On Moving Showstoppers: Stephen Sondheim’s ‘I’m Still Here’, There and Everywhere

Though they weren’t especially fruitful for him, when I think of the mid-1990s, I think of Stephen Sondheim. I listened a lot to his music at that time, but not to a lot of it: three tracks, to be exact, on a cassette called The Magic of the Musicals. This compilation had come out of a touring concert series starring Marti Webb and Mark Rattray, and I’ve since learned it had been recorded in June 1992 at the Bristol Hippodrome, just up the road. Trundling across the Somerset Levels with mum or dad, heading for sports practice, stereo turned up, I’d have liked that detail about the recording’s postcode; as it is, or was, I remember listening hard to a particular aspect of the recording, not so much to the lyrics, or even to the tunes, but to Webb’s voice, which had something about it, something in it. The first time we played the cassette, I remember, I realised I’d heard her voice before: I recognised it from Tell Me on a Sunday (1980), which mum had at home on vinyl album. I knew I knew the voice, but I was surprised to realise why I knew it. I think I’d thought our record player had done something to it. When I heard that same something on the pristine cassette (always to be kept in-between times in its box, lest it should accrue dust or melt one summer, as another had, on the scorching dashboard), I discovered I’d got it wrong: the graininess I’d got used to hearing on Tell Me on a Sunday had not been a needle scratch or a smudge on the vinyl, but an oddity of the voice itself. ‘I want you so, /It’s like I’m losing my mind.’1 The wisp of something between ‘I’m’ and ‘losing’ is nigh on impossible to transcribe — it happens between the fourth and fifth quavers of that first verse’s terminal phrase — like the voice is catching on something, almost as though it’s caught itself having second thoughts about the simile it’s part-way through constructing. Hard as it is to explain its effect — not least to explain what it is, a crack or crackle or scrunch — it’s something you can’t unhear. Though only just, it’s just there. All the while I was hearing this thing — let’s call it the voice’s character — what I was not hearing was a character’s voice. It didn’t really occur to me that the voice might belong to one, or that this was a question I should be asking of Webb’s performance. Listening again to it now, I see that her rendition of ‘Losing My Mind’ is broadly consistent with the way you’d expect it to sound in a production of the show from which it comes. By the time the song comes around in Follies (1971), the character for whom it represents a set piece, Sally Durant, is rather closer to the shadow sense of the show’s title than to its actual referent: having gathered with old friends and colleagues to remember their interwar show, the Weismann Follies, Sally has begun to spiral, à la folie, crazy in love still for her old flame Ben. ‘Losing My Mind’ is a torch song, then, and the challenge of singing it has to do with leaving yourself somewhere to go, as you must in a showstopper: starting quietly — as Sally interpolates a description of another maddingly ordinary day with thoughts ‘about you’ — and ending big. A singer can meet this challenge as Sondheim once described, by realising in performance ‘how a single word can change or intensify the emotional tone of what is being said (or sung)’.2 Sondheim is thinking here about what he’s built into the lyrics — sing it as it’s written and the right sense of tone will follow — but a singer might look to stress or activate other possibilities, in and between the author’s words. The show’s last run at London’s National Theatre provides a neat example: seated at her dressing-room mirror, clutching a hairbrush, Imelda Staunton relied on the ‘so’ in verse 1 (‘I want you so’), and then again after the instrumental break (cut short this time — ‘I want you sŏ’ — as though choked back), to show how far she’s come, emotionally speaking, in a matter of twenty lines.3 It’s what intensifiers do, of course — ‘intensify’ things — but this one does so in such a way on Staunton’s watch as to make the reprise a shift in emphasis rather than a simple repetition. Webb moves through the song to a similar effect. The sign of hesitation between ‘I’m’ and ‘losing’ becomes an audible pivot point, a decision the singer has to make each and every time the simile occurs. The second time it arrives, it does so as a question — ‘And do they know/ It’s like I’m […] losing my mind?’) — leading not, as you might expect, to a more stagey inflexion of the phrase, but to something ever so slightly smoother. Though there’s still some rubato there, she sounds surer of herself this time, as well she might in asking a question to which she probably knows the answer (yes, ‘they’ — her friends — surely do know she’s losing her mind). But does this a character make? Yes and no. Not a character of the kind we take Sally to be in Follies, and certainly not the one Sondheim has in mind when he points out that most of his lyrics were ‘written not just to be sung but to be sung in particular musicals by individual characters in specific situations’.4 Forbidding as that triplet of adjectives sounds, ‘character’ in Webb’s case doesn’t feel as much of a category error as it might, or should. It didn’t way back when, at any rate, because Webb’s take on ‘Losing My Mind’ was part of a sequence. Without any sort of break — just a few bars of incidental woodwind music, and a key change — the song segued into a version of ‘Not While I’m Around’. I didn’t think of it as a version; I had no reason to. But that’s what it was: a version of the song Tobias sings to Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd (1979). Come Act III, he sings it because he now suspects the title character of nasty business, and he wants Lovett, whom he loves, to know he’s got her back. ‘Demons are prowling/Everywhere/ Nowadays. / I’ll send them howling, / I don’t care – /I got ways’.5 It’s a touching, unusual number, made all the weirder by its