Misery Yesterday, Comedy Tonight
Pictured: Buzz Mauro as Hysterium in drag as Philia with Floyd King as Pseudolus.
Photographer: Carol Pratt
The story of how Stephen Sondheim replaced the opening number of A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM — trading “Love Is in the Air” for “Comedy Tonight” toward the end of the show’s out-of-town tryout has been often told and I’m not going to belabor it here, except to say that it seems, single-handedly, to have saved the show from certain doom and turned it into a resounding hit — the show that Sondheim once said was his “desert island musical” among his own works.
“Comedy Tonight,” written over a weekend in Washington, DC, is a knockabout number that promised a knockabout show — a promise FORUM certainly keeps. What’s been less often talked about is the musical — rather than the lyrical — journey that led to it. I hasten to say that far from revealing secrets, everything I’m about to state here is speculative, but it makes a certain kind of sense, at least to me.
Sondheim, who had just turned 32 at the time, was a frustrated young composer whose every attempt to get his music heard on Broadway had been thwarted. His first show, SAURDAY NIGHT, had been scuttled when the producer died before the money was raised. He had been rejected by no less than Ethel Merman as the composer of GYPSY because she wanted someone with a track record. Now, finally, with FORUM, he was getting his chance — perhaps with a bit of a chip on his shoulder.
But he was not — then or ever — a typical Broadway tunesmith. He’d trained under the avant-garde classical composer Milton Babbitt, and he wasn’t trying to be the next Rodgers-and-Hammerstein combined. He was trying to make a new kind of mark in what would soon be a changing world. For the lowbrow antics of FORUM, he wrote an opening called “Invocation” (a reworked version of it was later used for THE FROGS), which director George Abbott rejected because, he said, he couldn’t hum it.
It’s easy — in hindsight — to take this as a tacit insult to Abbott’s old-fashioned ideas about songs (he was more than 40 years Sondheim’s senior and a pure traditionalist) but the truth is “Invocation” is actually a difficult piece of work — more of a drone than a sunny invitation to enjoy yourself, and nothing like a Broadway opening number of the time, probably an intentional choice on Sondheim’s part. Despite the lyric’s promise of a knockabout farce, it’s a “composer’s composer” piece of music; the young creator was no doubt proud of it, and somewhat insulted by what he thought was Abbott’s tin ear. Still, he dutifully went back to work, willing, if not eager, to try to please the boss. What he came up with was the breezy, charming “Love Is in the Air,” which Abbott assented to, although it had nothing to do with the show it was at the front end of. You can hum it. But if you do, carefully, you may hear a bit of an attitude underneath the obvious attempt at a jolly tune: contempt. Sondheim could be famously cantankerous at times and simultaneously devilishly clever. And the song, which is so breezy and simple and busy celebrating love and springtime, and summersaulting also seems to be saying, “you want hummable? Hum this, you old bastard.”
It also has a surprisingly shrug-shouldered finish (what theater people call “the button”) not designed to earn big applause. It’s not a bad song, just a disastrous choice for an opening number. But it wasn’t until Jerome Robbins, for whom Sondheim had nothing but respect, suggested that it be replaced by a number that contained the information from “Invocation” with the easy attractions of “Love Is In the Air” that the composer relented. The result was “Comedy Tonight.”
Robbins was specific and smart in his instructions to Sondheim, and the two of them were both trying to move the musical theater in a new direction, so the respect was mutual. Robbins didn’t want jokes in the number — he wanted a simple invitation (not an invocation) to a lowbrow farce. He wanted the audience to understand exactly what they were in for. This would give him room to stage a bunch of funny business inside the number, which he did with such brio and expertise that the number usually stopped the show before it was properly begun.
The lyric journey from the first to the third opening number tells a clear story of how Sondheim finally nailed the opening. The musical journey hints at a different story — of a moody enfant terrible composer who managed finally to get the job done, suffering the indignities of the Broadway theater as it then was.
