The Fishbowl

"Do you know how much you mean to people?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve never understood it.”

“People love you.”

“I’m glad. I like most people.”

“You don’t know how talented you are.”

Where I live.

I grew up surrounded by talent. The churches I attended were flooded with magnificent singers and professional musicians. The Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) was flooded with talent. But there’s something I’ve always disliked about talent or, rather, the term. Many, many people have talent. Very few ever get to tap it to its full potential. I’ve known people close to being great artists but never broke the ceiling into something new.

On the positive side of talent, I take delight in seeing someone so versatile that it blows me away. Immediately, I think of Bruno Mars and Jaime Foxx. Those are two of the most talented men I’ve ever seen. Mars was talented at an early age and, even though it’s time for him to give us another “24K Magic” or “That’s What I Like” instead of anymore complaining about love, Foxx suffered for many years on sub-par sitcoms and movies to give us one of the finest performances in a biopic in Ray.

The negative side far outweighs the positive. When there is something unique about you, feel a lot like you’re in a fishbowl, trapped and on display. My abilities in theatre and music mostly mystify those around me as I live in a corner of the world where most people are just “plain folks.” Most of them have talent too, but my approach to art has always been essentially a professional one—I don’t do it because I’m good at certain things, I do it to create something aesthetically beautiful. So, to the local electrician and the railroad workers, and the civil servants, I’m different. Being different never really feels good.

When I flip through my ASFA yearbooks, the most astonishing thing is how I’m never smiling in any photograph. I did about as well as anyone can at ASFA (and, as the saying goes, “Nothing guarantees failure in life like success in high school,” but I always felt set apart. People looked at me like I was from Mars. Additionally, more people knew me than I knew them. I suppose a comparison could be made to the quarterback of the football team. Truthfully, I was mostly lucky. Yes, I might have had talent, but I was cast a lot because I was male (most plays have more male characters) and had a preternatural understanding of theatrical performance that certainly needed honing but was unique among some of my classmates. I’m not saying I was better than them. I was just dead serious about it. That also set me apart from others.

As hinted at earlier, having talent does not necessarily mean you can be a great artist. You might be born with something special, but everyone needs education and training, whether it’s the school of hard knocks or legitimate school. For example, I believe Emma Watson has a lot of talent. It finally paid off in a little film called The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a tiny miracle. She utterly captured the kind of artsy kid I grew up with. But I don’t know of a single performance afterward which paid off in the same way. Like many actors of the day, she is more interested in activism than acting. I think this goes for Natalie Portman as well. It is very possible she hasn’t given a performance as good as her debut in Leon: The Professional. The talent is there. But I’ve not been moved. Not so with Rachel McAdams, for instance, who manages to steal virtually every scene of every movie she’s been in.

And, of course, there are plenty of untalented people who somehow became famous. It would be rude to mention their names so I will do so now…No, just kidding. We can all spot them. “How did they ever make it in Hollywood?” “How did anyone buy that book?” “I could do a better job than that!”

Once people know you have talent, you can’t escape it. I’m a churchgoer and nearly every time I affiliate with part of the Body, this is sniffed at and often used against my wishes. I’ll give you, perhaps, the funniest example:

In 2000, my first full-length play premiered. I was seventeen years old, and this made the local news. We had moved and were looking for a church closer to home. I just wanted to go to church. I didn’t want to do anything else. My plate was full. So, I was glad when the local ABC affiliate decided to interview me on Sunday morning. I thought, “Well, everyone will be in Sunday School and won’t see this. They won’t know I’m a writer or an actor.” By the time, I got to the service, everybody had heard about it, and I was soon cast in Christmas and Easter pageants and sought out for sketches. I was in my senior year of high school, preparing for college. I didn’t want to, but the word was out. In wall-eyed vision, folks were looking at me in the fishbowl, commanding tricks.

