A lot more Sondheim, a little more dancing - Dance Theater - Stephen - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2002 by Sylviane Gold

STEPHEN SONDHEIM FANS--AND that means most of us who love musical theater--have reason to rejoice this year: 2002 looks like it's going to be a veritable festival of the composer's work. A revival of Into the Woods, the wonderful 1987 musical, whose book by James Lapine turned our favorite fairy tales upside down, arrives this month at the Ahmanson in Los Angeles prior to a Broadway opening in April. In May, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., opens "The Sondheim Celebration," an extraordinary six-shows-in-fifteen-weeks tribute that includes musicals both venerated--A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Company, Sunday in the Park With George--and little-seen--Merrily We Roll Along and Passion, as well as a Japanese production of Pacific Overtures and an adaptation for young people of Into the Woods.

The works listed above, for which Sondheim wrote both words and music, would be enough to secure his reputation as our greatest living theater composer. (Peace, Andrew Lloyd Webber fans--there's a reason Tom Clancy outsells Don DeLillo. And while I will readily confess to preferring Evita to Sweeney Todd, I don't kid myself about why.) Add the scores of Follies, Assassins, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and Sondheim easily takes his place among the all-time greats. Yet there's something missing as you tick off all those titles, and it's this: In only a couple of instances does your brain instantly call up an emblematic dance number.

Think of Oklahoma!--you hear the title song and you see high-jumping cowboys; with West Side Story, you hear "Maria," you see the dance at the gym; even My Fair Lady, as prim and proper as a musical can be, offers up jaunty Cockney hoofing in "Get Me to the Church on Time." Dance is part and parcel of most of the great musicals of the last half-century. But while Sondheim's shows often call up strong visual images--Sweeney Todd raging beside his barber's chair, Georges Seurat freezing his family and friends into the magnificent tableau of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Desiree Armfeldt ruefully assessing her love life with "Send in the Clowns"--those images tend to be stationary. (This trait is shared by the shows of Lloyd Webber, but that's another story.)

The exceptions are Follies and Pacific Overtures, which, though worlds apart in content, share a source in theater form itself. Follies was derived from and is a salute to the elaborate production numbers and vaudeville turns of the Ziegfeld era on Broadway. And Pacific Overtures used the stylized rituals of Japanese theater, the dragon dances and geisha performances, to trace the history of Western influence on Japanese culture. Those shows simply couldn't exist without their dance sequences. In the rest, dance is a minor or nonexistent element. It's odd that Sondheim, who cut his teeth on Broadway writing the lyrics for West Side Story, one of the greatest dance shows ever, has rarely composed a pure dance number for a show. And even with Michael Bennett's superb choreography, the featured dance Donna McKechnie did in Company (a preview of Cassie's solo in A Chorus Line) had a paste-don, obligatory feel to it.

When I told James Lapine I wanted to write about his new production of Into the Woods for Dance Magazine, he gave me a wry little laugh--"That great dance show," he said. Well, of course, like most Sondheim shows, it isn't. But it is a great show, and one whose themes--of happy endings that morph into nightmares, of communities stalked by fearsome monsters--will speak to the mood of the times in a way Sondheim and Lapine could never have imagined in 1987.

Other things will be different as well. Glorious as Tony Straiges's set for the original production was, it took up so much of the stage that there was little room left for dancing or much else. This production will be designed by Douglas W. Schmidt, and Lapine, who is again directing, expects to make use of the entire stage floor. The choreographer this time is John Carrafa, who worked with Lapine last season on Dirty Blonde and who designed Urinetown's witty, easy-does-it homages to Bob Fosse and Alvin Ailey.

As rehearsals were approaching, Lapine was predicting that Carrafa would give Into the Woods a stronger dance profile than we're used to in Sondheim. "He's thinking in a lot of interesting ways about how to make it a more movement-y show," said Lapine, whose background is in the visual arts and writing. "I don't think that way," he adds, and neither does Sondheim. "We just start as writers. So many of the stories that we tell tend to be more literary than movement-based.... With Follies and Company, Michael Bennett was engaged from the beginning. It's all about how shows come to be born."

Sunday in the Park, Lapine's first collaboration with Sondheim, "didn't really call for movement," he says. But Into the Woods, whose very title calls up action, is going to get some this time around.

Sylviane Gold has written about theater for the Boston Phoenix, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The New York Times, and other publications.