Dirty rotten scoundrels

Where, in those words, is the aloof, curmudgeonly ascetic, the aridly intellectual writer of overcomplicated, unmemorable melodies that Sondheim’s critics love portraying him as? The answer is nowhere, because he doesn’t exist. “I’m a rank sentimentalist,” he insists, laughing. “I’m a romantic — it’s so clear. If anything, I should be faulted for being wet, not for being dry. But intelligence often gets mistaken for asceticism. If I were only writing music, I don’t think it would bother people so much. But it’s the combination.” That is being re-evaluated, I suggest. “Well, I think what you call the mis­perception is changing, because, if you just hang on long enough, people get used to you. When there were six of my musicals done in Washington in 2002, the leading New York critic, Ben Brantley, said — and I paraphrase — that far from being cold, I may be the most sentimental, most heart-on-sleeve songwriter around. And he’s right. It’s all I’ve ever been — I was brought up on movies, for Christ’s sake.”

I ask him if he thinks skill is a quality that is viewed with suspicion. “Well, it is very much allied to the accusations of aridity and soullessness,” he replies. “That’s absolutely true. But whenever I look at Dali’s pictures, say, I don’t care how pretentious or silly some people think they are, I look at the skill and think, ‘Oh, boy. How the hell?’ Or any of the old masters. I just go berserk about the amount of skill. It does imply an intellectual judgment, yes. But skill in the service of passion — what could be better? That’s what creates really good art.”

We are talking in a room above the London theatre where Road Show, another of his more problematic works, receives its British premiere next week. Sondheim is in town for the dress rehearsal, which I join him at later. Slightly unsteady on his feet as he ascends a steep staircase, in every other respect he is as sharp and agile as ever — delightfully, cattily good company, ordering up more white wine, readily moved to tears, cackling away when he’s been particularly mischievous, barking out anecdotes in a rasping voice.

The Menier Chocolate Factory has a distinguished track record with Sondheim, having revived Sunday in the Park with George and A Little Night Music; both productions transferred to the West End, then to Broadway. Road Show’s gestation has been particularly drawn out and convoluted. It began life in 1999 as Wise Guys, in Sam Mendes-directed workshop form, in New York. Rewritten as Bounce, it opened there, in 2003, directed by Hal Prince. Five years later, in a radically altered version, it reached the stage as Road Show in a production by John Doyle, who two years earlier had won a Tony award for his staging of Sondheim’s Company. My friends might say, ‘Jesus Christ, he’s the most manipulative man I’ve known in my life.’ But as far as I know, I’ve been pretty honest about myself

In fact, Road Show’s roots go much further back, to when Sondheim was only 22 and, having read a biography entitled The Legendary Mizners, set about saving up the money to buy the rights. He would soon discover that they had already been snapped up by the producer David Merrick, who had plans for an Irving Berlin score. These plans came to nothing, but Sondheim remained fascinated by Wilson and Addison Mizner, siblings who were chancers and ne’er-do-wells. Their careers spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and encompassed the Klondike gold rush, the writing of Broadway shows, restaurant ownership, Fifth Avenue retailing, boxing promotion, fraud, alcoholism, drug addiction, Hollywood scriptwriting and, in Addison’s case, the designing of houses for plutocrats in Florida.

The composer has form when it comes to flawed antiheroes, to characters impaled on the horns of a moral dilemma who seek to negotiate a way back to earlier happiness, clarity or innocence. He couldn’t imagine writing about someone who was “sanguine — to do so without making them dull is hard. I used to love all those movies about conmen. There’s something about those guys, when they’re good at what they do, that really tickles me”.

Merrily’s central character, let’s not forget, was a once idealistic Broadway composer (Frank Shepherd) who becomes, as Sondheim puts it, “a jaded, crass, mani­pulative man, and you first meet him as that”. The decision to tell the story from end to beginning — to be first introduced to Frank at his worst and to see him at his best only in the final scenes — was, of course, the key problem with the musical, as Sondheim soon discovered. “It’s the picture of Dorian Gray in reverse,” he concedes. “You start with that portrait, everybody’s going to leave the theatre, right? Nobody would sit through that. I wouldn’t. I’d say, ‘Ugh, horror show — out!’”

The American director and playwright George Abbott was, Sondheim says, “the only person I ever met who knew Wilson Mizner, and he said he was one of the most awful sons of bitches he ever met. Now George, although he was a removed and cold man, was not a bitch, and if he said Wilson was a shit, he meant it.” Sondheim’s skill, in the non-arid sense of the word, is to give Wilson lyrics and melodies of incredible seductiveness. Both brothers charm and manipulate you, two key Sondheim words.

Could they be applied to him, too? “I wouldn’t think so,” he chuckles. “The reason for that is simple. I had this extremely difficult mother whose primary characteristic was that she was a compulsive liar. So I learnt early on not to do that. I mean, I lie as much as anybody else about dinner parties — ‘I can’t come over because I’ve got a cold’ — when I have something better to do. But the sort of lying implied when you speak of manipulative people is something I find abhorrent. That’s not a high-horse thing. It’s against... I would say my nature, but it’s really against what I learnt at my mother’s knee. Therefore I don’t think of myself that way. Now, I might be dead wrong, and you could get my friends together and they’d go, ‘Jesus Christ, he’s the most manipulative man I’ve known in my life.’ But as far as I know, I’ve been pretty honest about myself.”

He is clearly drawn to such people, though. “If you see pictures of Wilson, he was very unattractive. He was sallow, with this long face, and, because he started drugging and drinking at an early age, by the time he was 30, he looked 50, and by the time he died, he looked 90. But he obviously had that thing that makes the birdies forget to sing.”

You can speculate about where what might be termed this appalled fascination comes from in Sondheim, but he’ll resist you all the way. “It always sounds like a cover-up,” he says, “but it’s true. I merely, like an actor, get under the skins of the people that the librettist has created, or that we have created together. I speak for them, and you cannot write about people you don’t in some way love. That is all that matters. I am not out to make a point, and I’m certainly not out to reveal myself or conceal myself.”

Road Show is not, perhaps, right up there with Sondheim’s classics, but it is a musical in which everything his fans love about him — his gift for melody, lyrics, narrative, characterisation, empathy and sentiment — is put at the service of a sharply drawn and engrossing piece of musical theatre. And written not by an aloof curmudgeon, but by a passionate, committed, romantic man who is still, in his ninth decade, seeking what he “always expected the theatre to be like”.

Road Show, Menier Chocolate Factory, SE1, from Wednesday