Putting "Putting It Together" Together
The making and remaking of a Sondheim revue
You are at a party. The hour is uncertain, but it’s late enough that the canapés have been cleared, your first drink replaced by a second or a seventh. You’re in a Manhattan penthouse, high above the ordinary world. Your fellow guests are beautiful and witty and adrift. You notice that they talk in the assured, modulated way of people who have learned to keep difficult things just far enough from the surface. The music playing—Sondheim, naturally—seems more honest than they are.
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This is the world of Putting It Together, a musical revue with no book in the conventional sense, no plot that advances by cause and effect through to a resolution. What it has instead is a situation—five people at a party, two marriages at different stages of unravelling—and into that situation it pours nearly thirty songs drawn from across the Sondheim catalogue. These numbers become a kind of mosaic argument about love, time, compromise, and the cost of creative life. Somehow, assembled with sufficient care, the pieces cohere. Bit by bit, it becomes something.
That phrase, bit by bit, is of course Sondheim’s own. The show takes its title from that tour-de-force song in the second act of Sunday in the Park with George in which the modern-day George, an artist navigating the grim machinery of arts funding and critical opinion, reflects on what making art actually requires. It is a song at once cynical and resolute, funny and agonized—which is, one might suggest, also a fairly apt description of the revue that adopted its name.
Putting It Together arrived in the world on 27 January 1992, at the Old Fire Station Theatre in Oxford. The producer was Cameron Mackintosh, who had form in this territory: it was Mackintosh who had produced Side by Side by Sondheim back in 1976, when that revue—conceived by David Kernan and director Ned Sherrin, with Julia McKenzie among its original cast—transferred from a charity benefit in Wavendon to the Mermaid Theatre in London, running for 806 performances before crossing the Atlantic. By 1992, a generation’s worth of new Sondheim had accumulated: Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins. Mackintosh, having long fielded requests for an updated revue, finally persuaded Sondheim to agree. McKenzie, now a director of considerable stature, was brought in to devise and direct.
The Oxford cast comprised Diana Rigg, Clive Carter, Claire Moore, Clarke Peters, and Kit Hesketh-Harvey. The show ran for 24 performances before the creative team turned their attention to its American incarnation, which arrived at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s City Center Stage in April 1993—by which point the revue had been substantially reworked into the party-narrative form we now associate with it. The revision brought with it a casting coup: Julie Andrews, returning to the New York stage after an absence of more than thirty years, played the Wife in a cast that also included Christopher Durang, Michael Rupert, Rachel York, and Stephen Collins. That production ran for 59 performances off-Broadway.
It would be another six years before Putting It Together reached Broadway itself. A heavily revised production opened at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in October 1998, transferring to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in November 1999. The Broadway cast starred Carol Burnett, appearing on Broadway for the first time in years, alongside George Hearn, John Barrowman, Ruthie Henshall, and Bronson Pinchot. Hearn received a Tony nomination for his performance as the Husband. The show ran for 101 performances before closing in February 2000, to reviews that were admiring of its performers while remaining cautious about the material itself. Remarkably, London did not see Putting It Together at all until 2014, when a production starring Janie Dee, David Bedella, Damian Humbley, Daniel Crossley, and Caroline Sheen opened at the St. James Theatre.
The party frame of Putting It Together is loose enough to invite reinvention: it has been staged with minimal sets and maximum imagination, in studio theatres and concert halls, at music schools and conservatories, by professional companies and student ensembles who find in its catalogue a kind of compressed education in what Sondheim can do. It’s a show that practically begs to be put together anew each time. And perhaps that is precisely what its title has always promised.
This month, students at the University of Manchester are mounting their own production of Putting It Together—and they’re doing so in a way that helps us all think more deeply about what this show can be. Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of speaking to them about putting Putting It Together together.
Arjan Dhatt’s production is not a standard mounting of Putting It Together, its cast much expanded beyond the usual five performers. “You’ve still got the same themes and character relationships running through it,” Arjan explains, but “the ability to get everyone involved” is part of the point here. There was an overwhelming desire from within the University of Manchester Musical Theatre Society to do a Sondheim show this year, and Putting It Together offered a framework capacious and flexible enough to include as many people as possible without the show buckling under the weight of them.
The venue is part of the vision too. Rather than the society’s usual Students’ Union Theatre, this production takes place in the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall—a grander space, and one the society doesn’t normally get to use. “We’re going to try and turn this hall into a massive cocktail party in Manhattan,” Arjan says. When performers aren’t singing, they’ll be at a sofa, or by a bar—present at the party, part of the atmosphere.
