CD REVIEW: BOUNCE, A NEW MUSICAL BY STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Okay, I admit it -- this review has nothing to do with film music. Though Stephen Sondheim has made a handful of contributions to the cinema -- the score for Stavisky, the theme for Reds, original songs for The Seven Percent Solution, A Little Night Music, The Birdcage and Dick Tracy, a cameo (as himself) in Camp, and the wonderful screenplay (written with Anthony Perkins) for The Last of Sheila -- he is principally a composer of the musical theater and its greatest living talent. So if you have absolutely no interest in musical theater, you're welcome to click over to musicfromthemovies.com where they probably have in-depth coverage of whatever Marco Beltrami's up to.

Even after Sondheim and Weidman finally began writing, Bounce did not take an easy path to the stage, and during its history it was variously titled Wise Guys and Gold! Sondheim was originally interested in just telling Wilson's story, understandable since Wilson was famous as a cynical wit like the composer himself, but Addison was an equally colorful character (a popular but self-trained architect, he was notorious for leaving out crucial elements like staircases and bathrooms) and Sondheim and Weidman decided to focus the story on the relationship between the two brothers, as well as their competitive love for their mother. The show's long gestation period included a workshop production with director Sam Mendes (who had previously directed the London revival of Sondheim's Company), but the Sondheim-Mendes collaboration proved to be an unsatisfactory one, and the show was ultimately directed by Harold Prince, who had a long string of successes with Sondheim in the 70s but hadn't worked with the composer since their Broadway flop (and cult favorite) Merrily We Roll Along. Prince directed Bounce's Chicago and Washington D.C. productions but the reviews were middling and despite expectations it was not transferred to Broadway (Sondheim's show Assassins played off-Broadway in 1990 and only just received its first Broadway production, earning five Tonys at the recent ceremony -- P.S. Classics will release the cast album of the revival on August 3rd).

Bounce is an unusually lighthearted score for Sondheim, trying much more to be an old-fashioned crowd pleaser than is normal for him, but though the score displays his usual craft it's ultimately a minor work though a highly enjoyable one, especially upon repeated listenings. Sondheim was on an amazing streak through the 70s and mid-80s, with several classic shows -- Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park With George -- as well as two shows, Pacific Overtures and Merrily We Roll Along, which were less dramatically satisfying but benefited from his spectacular song scores. His first show after Sunday, Into the Woods, was one of his biggest commercial successes, but despite many clever and moving songs (especially the ones sung by Joanna Gleason and Bernadette Peters), the show was overlong and the final numbers fell a little flat (though many Sondheim fans vehemently disagree with me, finding the finale to be among his most moving), seeming like an unsuccessful attempt to tie the show up dramatically and thematically (as opposed to the stunningly conceived and executed conclusions of Sweeney and Sunday).

As if deliberately forsaking the (relatively) family friendly subject matter of Into the Woods, his next project was Assassins, a darkly comic look at the real life characters who tried (and sometimes succeeded) to assassinate American presidents. While not entirely successful as a show (I admit I haven't seen the recent revival, which has received largely raves), the songs are frequently dazzling, with a wonderful pastiche Americana sound.

The next show was Passion, based on the novel Fosca and the movie Passione d'Amore (scored by Armando Trovajoli) about a plain woman's obsessive love for a handsome officer. Though there were memorable passages, highlighted by the Tony winning performance of Donna Murphy (from Spider-Man 2 and Star Trek: Insurrection) as the heroine Fosca, the show was unsatisfying, the score more through-composed than usual which encouraged the kind of recitative-based songs that many (including Sondheim) are inclined to criticize when Andrew Lloyd Webber writes them. The finale wrapped up the story unconvincingly, so much so that when I saw the show on Broadway some audience members openly snickered at the ending.