Should I be happy with the gifts I was given? I am. Do I sometimes wish I could know people on a deeper level? Almost always. A writer in particular needs people in their lives. We read because, as Harold Bloom told us, one can never know enough people. That is to say, a novel or a poem or a play gives you a view of the world that is truly insightful and could only come from that person. That is part of the reason we fear death. When those eyes close for the last time, a whole vision of the world is gone in a flash. That’s why we cry when certain artists die even though we don’t know them.

I often wonder how many people know me. I feel like I don’t know half the people I know. If, for a day, would I switch with someone who didn’t have these talents, I would do it in a heartbeat. No anxiety over performing well. No expectations. No fishbowl—a vast, open ocean. But “what ifs” are for philosophers.

I suppose I can remain in the fishbowl and circle around, waiting for food if sometimes I’d rather leap from the ocean like an orca knowing that I can shine for a while and then retire to the depths.

Who is Bobby?: An Inquiry into Sondheim's COMPANY

Dean Jones and Elaine Stritch in the penultimate scene of 1970's COMPANY

Falling in love with Stephen Sondheim’s musicals, I must admit, shamefacedly, was a slow process. Having been reared on evangelical church musicals and a steady diet of Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber’s worst work, the first time I popped in a VHS of Sunday in the Park with George, to me—the entire score—sounded like a broken-down Erector set. I was all of eleven—and miserably wrong—but, as I matured, so did my craving of more mature musicals. Sadly, I fear the American Musical Comedy reached its apotheosis with him and, although there has been some interesting music on Broadway in the last thirty years, nothing quite so bold, daring, or competent. At forty-one, Sondheim is my Shakespeare (yeah, I said it a long time before Lin-Manuel Miranda). What I mean by that, of course, is that it is to his musicals I go for sustenance and wisdom to face the world. Still, there are a few of his shows I still look unfavorably upon.

Saturday Night, what was supposed to have been his first Broadway score, has its charms (particularly the song “So Many People”), but it is “baby Sondheim” and it shows. Anyone Can Whistle ran for eight performances on Broadway and has only been seen in New York in concerts—and, even then, only since the mid-‘90s. It is difficult—a three-act musical fable about nonconformity with an often-bizarre book by the usually magnificent Arthur Laurents—yet, for all its difficulty, it is mostly remembered for its inventive choreography (by Herbert Ross). Its title song (and “With So Litle to be Sure Of” and, I guess, “I’ve Got You to Lean On”) are songs worth studying, loving, and fit for any cabaret. But the show itself remains a puzzlement. As Sondheim admitted, it’s written by the smart aleck kids in the back of the schoolroom condescending to its audience.

'70s Sondheim in the recording session for the original Broadway cast album

Even Shakespeare had his failures (I’d rather die than sit through A Winter’s Tale), but they are few and Sondheim’s were few. While he spent most of his life fighting his reputation as firstly a great lyricist and composer second, in the end studying his words are telling—except, perhaps, the words of the lead in his 1970 breakthrough musical Company. There is something about that show, as much as I love the score, that has always nagged at me, something difficult for me to bear—I, being only one among thousands. The main character of Bobby, whose thirty-fifth birthday is being celebrated with all his “married friends” observes marriages and dates but seems unable to “connect” (a word Sondheim used a lot in his later shows) and settle down. The proto-“concept musical,” Company actually was less inventive than retrogressive. It reverted back to the pre-Rodgers & Hammerstein days when revues were more common than book musicals. The difference was it had a modern edge (at least, in 1970) and was hatched from an odd egg.

The late George Furth, a familiar supporting actor in Hollywood (in Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid, he was the faithful safe protector on the train) provided producer/director Harold Prince a few vignettes about marriage. They had been written as part of therapy sessions and all centered around an unaffiliated woman with her married friends. Prince brought the idea to Sondheim for musicalization and, quickly, the female lead was changed to a male and they had a theme, which I think was all they thought they needed. But, like with Assassins, when there is no central figure you can get behind, the results can be wonky even when they “work.”