FORUM was not, overall, a happy experience for the young composer-lyricist, much as he admired the result. In a letter to his friend Leonard Gershe shortly after the show opened, he complained bitterly about Abbott’s incompetence, and averred that the show had been saved not only by the opening number but by Robbins’s restaging of two other crucial sequences. As a galling accompaniment, the New York critics had ignored his compositional skills and his only solace was a handful of admiring letters about the music, particularly one from Frank Loesser and another from Harold Arlen, two composers for whom he had nothing but admiration.
Over the years, he softened in many ways, especially once his prowess as a composer was acknowledged, first with grudging respect and, finally, with effusive celebration. But it was a tough launch to a brilliant career, and I wonder if you can hear, as I think I do, the bitter-pill quality of that journey from “Invocation” to “Comedy Tonight.” If you can, it serves as a kind of metaphor for his entire career.
JACK VIERTEL spent 20 years as Artistic Director of NY City Center’s Encores! series and 35 years as as Creative Director and Senior Vice President of Jujamcyn Theaters in charge of creating and developing projects for the company’s five Broadway theaters. He is the author of The Secret Life of the American Musical.
LOVE IS IN THE AIR
[PROLOGUS, PROTEANS]
Love is in the air
Quite clearly
People everywhere
Act queerly
Wives are at their husbands’ service
Virgins are distinctly nervous
Love is going around
Anyone exposed
Can catch it
Keep your window closed
And latch it
Leave your house and lose your reason
This is the contagious season
Love is going around
It’s spreading each minute
Throughout the whole vicinit-
Y. Step out and you’re in it
With everyone involved
Who can stay uninvolved?
Love is in the air
This morning
Bachelors beware
Fair warning!
My advice to you is gratis
If you wanna keep your status
Stay home, don’t take a breath
You could catch your death
‘Cause love is around
COMEDY TONIGHT
[PSEUDOLUS]
Something familiar,
Something peculiar,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!
Something appealing,
Something appalling,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!
Nothing with kings, nothing with crowns;
Bring on the lovers, liars and clowns!
Old situations,
New complications,
Nothing portentous or polite;
Tragedy tomorrow,
Comedy tonight!
Something convulsive,
Something repulsive,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!
Something aesthetic,
Something frenetic,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!
Nothing with gods, nothing with fate;
Weighty affairs will just have to wait!
Nothing that’s formal,
Nothing that’s normal,
No recitations to recite;
Open up the curtain:
Comedy Tonight!
Something erratic,
Something dramatic,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!
Frenzy and frolic,
Strictly symbolic,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!
[ENTIRE COMPANY]
Something familiar,
Something peculiar,
Something for everybody:
Comedy tonight!
Something that’s gaudy,
Something that’s bawdy–
[PSEUDOLUS]
Something for everybawdy!
[ENTIRE COMPANY]
Comedy tonight!
[MILES GLORIOSUS]
Nothing that’s grim.
[DOMINA]
Nothing that’s Greek.
[PSEUDOLUS]
[Indicating DOMINA:]
She plays Medea later this week.
[WOMEN]
Stunning surprises!
[MEN]
Cunning disguises!
[ALL]
Hundreds of actors out of sight!
[ERRONIUS]
Pantaloons and tunics!
[SENEX]
Courtesans and eunuchs!
[HERO]
Funerals and chases!
[LYCUS]
Baritones and basses!
[PHILIA]
Panderers!
[HERO]
Philanderers!
[HYSTERIUM]
Cupidity!
[MILES]
Timidity!
[LYCUS]
Mistakes!
[ERRONIUS]
Fakes!
[DOMINA]
Rhymes!
[PHILIA]
Crimes!
[PSEUDOLUS]
Tumblers!
Grumblers!
Bumblers!
Fumblers!
[ALL]
No royal curse, no Trojan horse,
And a happy ending, of course!
Goodness and badness,
Panic is madness–
This time it all turns out all right!
Tragedy tomorrow,
Comedy tonight!
