‘The season of Sondheim’ dawns as South Florida theaters stage musicals by the Broadway master

Stephen Sondheim is one of the most revered composers for the Broadway stage, and his work permeates popular culture. Yet Sondheim is not the theatrical staple of the South Florida landscape the way Andrew Lloyd Webber or touring Disney shows have become.

But that all changed with Friday’s opening of West Side Story at Coral Gables’ Miracle Theatre for a run through Feb. 21. Next, Zoetic Stage and the Adrienne Arsht Center present Sondheim’s Passion Feb. 18 through March 13. And right on the heels of West Side Story, Actors’ Playhouse will present Sondheim on Sondheim, an illustrative revue featuring more than two dozen songs and archival video footage of the Pulitzer-winning composer discussing his work. The latter — “a cultural master class,” says David Arisco, Actors’ Playhouse artistic director — runs March 16 through April 3.

Call it the season of Sondheim.

“We don’t produce him a lot down here, and this is a great season for it,” said Stuart Meltzer, who will be directing Zoetic’s production of Passion, one of Sondheim’s later works. “We wanted to bring a Sondheim musical that hadn’t been seen frequently and that people didn’t know. Passion was his last hit in New York in the ’90s, and we wanted to do something different, a little darker that really spoke of romance and a different kind of romance. I think Miami audiences will connect with it.”

Meltzer’s introduction to Sondheim came when he was on a kibbutz in Israel while on sabbatical from college.

“I made friends with another gal who was finding herself and had just left Harvard. I was really young and knew of Sondheim, but she really introduced me to his work, and we sat there eating sunflower seeds listening to Merrily We Roll Along and Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods. … We spent an entire year listening to his music and being affected by this music.

“Sondheim is able to identify a feeling and put that into a sound and the intellect into it. His canon of work, in varying degrees, I can identify with.”

Arisco says the quality that makes Sondheim great can make for a harder sell when trying to fill theater seats — the endless balance of art versus commerce that Sondheim wrote about so convincingly in his lyric for Putting It Together: “Advancing art is easy/Financing it is not.”

Actors’ Playhouse staged a production of West Side Story in 1997, but to Arisco’s knowledge the property, featuring the lyrics of a young Sondheim paired with Leonard Bernstein’s majestic score and familiar to many from its 1961 Robert Wise film production, has been largely absent from Miami stages.

“For me, Sondheim has always been there but not always in my theatrical repertoire. His works are thinking man’s theater, and when you are performing in a 600-seat house you also have to be looking out for the everyman.”

Sondheim, born in 1930 in New York City to a father who manufactured dresses designed by his mother, is like no one else — and that’s the challenge for actor and viewer.

“I was a high school teacher in 1978, ’79, and used to take the kids to New York City to see a Broadway show,” Arisco says. “They’d have seen Gypsy [for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics in 1959] or Fiddler on the Roof. What did I take them to? Sweeney Todd. And let me tell you, the chaperones around me would say, ‘Who is this cat? What is he taking me to?’ But by the end, they had to admit they’d seen something incredible.”

Miami, too, is ready for its three dates with Sondheim, says Meltzer, who staged Sondheim’s Assassins as Zoetic’s first musical production in 2014.

“People seem to pigeonhole Miami audiences, and I’ve learned from my theater they are very hungry for good material and thought-provoking work and things that speak volumes about life and reflections of life. That is why I’m doing Passion.”

But first, you have to find a director with the vision and ability to find a cast that can pull off Sondheim’s tricky material. Folk singer Judy Collins sang a beautiful Send in the Clowns, originally from Sondheim’s 1973 musical A Little Night Music, and turned it into a hit for AM pop radio in 1975. But could she sell it on a Broadway or a South Florida stage?

“People have to be a special talent,” Arisco explains. “You have to have the chops to sing a Sondheim song. You have to have the musicality to interpret intervals and tonalities, but you also have to be an actor. Every one of his songs is a piece of theater, tells its own story. He is a master at making sure the song moved the story, it wasn’t just a song stuck in there for entertainment purposes. You’ve got to find people who can interpret and make the audience be moved by the lyrics.”