The Prince of Broadway and its Baddest Bad@$$

Company technically takes place over the course of just one second—the second Bobby imagines his “surprise party” celebrating another year not dead and, in that second, he reflects on the joys and the horrors he has witnessed as being the third wheel among his many coupled life-mates. He has three on-again/off-again girlfriends to whom he will not commit, and the chorus of the wedded consistently tries to set him up, urging him to marry, or, at least, urge him to look within.

It is widely believed that Company was the first real Sondheim music to be heard on Broadway, his previous effort (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum only had flashes of his musical/lyrical talent), but it was with 1966’s television musical Evening Primrose (co-written with Follies librettist James Goldman) where Sondheim found his musical voice—a mixture of what he learned from Jerome Kern, Kurt Weil’s Broadway music, and the experimental composer Milton Babbitt. Following suit, all of Company’s songs, scenes, and intricate parts are and can be delightful and/or disturbing. On the other hand, I have always left it feeling quite cold (a common contemporaneous criticism of Sondheim back in the day) as Robert, the main character, is a cypher—a bystander who asks too many questions and seems to have no center. Most have believed Bobby to be homosexual (as Sondheim and Furth were, though this was not public at the time), but Harold Prince’s stamp is all over the show and Bobby shows no textual signs of homosexuality except when he is flippantly accused of it in the song “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.” Indeed, Sondheim and Furth refused to alter the text for Bobby to be homosexual in their lifetimes. Still, other believe him to be one of many men allergic to commitment. Others are satisfied he is just constantly free-wheeling bachelor. The text leaves much room for interpretation—that may make it a mature work, but no one knows who Bobby is by the time the curtain closes.

Technically, Broadway audiences were more familiar with Larry Kert as Bobby

I had the opportunity recently to compare the two published versions of the text to find out what I thought of Bobby. The original 1970 book was preserved in print in anthologies and Theatre Communications Group published the final version produced while both Furth and Sondheim were alive—a 1995 version that took out some specific references to the 1970s for timelessness, updated some of the technology used, and added the (originally) cut (and miserable) song “Marry Me a Little” as its Act I finale. Both versions are interesting though but as usual, I wish the creators would have left it alone as a period piece from the 1970s as it was presented with the New York Philharmonic Concert starring Neil Patrick Harris, perhaps the best version recorded for home viewing. I find, more and more, authors tampering with their works after they’ve received their definitive production (e. g. Broadway premiere, etc.), should just leave it alone already. After all, is Sam Shepard’s 1978 Buried Child the winner of the Pulitzer Prize or the version which “premiered” on Broadway so many years later? The answer is simple, but some artists can’t leave well enough alone.

Boyd Gaines in the 1st Broadway revival

The two printed versions of Company, however, can be considered definitive, but at the center is still the cypher Bobby. Sondheim often eschewed happy endings in his works, and he often left musicals with an open-ending. That is what made him the most virile and dazzling musical composer of the late twentieth century—he knew the traditions of the form, but also broke the mold for new vistas which no one has bothered to travail. With Company, however, I think we can safely say Sondheim and Furth were out of their depth when it came to creating Bobby. Neither were married when they penned both versions of the show. Now, some say Sondheim’s genius is that he mastered so many concepts outside of his own experience, probably in the way Shakespeare did. After all, Sondheim needn’t have been Swedish to write songs for A Little Night Music. But hear me out.

In the finale, one of the husbands, Larry, asks, “how do you know so much about it when you’ve never been there?” He asks this because Robert (Bobby-Baby Bobby-Bubi) seems to have absorbed so much information on marriage from his friends that he seems to understand its pitfalls uncannily. In 1970, Sondheim was nearly a quarter century away from having his first serious relationship which did not end in marriage, though a later one did. It is well known he was in love (early on) with composer Mary Rodgers and actress/singer Lee Remick, but no gay characters appeared in any of his shows until 2008’s Road Show (a throwaway, meant for the attic) and Sondheim always insisted he wrote from the character’s perspectives as drawn up by the librettist.