resistance to definition: it could be a lullaby, except ‘mum’ (Lovett) is the one who’s being required to listen; it sounds like a nursery song, only Tobias is no child;6 it has the makings of a sentimental ballad, until Lovett cuts in; it could be a love duet — as Lovett is finally moved to reciprocate and to echo Tobias’s sentiment (‘Nothing’s gonna harm you, /Not while I’m around!’) — but for the fact that she only joins in to placate him, to put him off the scent. No such confusion on The Magic of the Musicals. ‘Nothing’s gonna harm you,’ Rattray declares, oh so softly, ‘Not while I’m around’: well, nothing’s gonna make you think of a street urchin, either, not while he’s around, for Rattray sounds every inch the romantic lead.7 Gone is the cockney’s ‘gonna’, for now it has the ring of a Broadway Americanism;8 and gone is the gutsy threat (‘I got ways’) as Rattray quietly rights the grammar: It still sounds like bluster, but ‘I’ve got ways’ bespeaks a dreamy resourcefulness — a lover’s fond illusion — and not the belligerence of a protective youth. Neither does this version conform to the original’s two-part dynamic; Mrs. Lovett is nowhere to be heard. Yet the song is not not a duet: someone is assumed to be within earshot, perhaps even to be readying herself to respond, and that someone is the pseudo-character of Marti Webb. In its abbreviated, corrected form, the song sounds like — no, not sounds like, just is — an answer to the questions raised in ‘Losing My Mind’. It is an at once makeshift and highly curated response to that torch song, and the meaning of it couldn’t be further from the meaning intended in 1979, sung in a particular musical by individual characters in a specific situation. But it did make perfect sense to me in the mid-1990s, this coupling of songs on The Magic of the Musicals. It’s what I wanted to hear. When we read the draft over, we found that once the plot had begun, the show felt contrived and convoluted. So on the second round we extended the setting of the mood a bit longer and more elaborately, and delayed the machinations of plot until later in the evening. Once again, as we read it to ourselves, the show gripped us until the plot took over. Gradually, we realized the obvious: what was wrong with the show was the plot — the mood and atmosphere were everything, the events secondary.10 The story of their learning to tell a non-story is revealing. On its own terms, it models a particular kind of creative labour: of having to work hard and produce a lot — as many as nine drafts11 — in order to create something that might look, in production, like you’ve shirked on the work, or lost the plot. It would only look like you’ve made a songbook in search of a story, of course. That one could be ‘gripped’, as Sondheim recalls, by the ‘mood and atmosphere’ of such a show would be enough to justify the approach. It could be ‘everything’, in fact. I enlisted Julia [McKenzie] to help; she was a good friend, she knew my canon and she had become an experienced director […]. What we came up with was a pleasant but awkward revue titled Putting It Together, which made the mistake of trying to shoehorn songs of different styles and tone into a story line.15 Sondheim was always his own sternest critic, as some have noticed, though one wonders whether he was also having a dig here at the jukebox musical.16 When Putting It Together opened in January 1992, Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story was well on its way to becoming a regular fixture in London’s West End (where it would remain for the next ten years); and by the time he got around to printing that retrospective note about shoehorning songs, another crop (Mamma Mia!, We Will Rock You, Jersey Boys) had put down roots this and that side of the Atlantic. Whatever Sondheim’s particular views on this insurgent genre, and he was never not particular, one suspects he was quick to agree with Stephen Holden, to whose judgement he slyly defers in Finishing the Hat: ‘“karaoke hell”’.17 God S[tephen] S[ondheim] is revealed on screen, roaming around his studio, chattering aimlessly. As he does so, the performers enter and take their places. […] ALL (Variously) Nice smile. Sweet face. Real style. Such grace. That wit – That’s it! SS spills a bowl of pencils off the piano. SS Oh, shit. ALL (Variously) And does he know how to rhyme! Sublime … He’ll surprise you every time. You’re never sure just where the Tune is going next, Just like the lyrics – No, the ‘text.’20 ‘I immediately fell into a familiar self-deprecating mode’, he recalls, thinking back to the writing of this (the opening to Act II of Sondheim on Sondheim).21 Familiar to whom? Familiar to himself, presumably, so used had he grown by this time to spinning the revue as self-critique; but familiar to the audience, too, to his audience, who could be counted upon to recognise the mode. You don’t have to be a Sondheim fan to get the spoof — the jokes, the echoes, the shamelessness of turning ‘rhyme’ into one, and then doing it again (what a surprise) — but it helps. [M]ost of the lyrics which follow belong in the mouths of particular characters in particular situations, characters who are only partly knowable without the context of the dialogue and actions in their stories […]. With few exceptions, every lyric in this collection is prompted by the beginning, middle or end of a culmination of incidents before it, incidents of which the reader is likely to be unaware. For example, ‘In Buddy’s Eyes’ (from Follies) loses much of its tone and all of its subtext when disconnected from the placid surface of its music and the scenes and dialogue which have it. can we know what Sally or what she’s trying not to without It’s as we were to know from his for what are songs but even when to other songs, of are scenes in I’ve been many times why I don’t the for my own since I lyrics as short I The key word in that is […] have to with never have to with A has to with and still make the enough to an on the and a an where he loses them for and has to them I like to think I can their