In many ways, Bounce is a big improvement on Passion, but in his apparent attempt to make a lighter and more crowd pleasing show, Sondheim and Weidman have crafted something largely forgettable, a true rarity for the composer. There are fine, catchy songs and a pleasant pastiche sound (reminiscent at times of Assassins' Americana) with echoes of Sunday in the Park and Merrily We Roll Along, but one of the strongest elements of the album is actually Richard Kind's performance as Addison Mizner (the photograph of the real Addison in the CD booklet suggests the late Robert Morley). Kind has been a TV fixture for over a decade, beginning with the short-lived forensics drama UNSUB, which predated the movie of The Silence of the Lambs by two years and was a forerunner of today's ubiquitous CSI shows, though Kind is best known for his regular roles on Mad About You and Spin City. Kind's performance in Bounce gives the show both its heart and its passion, while Howard McGillin as Wilson seems inappropriately callow. I don't know if this is due to Sondheim's lyrics or McGillin's youthful voice (he's been on Broadway for at least two decades, playing one of the soldiers in Sunday in the Park back in 84), but McGillin always sounds too boyish for the famously acerbic Wilson. That may partly be an inherent flaw in the musical theater style -- I doubt if anyone who played Joe Gillis in Lloyd Webber's musical of Sunset Boulevard was ever able to capture the effortless, world-weariness of William Holden in the movie, and a friend who listened to the cast album Kiss of the Spider Woman kept wondering "Which one's the straight one? "

As a Sondheim obsessive, I have managed to acquire early drafts of the script over the last decade, and in the italicized sections of this review I will compare the cast album to the early drafts as well as to Alva Johnson's book The Fabulous Mizners (aka The Legendary Mizners).

In the opening scenes, both brothers die of natural causes in 1933, only a month apart. Estranged for years, they find themselves unwillingly reunited in the afterlife, where they sing a duet of the title song, BOUNCE (4:07), a softshoe (briefly interrupted when Wilson takes a snort of cocaine) in which they explain how they learned to recover from adversity throughout their lives. The song is one of the strongest in the score, though it's overused over the course of the show -- the fact that "Bounce" was the show's third title suggests that Sondheim only eventually settled on it as a uniting theme.

The "First Draft," dated 3/21/97, begins with the brothers onstage in a vaudeville show, singing a song called "Wise Guys," which is one of only two songs that had been written for this draft, and which did not end up in the final version of the show. The 10/26/98 draft has yet another different opening, with the brothers watching a historical pageant of great Americans and climbing onto the stage themselves. This leads to the vaudeville setting of the first draft's opening, where they again sing "Wise Guys."

Wilson and Addison witness the death of their father, who in his dying words (sometimes mumbled and duly interpreted by their mother, played by 75 year old Seven Brides For Seven Brothers star Jane Powell), giving the fateful advice to pursue every OPPORTUNITY (2:23). The song is one of the more broadly comic in the show, with Addison puzzled by Papa's exhortation "Westward ho, boys!" ("But Papa, we're in California"), and Mama interpreting "We'll be rich again" as "We're in Michigan." Herndon Lackey plays Mr. Mizner as well as many of the other male supporting roles, and his vocal performance as Papa sounds eerily like another father figure from Sondheim -- Tom Aldredge as the baker's errant father in Into the Woods.

The 3/27/97 draft introduces Wilson and Addison's four upstanding older brothers, who have no role in the final version of the show, and Mama sings a song which introduces the brothers and narrates the family's adventures around the world -- this is the only other song in the First Draft, and like "Wise Guys" didn't make it into Bounce. The 10/26/98 draft dispenses with the other brothers more quickly, and Mama sings the "my two young men" section of "Next to You," which leads into "Gold!," which is essentially the same as in Bounce.

Sondheim works in a classic Americana vein for GOLD! (2:54), as the siren song of the Gold Rush lures the brothers to the Yukon, goaded by Mama. Kind's reading of lines like "ALASKA? Way up in ALASKA?" makes this one of the album's liveliest cues. GOLD! - PART 2 (0:31) is a brief continuation, as a group of poker players in Alaska try to con Wilson out of his money.

WHAT'S YOUR RUSH? (2:33) is a seduction song sung to young Wilson by Nellie (Michelle Pawk), a dance hall girl in Alaska. The sinuous melody and insinuating lyrics are reminiscent of other Sondheim seduction songs like Dick Tracy's "Sooner or Later" and Into the Woods' "Hello, Little Girl," and it's one of the few songs from the score that is sufficiently self-contained to be performed outside of the show's context. The song is pleasant enough, but like too much of the romantic material in Bounce it's a bit on the unmemorable side, though the relaxed tempo makes it a pleasant change from the bustling numbers that surround it.

