This whole story seems odd and I feel like we're getting part truth, part exaggeration, and all self promotion.
I am a huge fan of JRB's work, but he is an insufferable egomaniac.
He's burned bridges with some of his peers because of his arrogance. For the record I don't know the man personally, but I do know someone (a composer whose work is familiar to you all) who used to be his friend. Of the two of them JRB got a show on Bway first (Parade) and suddenly it was like he had won a contest. He acted like a very poor winner, gloating and belittling the other guy.
I'm not going to name our mutual friend, so you can take that anecdote or leave it as you wish.
Having said all that, I still admire his talent, just not his social manners.
(T)here appears to be a major irony here when one considers Sondheim's negative comments about PORGY AND BESS (before it opened, and before he even saw it) and made not privately to his friends involved in it but in The Times.
As I recall it, henrik, Sondheim was responding largely to comments made by Paulus & Co., also in the TIMES. Those comments made it sound like they were rescuing a poor, sad old work with their marvelous new inventions such as giving Bess a back story. Sondheim was also offended at the de-emphasis on Heyward by the Gershwin estate's renaming of the show.
My memory of the Paulus interview is that it was NOT "we're trying a new approach", but "we're fixing this dreary, out-of-date clunker with its fabulous Gershwin tunes." Under the circumstances, I found Sondheim's remarks rather restrained.
But if we asked a lawyer, I can see where he might say that, technically, Sondheim was calling the kettle black. I guess none of us is 100% consistent.
"Franz is not as sheepish as I. He’s a little older, but he’s also devastatingly charming, impossibly talented, and confident that he can guide any conversation safely to shore. I occasionally refer to him as “The Waring Blender” because he is so smooth."
I love how that is phrased, as if his only really bad point is that he's older...
I think the idea that dinner after receiving free tickets to a show from someone who you might look to as a mentor is not the time or the place to be offering potential "fixes" isn't all that radical or outrageous.
My impression from the blog is that they sat in uncomfortable silence INSTEAD of offering fixes.
Certainly nobody here has argued that Sondheim has to take orders from 20-year-olds.
"You can't overrate Bernadette Peters. She is such a genius. There's a moment in "Too Many Mornings" and Bernadette doing 'I wore green the last time' - It's a voice that is just already given up - it is so sorrowful. Tragic. You can see from that moment the show is going to be headed into such dark territory and it hinges on this tiny throwaway moment of the voice." - Ben Brantley (2022)
"Bernadette's whole, stunning performance [as Rose in Gypsy] galvanized the actors capable of letting loose with her. Bernadette's Rose did take its rightful place, but too late, and unseen by too many who should have seen it" Arthur Laurents (2009)
"Sondheim's own favorite star performances? [Bernadette] Peters in ''Sunday in the Park,'' Lansbury in ''Sweeney Todd'' and ''obviously, Ethel was thrilling in 'Gypsy.'' Nytimes, 2000
EDIT: Frank Rich's Times review of PUTTING IT TOGETHER appeared April 2, 1993.
Thank you. That makes it even harder to understand the problem. Even if Brown didn't like the evening, he could have talked about some of the great songs that were sung during it.
Eric, I thought After Eight's post about bowing and scraping before Sondheim was intended to mock Sondheim, not you. Not, as taz would say, "in this situation".
Yeah, my impression is that they sat there awkwardly for twenty minutes making only uncomfortable small talk, without mentioning... anything related to the show Sondheim had treated them to. Which, I don't know, in-and-of-itself boggles my mind. A legendary composer treats you to a show and you say... nothing?
"...everyone finally shut up, and the audience could enjoy the beginning of the Anatevka Pogram in peace."
You are absolutely right, Kad, but setting aside all the personal impressions of Brown that have been shared here, I can imagine a 23-year-old feeling caught between a polite lie and a hurtful truth. He doesn't want to be unkind, but he also doesn't want to sound like a dolt.
I have certainly been in circumstances where an audience response was so hostile, it seemed almost insulting--mocking even--to rave about the performance (yet that was still what the artist really wanted).
Of course, Brown should have thanked Sondheim for his generosity, all the same. And maybe Brown did, just not successfully enough to hide his displeasure with the work. We don't have a full transcript.
(ETA We don't even know if Sondheim remembers the incident. It amuses me to think he may not.)
