[Fasten your seatbelts, this one’s an epic — but I think it’s worth it! Brian xx]
The groundbreaking gay musical La Cage Aux Folles premiered on Broadway forty years ago this week: August 21st, 1983. Decades later, its affectionate depiction of a loving, same-sex couple had theatre critic Michael Billington declaring, ‘No piece of theatre has done more to enhance gay self-esteem or encourage sexual tolerance.’
So why had I – a flagrant homosexual show queen – failed to see it, or even listen to the recording, until this week??
Because I’ve always been #TeamSondheim.
Let me explain.
Most of the world knows La Cage, currently enjoying a successful summer revival at London’s Open Air Theatre in Regents Park, as a joyous comedy about same-sex love. Its score by hit-maker Jerry Herman includes the classic empowerment anthem ‘I Am What I Am,’ beloved of drag queens and disco divas the world over.
To me, though, La Cage had always represented one side in an artistic feud between two musical theatre icons.
On the surface, the divergent careers of Jerry Herman and Stephen Sondheim demonstrate different approaches to popular art: accessible show tunes vs. atonal experimentation; critical vs. commercial success.
But the twinned stories of these gay artists, whose careers began pre-Stonewall and continued into the AIDS era, also encompass internalised homophobia, HIV stigma and the thorny question of how to express your identity through art.
Let’s rewind…
1984
Upon its debut, La Cage swept the Tony Awards, winning all the major prizes including Best Book, Best Score and Best Musical. Although shoutouts to queer pride are ubiquitous at the Tonys nowadays, book writer Harvey Fierstein caused a controversy back then by thanking ‘my lover Scott’ in his speech.
Jerry Herman, however, avoided any references to gay visibility in his acceptance speech, but weighed in on a different kind of culture war:
This award forever shatters a myth about the musical theatre. There's been a rumor around for a couple of years that the simple, hummable show tune was no longer welcome on Broadway. Well, it's alive and well at the Palace!
Although the term ‘subtweet’ had not yet been coined, everyone in the audience could’ve guessed where Herman’s shade was being thrown.
The ’84 Tonys had pitted La Cage against Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. Sunday went home nearly empty-handed, winning only for its Lighting and Scenic Design.
Reading about this years later as a teenage Sondheim obsessive, I interpreted that loss as a crime against taste and Herman’s speech as unconscionable gloating. Back then, I devoured everything Sondheim, listening to cast recordings over and over and even subscribing to the Sondheim Review. With its intricate wordplay and psychological complexity, Sondheim’s work represented everything layered, postmodern and nuanced that I hoped to emulate in art.
Jerry Herman, composer of middlebrow hits like Hello, Dolly!, represented showbiz schlock, cheap sentiment and major chords.
And I wasn’t alone in setting these two on opposite artistic poles.
On that very same ’84 broadcast, the Tonys offered up two star-studded medleys running twelve minutes each that glided through each composer’s work to date, framing their contrasting talents for the audience at home.
(If you want quick primers on the work of Herman or of Sondheim, consider watching these segments on YouTube before you read on.)
According to the Tony copywriters:
‘If I had to sum up Jerry Herman in one word, there is only one word that could be used: optimism…’
And in the opposite corner:
‘There are many things one might say about Stephen Sondheim and his work, but among them is not that he settles for ‘easy.’ Don’t check your mind with your coat when you buy a ticket for a Sondheim musical!’
To put it in more contemporary terms:
For Sondheim, the ’83-’84 season was something of a ‘coming out’ moment — not regarding his sexuality (which he’d still never addressed publicly) but in marking his transition from Broadway to the non-commercial sector.
His previous show Merrily We Roll Along had closed after only two weeks, prompting Sondheim to develop Sunday through a workshop process Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. In this smaller pond, he was able let his postmodern freak flag fly, writing one of his most conceptual shows yet.
Across two acts structured as ‘theme and variation,’ Sunday doesn’t exactly tell the story of pointillist painter Georges Seurat so much as it meditates on the challenges of artistic creation itself. Seurat, an obvious Sondheim stand-in, stays true to his unique vision, even when that means eschewing popular success and rejecting romance in favor of a steadfast dedication to his work.
Structurally and musically, the show was not traditional Broadway fare, but it had made it there thanks to huge critical backing, particularly from Frank Rich at the New York Times. To some in the theatre community, this may have seemed like special pleading for a niche piece that many audiences found baffling.
