for a while and then moved on.35 But the Berlin show never got made, and the prospect of producing his own version stayed with Sondheim as ‘a sporadic, if mild, obsession – more like an ache than a fever’.36 It wasn’t until 1993 that he raised the subject with Weidman (who again was pitching for his own long-cherished ‘show about the League of Nations’.37) This wasn’t the way that Sondheim usually worked: apart from Sweeney Todd, Road Show and Assassins were the only two shows that he himself initiated.38 Persuaded that the brothers’ story opened a door to the ‘zeitgeist of the period’, Sondheim started to think of it as his Citizen Kane – not in tone (both he and Weidman were committed to brisk comedy) but in scope: ‘fifty years of an aspect of the United States’.39 The show’s production, four iterations over fourteen years, was equally epic. Each version had ‘a distinct personality’ and emphasis, which Sondheim felt was reflected in their changing titles: ‘Wise Guys (opportunity vs opportunism); Gold! (greed vs morality); Bounce (resilience and reinvention); and Road Show (finding your destiny).’40 The first version, Wise Guys, had a couple of readings for invited friends before being tested out in a ‘highly exclusive, yet highly publicized “workshop”’ in 1999.41 Under Sam Mendes’s direction, Weidman and Sondheim revised the piece so heavily that it became, in Sondheim’s phrase, ‘very lugubrious ... Serious with a capital S’. Unhappy with this, the two writers then turned to Hal Prince who encouraged them to ‘restore some of the comic bounce’ (even if that meant losing ‘some of its epic quality’).42 Legal issues delayed production until 2003 when, briefly renamed Gold! and then Bounce, it had short runs in Chicago and Washington. Audiences were ‘cool’.43 But Weidman and Sondheim persisted, finally turning to John Doyle. Doyle ‘reconceptualized’ the play yet again, this time as Road Show, bringing out its ‘speedy, impatient, determined, brash and humorous qualities’ but also making it darker and more cynical.44 Nothing signalled the shift in mood more than the decision to drop the opening number, ‘Bounce’, for a new This time of the was The had for while the show was in making it Doyle more Sondheim and Weidman found the production the play they had so long to was and more than so too was their American the phrase Weidman is to the of or complete has different For a it the and most of one of a trilogy On the was simply a into and so but he was through and the of his to it as a The very fact of there being three than two or In three is the that the the middle and the the number, that is, of The of this idea for the of in and and it can be felt even as the years, in and goes so far as to trilogy as ‘the most of in the of epic and commercial for and the trilogy a for turning into it to modern the and are As a trilogy usually means the plays in over three as well as during a which and while the is that theatre will all three shows, only a ever the time and is another way in which theatrical from their or whose are over several years, the and to be A in is of by and which ran during the of at in and on The that it was equally to one as a experience or the between two or three of the the trilogy particular and into of The which the of three in a of is often read as a while the very title of and of the that to the of two and then a dialogue between two can about the of the It then that of was first at National whose at least in is to be a for The National was also the for a trilogy by around key - the law and (The of - and adaptation of The although that the of a different In three The of the from when in the United to when the as the title to the so their becomes the means to a story of US While scene is the trilogy is not simply linear in Each of the three a scene entitled and the story of the of the of from a to three to just three a point about the of the and the The they the more there is to the end of the to the and the moment when first of It was an that some who that more attention been paid to the of whose the had and The are not like The in the that there is of or chronological from one to the And yet there are many and between the three Each in the and into some of the and each some aspect of American from a is through the story of than the to White through the story of presidential assassins than and the ‘get story is all about back and and around and finally them the trilogy becomes more than the of its is in the in A Musical to in the but of to the the show to in the As has ‘the of the American musical has been to about This reached a in the with South Pacific and Get as well as as and the end of the offered what as The most famous of is which America’s little in to historical was about the of the of although it of a with Nixon that he tried to two and approached the of in America through the of the who the White House from to the that Sondheim and Weidman wrote is not their in American so much as their on that is, on about whose written and how they are from and Sondheim for this to Weidman, the This was a time when the of as a was The rights in a new on the of while Vietnam and to a of as well as a of The on and also the as White put it, were just a particular of then as the by or be as or even than the of and The thought this was a shocking as his he in of the of the historical a for reviewers of Sondheim and Weidman’s show Assassins in was of the with which historical and But in and was Wise Guys, the show that Road its opening some of the figures who had in Hello, I come with from how And to to you As well as little from just one in you just one a seven a of the If I to would the way That they happened Assassins the of what it at but most in a song that takes the of a with who on the of All to been at a you think that might him and some even of I If to some this song the point made by in a that in another number, that Sondheim to the Sam by a that ‘The been a of from the time of and as well as Kennedy, each was when they the Don to – this the scene in White in which a of for experience by were you when In Sondheim’s the of – a at the the the – the more than their that the President the of that it was a to to an out, but Sondheim and Weidman that it was not only but to the For a it a to the most number, National a of the that ‘the that the the assassins the Weidman they had a in a book that Weidman that of political is in fact ‘a of a highly that to define its in of the of a The a particular in Road Show, as an scene on his He his of ‘the and them to on and not or in the just for the the by a brisk For the of the show, Addison and Wilson to figure out what it in the the to them that he’d them to but made ‘a and so the of something something the only in – the between Addison and his For a but just a Addison that he has I want right – the it – The that there is more to be had – more – is in all three show shows by of and Sondheim described Pacific Overtures as Assassins as and Wise Guys as But as he pointed out, is all about and and, although it the of the also the that the show will in Pacific Overtures is at best In Assassins in the and for a of the – the right to be and to their guns they in the show’s final to a from the mid-century that a This kind of is with the and yet not how of him are meant to Most would that and then the a little ... the story – what does most to the of this about the of the is the fact that the line also on the process of making musical the long and story of the show’s in the right Sondheim the line as But even in the first version, Wise Guys, he the Wilson in the and what More the three shows through the of musical rather than American can that each one Sondheim’s with and and and The is even in Pacific Overtures, once that the of is a deliberate of an song in which two friends they to each takes of the fact that several of its were with and or John how he can of while Samuel of a of But the show’s is John Wilkes Booth, an who in the and who, been to by bad one point he a line from of a (1949) – be – but is not a prepared to than is his advice to The closest to a Sondheim is Addison another with a for even thought of his in of or a with a that it has into and been to in the when the of the New has in and the had a very dreams of ‘a of and with Sondheim’s is also about the and between and In the that is political – is to in the of the or to join in the – and Addison in his with and with the to ‘get out of with the of and the all the that to most to Sondheim’s with Weidman. to the of their he simply that they found the not to this as were or during the is a of American at the of is the author of The American Since and as well as and articles on US and themes

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