The songs in Company are, indeed, thought-provoking as to the question of marriage. “Sorry-Grateful,” “The Little Things You Do Together,”—all those songs strike a chord with anyone who has been in or observed marriages. I, myself, have grown old enough to know the joys and the horrors of marriage. On the one hand, I come from a long line of serious monogamists who lived in a world where divorce wasn’t an option, so I grew up with the belief that marriage was the natural course of all our lives. On the other, I watch Investigate Discovery like everyone else and know how some marriages turn out (seems to be one way of getting murdered). But I don’t think I would ever write about marriage. I have written many characters who are married, but it has no bearing on my themes, which I revert to my interests, passions, and foibles.

The last few stage directions of Company are the most irritating I’ve ever read in a script. What is the true ending of Company? If you listen to the cast albums, you believe he has resolved that he now wants “someone to hold me to close” in his soaring and unbelievably melodious “Being Alive.” But, when you see the show, Bobby is instructed, after the married couples leave his apartment when he has refused to appear for his party, to do something that could be interpreted so many ways it’ll make your eyes cross. In the 1970 libretto, as the married couples blow out the birthday candles, it reads, “Throughout this scene, Robert has stood center stage, listening; now he smiles. Curtain.” In the revision (that matters), after the couples leave the apartment, Bobby “sits on the sofa and takes a moment. Then he smiles, leans forward and blows out the candles.” If you’re wondering, it’s the smile that bothers me.

A wry smile follows from Adrien Lester

Is Bobby smiling because all his married friends have encouraged him to do something with his life and he looks forward to a committed future? Or, using the rougher edges of the show (like the truthful, but cynical “Another Hundred People”), is he smiling because his friends, who have tormented him about getting married for two straight hours, have finally left? It certainly seems so in the televised recording of the West End revival of Company with Adrien Lester as Bobby and Sam Mendes as director. Using the revised libretto, Lester is probably the least fascinating Bobby in all the productions I’ve seen. A wonderful actor himself, his singing leaves much to be desired. Indeed, the vocal quality of British singers singing Sondheim’s words is at a bar so low as to be beneath the sinking sands. While Maria Friedman is known to be a great interpreter of Sondheim, most of the London recordings don’t ring true at all, with the noble exception of the English National Opera’s mostly complete recording of Pacific Overtures.

Esparza, ladies' man

But it is that cynical ending that strikes very bitterly. In the original Broadway production, the marvelous Dean Jones left the show shortly after it opened because of marital problems in his own life and was replaced by Larry Kert, who had originated the role of Tony in West Side Story. Both performances were lauded. In their version of the show, I am more inclined to believe Bobby is smiling sincerely as a way of, at the very least, looking wistfully on his “good and crazy people—my married friends.” The John Doyle-directed second Broadway revival of Company featured Raúl Esparza, lovingly recorded for DVD and, as is Doyle’s usual want, a cast who doubled as the orchestra. While Esparza’s vocal interpretation of “Being Alive” is typically wonderful, he is simply too cool a character in the show, the show perhaps being a little cool and trite in itself. There, I lean with the cynicism.

Perhaps I’m making something out of nothing, but Company is the rare experimental play where the open-endedness of the damned thing drives me batty. I want to know what Robert’s problem is. Is he a symbol for the breaking down of marriage traditions after the sexual revolution? Is he a voyeur? Does he both love and hate women? What is his deal? Perhaps that question is what makes Company interesting fifty-five years after its creation.

Nice set(?)

Another West End and Broadway revival of Company came. Excluding the posthumously produced Here We Are, it included some of the last work Sondheim did before he passed away. It was critically lauded since it was cut to fit today’s fashion, but it might also have been the biggest bumble (and crassest move) of his artistic life. In 2021, Sondheim collaborated with director Marianne Elliott to adapt a Company which mirrored back to the audience today’s schizophrenic outlook toward sexuality and gender. With the newly christened Bobbie and the stage adorned with couples cast in the now well-worn and cliched concept of bending all the genders (or, in some cases, an entirely female cast for a show/movie originally written for males, etc.). This could be excused except for the fact that Sondheim claimed Furth would have loved the version. For a composer who was so indebted to his librettists (they being the only ones thanked in his Lifetime Achievement Tony Award speech), it is surprising he would tamper with the words and scenes of a man who had only been dead more than a little over ten years. Ah, well. It is not for me to judge. But I suppose I do. This version has not been available in published (or licensed—thank God) form and so I cannot comment on “Bobbie,” but I know for sure that ending, enigmatic smile would have taken on so many meanings as to induce headache.

