Stephen Sondheim

Neither [West Side Story nor Gypsy] were as successful as movies. What are your views on that? Why was that?

Westside was much more successful as a movie than it was as a show. ... Gypsy is the reverse. Gypsy was quite successful, although not as successful as it should have been. ... I think movie musicals are uh at best very shaky propositions. I think a musical for a movie has to be written for film. It should not be an adaptation of a stage piece. There's such different languages and um what holds one's attention through stage convention simply is uh boring enough On film, I think.

Why [did you choose] a woman who sells hot meat pies made from the victims of a mass murderer [as] a subject for a musical [in Sweeney Todd]?

Well, I've always been interested in Grand Guignol, and I've always wanted to do a scary musical. ... I realized after thinking about it for a while that that what was missing was the sense of sustained music, that what makes a Hitchcock film or a horror film work is the constant presence of music on the sound track so that silences count for something. ... And I happen to be in London for rehearsals of Gypsy. In nineteen seventy three, and they were playing at Stratford East a version of Sweeney Todd. I'd never seen it. ... I went out to see it and I was bowled over. because it had real charm and it was also very creepy. and it laid itself out like a libretto.

Are you disciplined if you're sent away to write another number to cover a certain situation or to rewrite a scene? Can you go straight away, sit down and write?

When there's a real deadline, there's absolutely no problem at all. When I know that something has to be in because we're going out of town next week, there's no problem. My moderately well-known example, because I've spoken about it before, is I wrote Send in the Clouds overnight because it was needed with the last week of rehearsal, and Glynis Johns needed a number in the second act where we didn't think she needed one before.

Are you content that your appeal is as a cult figure, that your work is caviar to the general?

Content is an odd word. I um I'm not discontent, I I suppose. I think the major joy of writing songs is that as many people as possible should hear them, and therefore I'm content in that more and more people hear the songs as the years go by and see the shows.

How did you come to meet Oscar Hammerstein?

My parents were divorced when I was 10 years old and my mother got custody of me and she bought a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. And three miles from the house she bought lived the Hammerstein family. They had a son named Jimmy, my age, and we became close chums. And I had a good deal of difficulty with my mother, who was a difficult woman. And I spent more and more time over at the Hammerstein house and became a kind of surrogate son. And Oscar became a surrogate father.

Did you eventually become totally alienated from your mother?

Uh no, I j yes. I eventually realized she had she had told me that um if I ever saw my father without her permission, she could have him thrown in jail. It was of course a lie, but I didn't realize it was a lie till I was fifteen years old, and the minute I realized it was a lie, I packed up and went and lived with my father.

Is there a central principle to writing musical theatre that you learned from Oscar Hammerstein?

It's not a trick. It's a central principle, which is to treat songs like little one-act plays, where you present a a situation and then either resolve it, or if you don't resolve it, move it forward, so that by the time you've finished the song, you're at a different point than you were where you were and this is in in terms of the story of the of the show, of the play. So that each song has a function.

Do you prefer actors to singers for your work?

Yeah. I uh it's not preferring actors to singers, but uh if if I'm if I have to decide between an actor who sings all right and a singer who acts all right, I think I prefer the actor who sings all right for most of the shows.

At what moment in the whole cycle of production do you feel the greatest joy?

First, there's the joy for the composer when you hear the orchestra reading down the score and you hear the instruments for the first time. Then, the look on the faces of the cast when they hear the orchestra for the first time is, you know, it's like the look on the face of children on birthdays and Christmas. It is unalloyed joy, and whatever the problems of the show, they disappear for that day.