with short which are called of this Sondheim’s that our to know a character should on what we take to be a a setting in Yet he for the here — it’s the that does it — that some songs do a all of their Not a not one you could plot to any but a the of a which whether by or to a of a show’s In more than one, we might think of such songs as The first is a and might be as a of who the second whose lyrics were by with and – a – and they the thing in they thought it was a song, and it kept on me it so I I got out and I them And up What are you gonna own answer to that question — and the song we have — is I’ve heard – What her think that she – What does she she’s a — but he didn’t want to think the a of his (‘I to in the of the is not listened to more than I care to — a — I to most such at a bit This is not because the but because — as when some thing of someone to her — the performance of can had a story to tell on the of her rendition in — you think of it, it’s been since I was the opening for — but at the of she still more a than the times and I’ve them all my still just and I’m still This is the one and only verse — a reprise of the first — and when it it does so with a key of a and with some But not from her — that’s the of this song when it’s done right — so it in for the to and the That’s the of so much can and does — jokes, — because it’s all in the voice, and did would just to his and his answer the It always to her her to someone like or down the just like her just get I don’t think you should feel about going to for a few You’re a when she had begun to be more of a than a When her had it out to felt as though it for a time. When she was she had written in her ‘I a I’m to by her voice, she found herself the voice of her at her last is not the but she might as well be for all the care her voice does care — as an she’s used to something of the sort — but she has a way of it. The the of the — of this to what you’d call — and when she does get round to the to her it’s only to her she’s It’s the in just like that the in her In the and are more such that to just as we do, that she can only expect her when it and took and with that she all she can not a home or even a to but her The of is So she But not before the change you’ve ever is all and the next, she’s the Without a and a good she the of her in times and I’ve them all my I’m still doesn’t to send the way for to feel or look in this sings to no one in particular, while a to in the just enough to doing what she does at her a of a of the then an a and a smile. We think and heard enough in the to know the way will with her to couldn’t look surprised at her Yet the of this song, and the of the is surely not to what we or they In doesn’t know where or how to look, for different things are to her all at an and an way or the is doing a on Not that at the to have that’s and her as she off the of her doing so in such a way as to the of and perhaps the to her becoming a more than an — and and all gone — even as she to become the once It’s not before to look like she suspects A in the with at its still still to the music, but ever so slightly In one of she no more than can to know where the going next, and there’s in the this performance has to do with to Sondheim on the — – / I — which is the sort of to a all In another and couldn’t look more at the of this or more of and in the on – My up the – So I’m the about one as and for — still some way off in — and for whose a With a of the has the look of a because it points in back to the of the … but don’t about and to the you know by now is it has the ring of a — a last word on the — here is as neat as it sounds, to the that comes between and this the of a I’m and the reason I’m here is because took care of the or an of the things she was once to do just to get on to everything, and look where it’s got me — home my from The of is that it could be it’s all in the voice. I’ve run the A to and la I got through all of last And I’m is up to a much in But with that time for and to her in one and the at before It’s as though she’s out of the performance and then back into it. As she from the the on the face. Not for the first time in this song, doesn’t know where to look as the of the on her right and and With and a she up and her — the of — in to the ‘I got through all of last I’m of has been singing for them we on an of and in and As much and the only to now and then as the It’s as well to remember, as this us that the are in Follies because in the and not, as one has because a director has them we must have a director to for in when was for one only in from the to the many of gathered that for the knew what to make of the quietly in the as out the will have the of the As for the in to see the show on the of must have a Yet it have been a question to which she was also in some way the at then and as the song the that had no to and to to someone never Follies As I’ve been trying to show in this are things to by Sondheim out of a this will sound like to that of an the that some show up than to and to What might us reason to is the of learning something from the their most can things we didn’t know about a song or a character — in of that phrase — to the that we to the song in its setting with a more as to how such a song or could work in a specific than we even to a setting with the of could Sondheim — it — have done it For his as he time and again in the Sondheim was always to this and it’s one a like from the you to This is not to the when he that his characters — characters in particular to be — only partly knowable without the context of the dialogue and actions in their it’s to recognise that a song to an setting can make that character knowable in a way the story to or or to When I watch singing I see singing to and for her But in to the to in that I also see singing a version of a version all the more of and her because has her with a to her own into and are finally for one at to what it to As Sondheim had always it for a and a not to this as no were or the is an in the of and a of for the most part on to sound and