Robert Tanitch reviews Do I Hear A Waltz? At Park Theatre, London N4
Songwriting collaboration is a volatile business at the best of times. Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim did not get on; which did not help.
“I agreed to write the lyrics, as wrong-headed a decision as ever I made,” said Sondheim. “Friendship, obligation and greed are not good enough reasons to write anything.”
The musical, said Sondheim, “is based on a small charming play that would have gained nothing for being musicalized, even by Puccini.”
The play was The Time of the Cuckoo by Arthur Laurents, which had premiered successfully in New York 1952 with Shirley Booth. A cheerful and repressed American virgin spinster in her early thirties goes on a holiday to Venice all by herself and fell in love with a nice middle-aged Italian who ran an antique shop, only to find he was married and had two children
A film was made called Summertime in 1955 with Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi. The role was perfect for Hepburn who loved playing love-starved spinsters. The film was called Summer Madness in the UK.
In 1965 the play was turned into a musical. “It was not a bad show,” said Sondheim, “merely a dead one. It was well-written, eloquently performed and a failure in every respect.”
The Italian businessman always sounds as if he is about to sing Some Enchanted Evening. The actual Do I Hear A Waltz? number should be a show-stopper, but isn’t.
There isn’t much sense putting on a Sondheim musical if you cannot hear the lyrics. The present performance hasn’t the bitter-sweet quality it needs. The casting and the production are lacklustre. It would have been better to have no steps and no tacky backcloth.
To learn more about Robert Tanitch and his reviews, click here to go to his website