Wayne LeGette, who will star in the Playhouse production of Sondheim on Sondheim, says, “Once you do it the way he wrote it, it starts to make sense why this weird, dissonant chord, why the phrasing, is the way it is; it absolutely tells the story.”

LeGette, a two-time Carbonell award winner, remembers an eye-opening experience years ago when he was studying at the National Shakespeare Conservatory in New York City.

“My Shakespeare teacher said actors are interpretive artists, they are not creative artists. When you are a young student that pisses you off. I wanted to reinvent the wheel and create, create, create. Not that you are not creating, but the composer and lyricist have done the creating for you so it’s your job to interpret what they have given you and not try to reinvent that song. Sometimes with Sondheim — with any good material — sometimes you need to sing the notes and say the words and get out of your own way, and the story will take care of itself.”

West Side’s Maria and Tony, Sara Amengual and Tim Quartier, agree.

“The thought process is maybe more complex but the lyrics are very true to the characters,” Amengual says. “That makes it easier. The rhythms are extremely difficult. The intervals can be challenging and sometimes sound foreign to our ears, but once you pick them up it’s like an epiphany. You feel like you should always have known them.”

Says Quartier: “The audience can understand what is going on. The challenge as an actor with his stuff is to trust that Sondheim has done most of the work for me and not to overplay moments so they come out cheesy and corny. You let the audience fill them in for themselves.”

Unless, of course, you are Barbra Streisand, who famously asked Sondheim if he would mind changing the closing line of Send in the Clowns — from “Well, maybe next year” to “Don’t bother, they’re here” — so that she could record the tune for The Broadway Album in 1985. She explained she didn’t understand the song’s original closure. Sondheim agreed to clarify the narrative.

“… His genius as a composer and as a lyricist is how startling and original all of his work is,” Streisand said through her long-time executive producer Jay Landers. “He didn’t comply with styles. He created them.”

Sondheim, unlike some artists in his position, has proven he isn’t resistant to change or to following advice to advance his career and grow.

“[W]hen he was first asked to write the lyrics for West Side Story he didn’t want to. He wanted to write his own music,” Arisco said. “But he was mentored by Oscar Hammerstein, who was almost like his father. Oscar said, ‘You’ll learn a hell of a lot from Jerome Robbins [the director and choreographer for the musical’s 1957 Broadway run]. Write the lyrics and learn everything you can, and you’ll get your turn to write your music later.’”

The hits and Tonys that followed were plentiful: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, among them.

Passion, set in late-1800s Italy on a military base where a young soldier deals with the obsessive love of the plain Fosca, wasn’t a box office standout. The musical ran on Broadway for 280 performances, earning it the distinction of the shortest-running musical to win the Tony Award for best musical.

But for Meltzer, staging Passion in the Arsht’s smaller Carnival Studio Theater and bringing the audience closer to the actors. is a challenge he can’t wait to execute. Passion is also one of Sondheim’s more personal works, conceived at the time the introverted composer finally allowed himself a live-in relationship with dramatist Peter Jones. All of those elements intrigued Meltzer.

“For the first time, Sondheim is really longing for love, [he’s] acknowledging that love is important to a person’s life and that it is something we do hunger for and strive for,” he says.

Meltzer’s Fosca, actress Jeni Hacker, says Sondheim’s work gave her a career. For a New Jersey girl at 16, who discovered Into the Woods on the Broadway stage and learned that the people up there could actually do that for a living, playing in a Sondheim production is a treat, and Passion gives the character actress a meaty role.

“There are not a lot of shows for someone like me to get to dig their teeth into and sing,” she says. “I never played a character like this. She is deeply troubled and very sickly and falls in love with someone she knows she will never be loved by. I’m very much looking forward to it; the anticipation has been a little grueling.”

“Actors love [Sondheim], but for some reason, producers shy away from Sondheim,” she adds. “So I’m happy it’s a rare occasion to see one Sondheim in a region in a year, and now we have three happening back-to-back.”

This story was originally published January 29, 2016 at 6:41 AM with the headline "‘The season of Sondheim’ dawns as South Florida theaters stage musicals by the Broadway master."