La Cage, on the other hand, was risky in a totally different way. A team of all-gay creatives (not just Herman and Fierstein but also director Arthur Laurents and caftan-clad producer Allan Carr) had chosen a story that redefined the concept of ‘family values’ and hinged on its lead characters affirming their sexuality in the face of homophobic bigots.
Fierstein, who came from the post-Stonewall generation, initially pushed for an even more unapologetic approach to the show’s gayness but Laurents insisted they proceed cautiously. George and Albin were deliberately cast with heterosexual actors and Laurents refused to have the couple kiss at the end. He even insisted on including a couple of biological women amongst the chorus line of men in drag: ‘This way,’ he reasoned, ‘should a straight man feel attracted to one of the performers, he can ease his guilt by telling himself he was looking at one of the real girls.’
The premise itself already tested mainstream (i.e. straight) audiences’ tolerance, so why push it? In his recent autobiography, Fierstein admits that Laurents’s approach was probably right for the time: ‘I wanted to change the world, but you ain’t changing nothing unless you’re putting asses in the seats.’
La Cage is an unabashedly commercial show that isn’t trying to revoluntionise the musical comedy form. Instead, it leans into the sequins and sentiment to make its unconventional lead couple more palatable.
It’s Herman’s lyrics that are arguably the show’s most radical element. He gives us a tuneful Act One showstopper, but stealthily inserts Gay Pride slogans for audiences to hum along to at intermission:
It's my world that I want to take a little pride in,
My world, and it's not a place I have to hide in…There's one life, and there's no return and no deposit;
One life, so it's time to open up your closet!
Compare this open-hearted declaration to Georges Seurat’s Act One soliloquy ‘Finishing the Hat,’ in which he retreats from emotional entanglements into a world of artistic abstraction:
But the woman who won't wait for you knows
That, however you live,
There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out the sky…
Finishing a hat...
The two composers’ divergent musical tastes coincide with deeper emotional differences in the subjects they’re drawn to.
Herman’s heroines would never keep a ‘part of’ themselves just ‘standing by’. Albin in La Cage, like Dolly and Mame, is another in a long line of protagonists who are wholly and completely themselves.
Born one year apart, both Herman and Sondheim had come of age in the decades before Stonewall. As Sondheim later said, ‘Everybody knew the theatre was full of homosexuals, but nobody admitted to being so.’
In writing La Cage, Herman had ‘opened up his closet’ in a way that his trendier contemporary Sondheim was still uncomfortable with.
If we rewind back a bit, maybe this isn’t so surprising.
1964
In many ways, the template for the Sondheim-Herman rivalry was set twenty years prior.
Hello, Dolly! was a megahit, the kind of popular show that saturates the culture in a way no Broadway show could ever do today. Louis Armstrong’s recording of the title tune rose to #1 on the Billboard charts, dislodging no less of a hit than the Beatles’ ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’.
Meanwhile, Sondheim’s show that season was the biggest flop of his career: the offbeat, countercultural satire Anyone Can Whistle (with book and direction, as it happens, by Arthur Laurents). It closed after only nine performances.
It’s impossible to know what a thirty-four year-old Sondheim might’ve grumbled snarkily about his uber-successful contemporary from the corner of a Broadway after-party. It was clear even then that the two had different agendas: Herman was playing for, and achieving, mass appeal, whilst Sondheim was trying, as yet unsuccessfully, to expand the form.
We can get a hint of what Sondheim thought from a little-known song he wrote a few years later for an unproduced film project. The script called for a tune not unlike ‘Hello, Dolly!’ that would be played on the radio over and over – ‘a big hit song from a big hit show that you can’t get away from.’
The pastiche Steve came up with is pure Herman, but curdled:
You thought it all would be pie
No, Mary Ann!
Pink little birds in the sky
No, Mary Ann!
Trite quotidian images, repetitive phrases; one can just imagine Sondheim smirking as he completed the assignment. According to his withering assessment, the idea of the ‘hummable’ show tune was a myth, accounted for by force-feeding:
Hummability really is a matter of repetition, and many of the songs of the so-called ‘golden years’ of musical theater were hummable partly because there were four reprises in these shows, and they got played on the air all the time.
Most of Herman’s famous songs are built on catchy monosyllables and simple declarative statements. They are what they are. His characters introduce themselves with personalities too big to be ignored, take ’em or leave ’em:
You coax the blues right out of the horn… Mame!