Though Nellie isn't featured in either of the early drafts, according to the Johnson book she was a real person, nicknamed ìNellie the Pigî by the miners because of her upturned nose. The 3/27/97 draft features an especially vaudevillian sequence in Alaska where Wilson convinces Addison to don a polar bear suit for a boxing match, and they both end up pursued offstage by a real polar bear.

Wilson performs one of the show's strongest songs, THE GAME (2:31), singing of his philosophy of life -- "And anyway, when all is said and done/The fun is in the winning, not what's won" -- to a skeptical Addison. In some ways the song may be especially close to Sondheim's heart -- a noted game collector, he inspired the Laurence Olivier character in the play Sleuth, which briefly bore the title "Who's Afraid of Stephen Sondheim."

NEXT TO YOU (3:47) is an unusual number, a romantic waltz in which the two brothers compete with each other for Mama's love, while Mama sings of the reasons she loves "my two young men" each equally but differently. The emphasis on mother-son love in the score is especially noteworthy considering Sondheim's own personal history -- he had a famously difficult relationship with his own mother, epitomized by the time she went in for surgery and left him a note reading "The only regret I have in life is giving you birth."

ADDISON'S TRIP (6:32) is my favorite number in the show (though it should more properly be called "I'm On My Way"), a musical montage depicting Addison's globetrotting business misadventures, from Honolulu to Hong Kong to Guatemala. Kind's rendition is wonderful, Sondheim's lyrics are at his cleverest, and the song is deftly structured dramatically (if biographically questionable), showing how all the artifacts Addison accumulates on his travels ("A Ming tureen/And a lacquered screen/A statue painted a bilious green") inspire him to a career in architecture.

Both "Next to You" and "Addison's Trip" are featured in the 10/26/98 draft (but not "The Game"), though the lyrics in "Addison's Trip" are a little different, especially the litany of Addison's acquisitions -- "a whatnot made out of God-knows-what" became "a wicker whatnot from God-knows-where," for example. The earlier draft features a version of this sequence but with no lyrics. In real life, Addison had worked in architecture years earlier, but it's such a terrific number that it'd be churlish to quibble with the biographical inaccuracy, which increases drastically in the next number--

Years later, Willie and Nellie meet up again, when he's broke and she's the millionaire widow Mrs. Eleanor Yerkes. They sing the duet THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAS HAPPENED (4:13), which is probably the weakest song in the show. Besides the musical awkwardness of the title, Wilson's line "You are the sexiest thing that has happened to me" seems both cheesy and anachronistic, two qualities one would never think to associate with Sondheim's lyrics.

There was a real Mrs. Yerkes whom Wilson married, but she was in her eighties and the marriage was quite brief. Needless to say, she was not the same person as Alaska's "Nellie the Pig." The early drafts feature a more historically accurate Mrs. Yerkes.

I LOVE THIS TOWN (3:57) is another one of the score's highlights, an exuberant musical montage depicting Wilson's string of New York successes, for as "Broadway Willie" he's renowned both as a fight manager and a theatrical producer but has little time for Nellie. Even though the song is dominated by Wilson, Addison gets one of the most moving moments in the intro, singing "Willie's got a wife/Even better, Willie's got a life" with genuine affection.

In the 10/26/98 draft, Wilson sings a song called "What's Next" (which resembles an early draft of "Bounce") after his breakup with Mrs. Yerkes, not featured in Bounce, which covers the same period of his life. Two real-life figures crop up briefly in "I Love This Town," boxer Stanley Ketchel and playwright Paul Armstrong. Ketchel was one of the most famous boxers of the era but largely forgotten now, and while in the show he's killed by a jilted girlfriend, in real life he was killed by a man who claimed Ketchel had seduced his wife, but Ketchel's killer was convicted of murder after it turned out that he and his "wife" weren't even married and Ketchel was set up. In the song, Wilson is producing Armstrong's new play, but in real life he was actually Armstrong's co-author, though Wilson was a famous non-writing writer who could tell brilliant stories and speak amazing dialogue but was never able to personally put pen to paper.

From her sickbed, Mama sings ISN'T HE SOMETHING (3:11) about her love for the errant Wilson ("If he had the slightest sense of shame/It would be a shame"), giving Jane Powell one last chance to shine in the show before her character dies. Traumatized by Mama's death, Addison takes it out on Wilson, who has arrived too late to witness her final moments, and the grieving Addison sings BOUNCE (1:42) to himself as the first act ends.