"Neither Sondheim or Brown says that opinions should be censored. The blog is about what one artist (or friend) should or should not say to another artist at the raw and vulnerable moment of creation."
Joey, weren't the Porgy team at the raw and vulnerable moment of creation when Sondheim wrote his piece in response to their pre-opening discussion of the production?
I hate to disagree with you Henrik, but I really don't see a huge connection here. Paulus didn't invite Sondheim out to see her creation and then ask what he thought.
^^^^^Am I misremembering, or didn't Sondheim even write that he was looking forward to seeing their production? I really believe his letter was directed at their published comments, not their creative output.
He did. I completely agree with your interpretation of the letter. It was carefully worded--and frankly, while it sounds like their Porgy and Bess worked in at least some ways, I had a similar reaction to the way their initial quotes in the Times were worded.
Sondheim's letter was about their attitudes towards the work and Heyward, not about what they were actually going to do. Though I'm sure, because it became national theater news, he didn't go see it.
I am guessing JRB's friend that got pissed off was a FOS (Friend of Steve's) who also has a famous theater family. But perhaps I'm thinking of another story and am completely wrong. I should stop speculating and confusing gossip in my mind, though.
He was responding to what he (and many others) perceived as their insensitive denigration of the work of George and Ira Gershwin--and especially of DuBose Hayward--in the New York Times interview and similarly in the program notes then available on the ART website.
I still don't see any parallel between Sondheim's letter to the editor and the situation described in the blog.
None at all.
Getting back to that situation, it makes no sense that there would be that awkwardness after Putting It Together. There was nothing especially wrong with or embarrassing about Putting It Together. It has to have been about a troubled show.
Unless, as I've come to wonder, the whole blog is a fabrication.
"He was responding to what he (and many others)..."
I have also heard John Kander was not an advocate of the "revisal", which doesn't surprise me, since John is a HUGE opera buff, and PORGY is like the American BOHEME or TOSCA.
But back on topic...
It has to be PASSION. Sondheim cared deeply about the show, wanted people to see it and feel what he felt, and JRB was no help in Steve dealing with the criticism he and Lapine were receiving from audiences, which was hostile to say the least. But maybe I'm wrong...what other SS shows opened around that time besides PUTTING IT TOGETHER and PASSION?
Regarding the troubled show, it has to be Passion. The only alternative I could even think of from this time was Assassins and that was a few years before the story. JRB probably thought he covered enough in this new telling to hide the real show and denied the truth when people realized. Who knows why that's an issue at this point?
As for Porgy and Bess, Sondheim wrote an open letter in response to an outrageous interview that painted the opera as a hugely flawed work of two (not three) writer/composers that needed to be rescued with accordion solos, a better ending, and key changes not to wake the baby. That it turned out to be a solid piece of theater is beside the point. The creative team framed the revival not as a re-imagining but a resuscitation of a landmark piece and that didn't sit well with a lot of people. Sondheim just had the nerve to tell them what he thought of their revisionist history of the show. I seem to recall the "we're saving this bad show" rhetoric being toned down a lot after the Sondheim blow up.
The big difference is that Stephen Sondheim didn't sit down in the front row, furrow his brow, and then slap Diane Paulus in the face with a dossier on why her production was bad bad bad immediately after the curtain call. Sondheim responded to the more outrageous promotional claims about why this production needed to happen for the benefit of the work itself. It was an attack not on the quality of the production but on the promotional angle.
The big difference is that Stephen Sondheim didn't sit down in the front row, furrow his brow, and then slap Diane Paulus in the face with a dossier on why her production was bad bad bad immediately after the curtain call
From my understanding of the story, neither did Jason Robert Brown.
I think the story makes everyone involved look kind of foolish. Like I said earlier, he and his friend didn't discuss during intermission or on the way to dinner how they were going to have to face Sondheim in the face of not liking his show?
Passion was also the cause of one of Arthur Laurents's famous lambastes of Sondheim that strained their relationship to the core on several occasions. After Pacific Overtures, Arthur went on a tirade about how "cold" Steve had gotten.
Arthur had been hard on Merrily. and he was dismissive of Sweeney and Sunday. But it was after Passion, that Arthur snapped. "You'e lost it!" he declared to Sondheim, and probably Lapine. "You've entirely lost all connection to your audience. You don't care what they see, what they hear, what they experience, what they FEEL. You've lost them and I don't ever see you getting them back."