You charm the husk right off of the corn… Mame!
Wow wow wow, fellas
Look at the old girl now, fellas
Dolly'll never go away
Dolly'll never go away
Dolly'll never go away again!
This style proved lucrative for Herman in the 60s. Dolly! and Mame both clocked in at 1,500 performances and toured widely across middle America. By contrast, even the longest runs of Sondheim’s whole career were less than half that. He gained accolades and a devoted following, but would always remain a succès d’estime compared to Herman’s succès de success.
Sondheim’s eventual breakthrough in the 70s came hand in hand with a mounting cultural cynicism that made Herman’s earlier earnestness seem quaint. Where a Herman lyric declares itself with its heart on its sleeve, Sondheim’s are often caught in a thicket of self-consciously conflicted rhetorical questions:
Isn’t it rich, are we a pair?
Leave you? Leave you?
How could I leave you?
How could I go it alone?
You're sorry-grateful
Regretful-happy
Why look for answers
Where none occur?
Though they were from the same generation, Sondheim’s embrace of challenging, risqué subject matter made his work seem more contemporary. If either of them were going to present frank homosexual desire onstage, your money might’ve been on the guy who’d already dissected unhappy marriages and murderous barbers.
In fact, the opposite was true.
Sondheim’s personal attitude to sexuality was marked by the same ambivalence he depicted so acutely in his characters. Speaking much later about his love life, he acknowledged, ‘I was never easy with being a homosexual, which complicated things.’ Those internal struggles show up his art.
A show like Company, for example, about a bachelor named Bobby who fears commitment, was subject to many queer readings over the years, which Sondheim strenuously resisted. Whatever the orientation of Bobby (or ‘Bobbie’ as she was re-named in a recent, gender-swapped revival), the show’s whole energy derives from the tension of the protagonist’s sexual hang-ups. The entire piece, as gay critic Adam Feldman convincingly argues, is ‘in some sense, a product of the closet.’
Coming into the 1980s, Stephen Sondheim would’ve had to work through a lot of gay shame before he could write anything as affirming as La Cage Aux Folles.
Herman, meanwhile, was moved to tears a couple years into the run of La Cage when he heard ‘I Am What I Am’ played from a float in the Gay Pride parade. By then, he’d settled down contentedly with live-in partner Marty Finkelstein.
Although his score declared that ‘The Best of Times Is Now,’ it couldn’t have felt that way as HIV/AIDS began to ravage the community. In just a few years, as Sondheim’s sexuality remained secretive, Herman’s life would be upended by loss and an unasked-for outing that halted his career.
1994
The publicity around Sondheim’s musical Passion ventured into hitherto mysterious terrain: his personal life.
Under the headline ‘Mr Cool Tries Passion,’ the LA Times reported:
He is in love, reportedly for the first time in his life. Though he is notoriously private, a childhood friend maintains that ‘Steve is happier and calmer than he’s ever been,’ and that is presumably due in part to his involvement with a young musician.
Coy references to an un-gendered ‘young musician’ were a trial balloon for the public revelation that the maestro of emotional alienation had feelings, sexual and otherwise.
Love was, ostensibly, the theme of his new show, but — this being Sondheim — of course it was complicated.
Passion’s heroine Fosca is sickly, conventionally unattractive and completely obsessed with a hunky soldier. The passion she directs at him is not experienced as pleasure, but a relentless force that cracks the love object open:
I wish I could forget you
Erase you from my mind
But ever since I met you
I find
I cannot leave the thought of you behind
That doesn't mean I love you...
Clearly, Steve was still working through some shit.
He would come out publicly five years later in a 1999 authorized biography. During this same period, though, Jerry Herman was not allowed to maintain his privacy.
First Herman had lost Marty, aged only 36, to AIDS-related illness and then received his own positive diagnosis. Adding to that, his HIV status was revealed without his consent in the pages of the New York Post by gossip columnist Cindy Adams.
As his T-cell count dropped, work dried up. As he later put it, producers began thinking, ‘Oh we can’t hire him, because he could get sick in the middle of a tryout.’
Despite La Cage’s success, Herman would never have another new show produced.
Understandably, Mr. Optimism went through a period of deep despair: ‘Inwardly, I was empty. I like to write happy, romantic songs, and I didn’t feel romantic or happy. I didn’t feel like a whole person.’
