Jason Robert Brown on How (Not) to Insult Sondheim — Page 5

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.

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No, not this friend, PJ.

I did know Franz though. He's a hack. Symphonic Poem? Please.

Poser.

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Updated On: 11/2/12 at 05:00 PM

"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...

Certainly nobody here has argued that Sondheim has to take orders from 20-year-olds.

In this situation.

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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.

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?

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"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?

^^^^^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.

As did I. Though I wouldn't miss McDonald as Bess if I had the chance to see/hear her.

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.

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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.

Not quite. But his silence was not golden this time.

I mean, really- you're invited by a dramatist to see his new show, you sit down at dinner after, and make small talk about the weather? Noooo.

I guess I should shut up, though. My point has been made.

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."

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Updated On: 11/3/12 at 11:32 PM