Who is Bobby? A man (firstly)—no more, no less. Not sure if he wants the “sorry-grateful” life of marriage. Not sure he’s met anyone who ever really challenged him to become a man. And also, someone who does not learn the lessons he is being taught. Maybe “Being Alive” is sung just to humor his friends in his mind, allowing a heavy burden to be lifted from his shoulders. And yet, the fact that I want to know what Bobby does after he smiles makes him larger than certainly my little old, unmarried life.

Furth & Sondheim

A Short Treatise on Solitude

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“…being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”

―Charles Bukowski, Women

Just me and my stick.

I offer the preceding epigraph though both authors are ones I’m not fond of. While I made a perfect score on my English Praxis Exam on Transcendentalism, I hate the whole bloody movement. It bored me from the word “ant.” And I never quite understood the cult of Bukowski. Still, I find wisdom and introspection in the above quotes that is a fitting introduction into an inquiry into solitude, especially in the life of a writer.

I may have told this story here before but bear with me: When I was a baby, there was a 24-hour period where I screamed bloody murder. My mother tried to pacify me with food, diaper changes, toys, etc. Finally, exhausted—she was a thirty-two-year-old old-hat at this—she shut the door and left me alone. Instantly, the screaming stopped. She cracked open the door to see me playing quietly with the mobile above me, a big smile on my face. I wanted to be left alone.

As a writer, solitude is key. In an ideal situation, there is no one in the dwelling but yourself, maybe a couple of animals (cats, preferably, as they do not interrupt you to go outside), your books, something cold to imbibe, whatever instrument be your pleasure—pencil, pen, paper, computer, etc.—and, of course, the outlet for you to plug your brain that energizes you to make something out of nothing and shape it into something pleasing.

As a playwright, however, there is, in the writing stage, an intense period of solitude followed by an intense period of collaboration in the pre- and post-production phase. You thought what you had was perfect. Then, you realize the director’s right that the second act is too short, the actor is right that this or that line doesn’t quite work. Edits are made. Sometimes you want to scream because everyone else thinks the play somehow belongs to them, but is doesn’t. In the end, if you are published, you are responsible for the printed text regardless of what goes onstage. That is what will be remembered. Solitude again—this time, on a dusty shelf.

But to be frank, and to agree with Bukowski, solitude is also depressing, taxing on the brain, unsettling to the stomach, and there’s a muscle aching—the heart, of course. I have been on my own for twenty years and rarely does a night pass by that I do not clutch to an ever-growing barrage of pillows as a replacement for something that isn’t there. For that one story above about my desire for solitude as a baby, there are ten thousand nights I’ve wished for company. Not to help me write, but to prepare me for the days and weeks ahead—even surviving the night which, for a writer, can be agonizing if you write in the wee hours. One bangs one’s head against the wall; it would be nice for a calming touch.

I no longer can write overnight as I did when I was younger. My options are early mornings, late afternoons, and evenings until I can no longer stay awake. There is no guarantee that you will be ready to write during these periods which leads many to “clock in” and “clock out” as it were. Most writers record of working from morning to noon and revising or taking/making calls in the afternoon. Would that I had that freedom.

As it is, I do not. I write when I can. And alone. It is the blessing and curse of the writer’s life. In a way, I’ve gotten what I’ve always wanted (except the Pulitzer) and there is a hole waiting to be filled that often feeds the work like coal stoking a fire.

Bukowski. Alone again (naturally).