And yet Herman’s ultimate response to this truly daunting set of personal circumstances was worthy of one of his resilient heroines. I’ve got a goal again, I’ve got a drive again, I wanna feel my heart coming alive again, Before the parade passes by…
Starting in the mid-90s, when public discourse around HIV had mostly sunk into silence, Herman embraced his role as a long-term HIV survivor, speaking about it in TV interviews and even appearing on the cover of Poz magazine in 1997 to tell the story of his experience with anti-retroviral therapy:
I wanted to tell people in my situation that there are medications now that can normalize your system. At the moment, I have no viral activity in my body. It’s below zero. It’s called ’out of range.’ I can hardly believe I’m telling you this. I’m not a person who believes in miracles. I wasn’t brought up to believe in miracles. But I think I do now.
It would be decades before the U=U findings proved conclusively that those with undetectable viral loads could not pass the virus on. And, of course, back then (and still today) access to these medications remains a huge challenge for folks, especially from Black and brown communities, without affordable health coverage.
What Herman did, though, was not unlike his choice to write La Cage: he offered his face and reassuring image to adjust public perception of an issue that invoked fear and prejudice in middle America. Jerry never shirked from speaking about his status, which was hugely rare in those days, and organised concerts of his songs to benefit HIV/AIDS charities.
Speaking about his participation in the drug trials for the FDA approval of protease inhibitors, Herman the hit-making author of Hello, Dolly! said, ‘I think it’s the best thing I’ve done for this world.’
I only learned about this advocacy of Herman’s recently, after I myself had been living with HIV for nearly a decade. Only in researching this essay did I learn that Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, the theatre community’s leading HIV relief fund, grew out of impromptu fundraisers organised by members of the La Cage chorus during their down-time between shows.
It’s fair to say that my assessment of Herman’s life and career has shifted since I was a teenage sophisticate waving the flag for Sondheim.
As I’ve gotten older and navigated the minefield of sharing my HIV status publicly, even making it a part of my work, I’ve come to respect not only Herman’s brave personal choices but also the virtues of his artistic approach, even if I still consider Sondheim’s work richer.
Jerry’s shows, like his attitude, were open – there’s a conscious attempt to welcome in the biggest possible audience. They also exude a resilient life-force that offers strategies for their protagonists to keep going if they can just open a new window, tap their troubles away or put a little more masacara on.
Listening to Passion on CD for the umpteenth time as a teen, I responded to its intellectual intricacy and sublimated desire at least partially because I was a closeted kid who, like the show’s creator, had some ways to go to acknowledge my identity.
Thanks to Jerry and Zaza, there were probably some other theatre kids out there who were way ahead of me in becoming their own special creations.
Bosom Buddies
In a hetero world, there are multiple ways to be a queer artist. Jerry Herman and Stephen Sondheim embody at least two of them:
— You can aim for the masses, planting positive representations and messages of acceptance inside broadly familiar forms;
— Or you can deconstruct the forms you’ve inherited, aiming to present the world anew — and hope that at least a select few will appreciate your vision…
But, wait a minute, have I learned nothing from all those cast recordings?
Must it all be either less or more?
Either plain or grand?
Is it always ‘or’?
Is it never… ‘and’?
Herman did try to write like Sondheim, at least once. Mack and Mabel, his downbeat show that ends with one of the leads dying from drug addiction, was not what audiences wanted — but he always considered it his favorite score.
Sondheim tried, at least once, to write an openly gay character in a show so confounding that it had at least four different titles and never felt finished — but he kept on trying.
Whereas Herman the traditionalist ended up on the cover of Poz, Sondheim the trailblazer consented to being photographed with… Pete Buttigieg?!?
Tell me again which of them is the more radical role model?
As gay men whose lives stretched from the 1930s to the twenty-first century, of course they contained contradictions.
Jerry Herman himself seemed to think the comparison between them was pointless:
Sondheim is a genius and I'm a songwriter. We're not in the same league as minds. I couldn't write about presidential assassins if you put a gun to my temple. My whole reason for being is to entertain people. I'm a mass audience person. That's where I aim, and that's where I hit.
I’d like to imagine that, if Steve and Jerry do find themselves chatting in that Great White Way up in the sky, they’re not trading barbs like Mame and Vera Charles.
Perhaps Angela Lansbury, newly arrived in the afterlife, can serve as a mediator.
And then they can join forces to Fight the Real Enemy:
As Jerry Herman taught us, time heals everything.