"LOVE LIFE:" S.S. ECHOES AT 'ENCORES!'
I don’t remember ever discussing Love Life with Stephen Sondheim but I do remember him talking about Alan Jay Lerner from time to time, the revered My Fair Lady lyricist who, with the similarly celebrated Threepenny Opera composer, Kurt Weill, wrote Love Life, a little-remembered, however well-pedigreed, 1948 musical revived this past month by Encores! at City Center. I bring Steve up because his strongly held opinions about Lerner resonated with me as I watched Love Life, and because I believe Love Life influenced him, perhaps more than he knew — though actually, I doubt that. He knew.
Love Life is today barely recalled except by those who saw it, like Mr. Sondheim, who was 18 in 1948. The Broadway musical was decisively into its “Golden Age,” Lerner, with Frederick Lowe, had just written Brigadoon, which was still running when Love Life opened on October 7 — misfortunately in the middle of a recording strike that precluded any original cast album for the show. Directed by Elia Kazan and choreographed by Michael Kidd (which is just crazy!) Love Life ran a respectable 252 performances (about seven months) but was not a hit. It was, however, a dive in another direction for musical theater away from the linear, romantic classicism of the well-made musicals of the time. Lerner, who initiated the project and wrote the libretto, intended Love Life as a metaphorical study of marriage spanning the history of America, but also as a study of America through the lens of one marriage. Commencing with a Revolutionary War-time union, and racing through a series of chrono-historical domestic dramas, Love Life ambitiously, and rather self-consciously, traces the marital story of Susan and Sam Cooper over years and years of American history. More pointedly, it traces the dissolution of Susan and Sam’s marriage, undermined by Sam’s increasingly avaricious All-American capitalism and Susan’s growing feminism.
Quite a lot for one musical comedy.
But there was more. Lerner constructed Love Life with interspersed in-one vaudeville turns that comment on the Cooper saga, rendering the show one of Broadway’s earliest “concept musicals” — more a theater-centric meditation than a narrative-driven musical play. In fact, Lerner’s full title for the show is: Love Life: A Vaudeville in Two Parts.
Encores! gave this very unwieldy creation an elegant and strongly cast production that still struggled to find a tone that made sense of the over-stuffed, time-traveling, vaudeville/melodrama mash-up. The Coopers were beautifully played by Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell, true troupers with chops, who sang and danced their way through nearly two centuries with panache and appropriate tenderness, and bitterness, richly embracing Love Life’s prismatic score, especially its best-known songs: “Green-Up Time” and the hauntingly Weill-ian “Here I’ll Stay.” The production’s show-stopper proved to be “Love Song,” achingly delivered by the majestic-voiced John Edwards as a Hobo who sings of truths that “nobody listens to,” and “nobody hears.” (Lerner and Weill’s most visceral note of political protest.) Many of Love Life’s vaudeville numbers were very smartly performed by a crack ensemble but the over-elaborate finale, “Love Life Illusion Show,” kind of went nowhere, except to call out toward Bob Fosse’s later magic circus framing of Pippin. (Yes, Fosse acknowledged having seen Love Life too.)
It's tricky drawing definitive conclusions from Encores!’s Love Life. Lerner’s original script was renovated for this production (for good reason) by director, Victoria Clarke, working with Encores!’s frequent script doctor, Emmy Award-winning television writer Joe Keenan. More renovations will be needed to make it viable for a future.
The score, though, remained pure and unadulterated Lerner and Weill, including Weill’s own lustrous orchestrations, sumptuously played by the Encores! Orchestra, led by returning “Guest” Musical Director Rob Berman. The music was generally sublime, though the burgeoning feminism that Alan Jay Lerner endows Susan Cooper with seemed, to me, undermined by the stock “girlish” yearnings he lyrically pours into “Mister Right,” her eleven o’clock number, which just sounded dead wrong, despite Kate Baldwin’s powerhouse delivery of the song.
Alan Jay Lerner, Steve Sondheim used to say, was a suave, “genteel” lyricist, who lacked any real voice, any lyric personality. His lines had style but lacked flavor (and humor). Steve preferred personality to perfection in his lyricists, though we often argued over Lorenz Hart, the Broadway lyricist with the most provocative personality of them all, in my opinion, whom Steve dismissed as technically sloppy. SS could be damn hard to please.
I love Alan Jay Lerner’s lyric-writing. I find him one of the most passionately romantic, yet adult-minded lyricists of them all. And Steve admitted to loving My Fair Lady. I did, however, find myself thinking that the weaknesses of Love Life are indeed the weaknesses of Lerner just as Sondheim saw him; the fundamental absence of any strong point of view, or personal slant, on Love Life’s rambling satire of America and of marriage. Lerner’s satire in Love Life — however well intended — seems mostly glib and disingenuous.
His experimental vision as a bookwriter, though, his sense of a concept driving a musical, was deeply impactful, clearly; particularly on Stephen Sondheim.
Steve nods at this in his superb, self-assessing lyric collection, Finishing the Hat, when he glancingly notes that his song, “I Remember That” — written in 1954 for Saturday Night, his first (but ultimately unproduced) Broadway musical — resembled strongly a song from Love Life, “I Remember It Well,” (that Lerner later rewrote with Frederick Lowe for Gigi). “I may have cribbed the idea unconsciously,” Steve admits.
I would go further. “Susan’s Dream,” though cut (I believe) from Love Life out-of-town, and restored (great call) at Encores!, is a penetratingly revealing “concept” number. Listening to it, one can picture Follies and hear Company. Literally. A close-harmonizing female chorus (flipped from all-males in the original) sings out Susan’s wifely nightmare:“Susan dreamed exactly what she had!” — full of bluesy rue and frustration. The melody and harmony of Company’s moody “Poor Baby” echo unmistakably in its wake — as sung in that show by a female chorus (of wives) about Company’s unmarried protagonist, Bobby.
Company, of course, constituted Stephen Sondheim’s own meditation on marriage — not as he’d lived it, but as he’d observed it. (Steve was a bachelor for much of his life; Alan Jay Lerner married eight times, ultimately.)
No harm in any of this. I love the idea that Stephen Sondheim was influenced by so much of what he saw and heard in the theater. (Somebody should write a book about that. Or maybe somebody already has.) As Steve certainly knew better than anyone, influence, in art, does not necessarily lead inevitably to imitation. It also leads to inspiration. And — for the venturesome few, like Lerner, Weill and Sondheim — innovation.