In the 10/26/98 draft, Mama sings a version of "What's Next" before expiring. In Bounce, Addison allows Wilson to find Mama's dead body unprepared, but in the early drafts Addison instead lies to Wilson, claiming that Mama's last words were about how Wilson "never thought about anybody but himself."

As Act Two begins, Wilson, Addison and Nellie have each gone their separate ways and sing a reprise of THE GAME (5:33), interrupted by the news of the Florida "Land Boom!," the lyrics fittingly sung to the tune of "Gold," and "The Game" resumes with a peppier tempo as the news gives the three protagonists a new chance for success.

In the 10/26/98 draft, Addison sings a version of "Wise Guys" leading into the "Land Boom" passage from Bounce.

On a train to Florida, Addison meets Hollis Bessemer (Gavin Creel), the wealthy young man who will become his lover, and Hollis sings of how his lifelong love of art and desire to be an artist were thwarted by his lack of TALENT (2:28). One of the score's best numbers, it's clever and moving at the same time, and demonstrates a particularly impressive bit of empathy on the part of Sondheim, a man whose own talent has never been in doubt.

Hollis is a fictional character, but the early drafts feature a real life counterpart, Paris Singer, who is merely a business partner and not Addison's lover. The Johnson book makes no mention of Addison's homosexuality (it was published in the early 50s, after all), but it's doubtful that Weidman and Sondheim would have made up a detail like this about a real life person, despite all the other fictionalization. Howard McGillin played Paris Singer in a Sam Mendes-directed workshop reading of the show, with Nathan Lane and Victor Garber as Addison and Wilson, and Debra Monk as Mama.

YOU (4:10) is another highlight and a first in the Sondheim canon -- a gay duet, between Addison and Hollis. Their lyrics are fairly banal for Sondheim--

You
Where have you been all my life?
You
You're the answer to my prayers
You
You're one in a million

In the 10/26/98 draft, Addison sings a song called "Dowagers" as he woos the wealthy women of Florida into hiring him.

ADDISON'S CITY (4:17) begins with a reworking of "Talent," which Hollis sings to Addison after he and Wilson have joined forces to convince the more-than-reluctant Addison (and the wealthy Nellie) to design his potentially greatest achievement, an entire pre-planned city to capitalize on the Florida land boom -- "Not just fancy forts for rich old farts/Much more than a city, Countess/More like an amalgam of the arts."

In the 10/26/98 draft, Addison, Wilson and Paris sing a trio of "Wise Guys."

BOCA RATON (6:29) depicts the frenzied rise and fall of the land boom, moving from a relaxed, tropical tempo to a frenzy as the boom crashes, with typically acerbic lyrics -- "All alone, and f****d for good/F****d as only Willie could." The brief BOCA RATON AFTERMATH (0:32) follows, as Hollis, believing that Addison has deliberately defrauded him, leaves him, and Nellie also goes her own way, finally giving up on Wilson.

The 10/26/98 draft features a largely similar version of "Boca Raton," but the lyrics vary from the final version. In the early drafts, Paris publicly repudiates Wilson's false claims about their building project, but in real life it was General T. Coleman Du Pont who sent a letter to the major papers, disavowing his relationship with the Mizners and helping to end the boom.

The relationship between the brothers is finally sundered in GET OUT OF MY LIFE (3:03), reminiscent of Sunday in the Park's powerful "We Do Not Belong Together," which reconfirms Sondheim's status as the Bard of Bitterness. The song reaches an emotional peak with Kind's wrenching delivery of the lyric "I love you, I love you/And worse, I DESERVE you!" In the final number, a reprise of BOUNCE (1:36), Wilson and a resigned Addison look west toward a new journey -- the afterlife.

Variety's pan of the Chicago production, which preceded the D.C. production, mentions a "terrific" final song, "Last Flight," which is featured in neither the early drafts nor the final production.

The CD closes with a bonus track of a song cut before the opening, Addison singing the self-explanatory A LITTLE HOUSE FOR MAMA (3:34), a pleasant enough song though it doesn't advance the story much and mostly helps to make Addison seem like the world's biggest mama's boy. It would have been great to have more of the deleted songs included -- maybe someday.

--Scott Bettencourt

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