The company Arjan has assembled is as varied as the venue is unexpected. Drama students and music students form the backbone, but alongside them are members of the university comedy review, STEM students, a law student, a liberal arts student—people for whom Sondheim is, in some cases, entirely new territory. In some cases, Arjan says, “they wouldn’t consider themselves singers by any means. And then they rock up, and they sing wonderfully.” Adam Fox, who is studying biomedical sciences, puts it simply: “I love performing, and even if I don’t get into performing in the future, I want to take the biggest advantage I can.” For Aoife Thompson, who will graduate at the end of this year, there is an added edge of occasion: this is her last university production, and she has chosen to spend it in a wedding dress, sprinting across a stage, performing “Getting Married Today.”
Learning to sing Sondheim begins not with singing at all. Emily Monk, serving as vocal director, describes the rehearsal process: “Words and rhythm are our main priority; pitches can come a bit later.” The company has been doing tongue-twister warm-ups, working through the material phrase by phrase, experimenting with emphasizing different parts of each line. “It’s often tempting as a singer to just sing the word without processing what you’re singing,” says Matthew Cassie, the show’s répétiteur. He has been pushing performers to find variation even within repetition: “If you’re saying the same word seven times, can you make that word different each time? If there’s a series of rhymes and then the next word doesn’t rhyme, there’s probably a reason it doesn’t rhyme—so you need to make something different out of that.”
This is, of course, exactly what Sondheim’s lyrics demand. The density is not decorative; every word is load-bearing, and a performer who isn’t listening to what they’re saying will be found out. Ben Gibson, musically directing the first act, notes one practical complication that follows from the show’s relative obscurity: without many recordings of this specific version to learn from, some performers have been coming to rehearsal having studied the song in a different key. “It ends up being quite a lot lower than they think it is.” The upside, though, is real: there is unusual freedom to make the material your own.
That freedom has shaped how the performers are approaching their individual songs. Katie Sutton, who is singing “Could I Leave You?” from Follies, has long loved the song—she describes watching a clip of Donna Murphy performing it “on repeat for so many years”—but has found that familiarity a starting point rather than a destination. “You have that version that you love,” she says, “but you have an opportunity to really go in depth in a way you might not get the chance to elsewhere. So I’m going to make my own version of it.” What draws her to the song is Sondheim’s ability to write the universal into the very particular: “You are watching this very well-to-do woman, and you feel her rage, and you feel her mischievousness. I think that’s really exciting.”
Adam, meanwhile, has been finding his way into “Live Alone and Like It,” through the kind of close attention to phrasing that the rehearsal room has been demanding. “Matthew was talking in one of the rehearsals about how Sondheim likes to go over bar lines—phrases won’t stop where you think they stop, and you’re actually saying the same phrase in the next line. Just figuring out those starts and stops, and how to create a flow and a rhythm—I thought that was really, really nice.”
And then there is Aoife, who chose “Getting Married Today” for her audition partly because, she admits, “I’m a stupidly fast talker.” She is clear-eyed about what the song is and isn’t: “Some people think it’s essentially rapping, where you’re just talking quickly—but it’s not.” She and Matthew began at half tempo, locating the notes before worrying about the speed. “Although no one actually seems to have performed it exactly at that tempo, I want to try and get it as close to that as possible.” And, she notes: “My cardio needs to get better, because there’s going to be a lot going on.”
What makes this production unusual is not just its scale but its spirit. Arjan describes giving every performer a three-layer context for their song: where it comes from in its original musical, where it sits in the 1999 version of Putting It Together, and where it lives in this production—because in a company this large and this varied, that context isn’t automatic. “I feel really privileged being able to talk everyone through that,” he says. The result is a room full of people approaching the same material from very different angles: the drama student finding in Sondheim a new kind of character work, the comedy society member discovering the wit, the biomedical sciences student seizing what might be his last regular chance to perform.
Several of them came to Sondheim through this very same society. Aoife played flute and piccolo in last year’s Into the Woods —“oh my god, it was horrendous, it was so difficult, a couple of breakdowns” — and describes the experience as the thing that showed her what Sondheim really asks of you. Emily, at fifteen, performed an orchestral reduction of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” with her chamber choir. “I remember just thinking, wow, this piano part is insane.” Ben heard the title song from Into the Woods at the cinema as a ten-year-old and spent years not quite being able to place it, until a school production of Sweeney Todd brought it fully into focus. Adam saw that same show performed badly at secondary school—“not a note was hit, every rhythm was off”—and then saw Into the Woods done well, and revised his opinion of Sondheim entirely. Matthew, the répétiteur, had never seen a full Sondheim production before this one. Working through the score has been, he says, “really enlightening. I’ve discovered one of my new favourite artists.”
And then there is Katie, who has perhaps the longest relationship with this music of anyone in the company. Her family played A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum on car journeys when she and her sister were small—the two of them singing along, she says, “with no understanding of the meaning.” She adds: “I think that’s a lovely thing—peeling it back, and getting to know different shows. I still feel like there’s so much I have yet to discover.”
That is, I think, a perfect description of what Putting It Together offers—not just to audiences, but to the people putting it on. The show is a compressed tour of a vast creative landscape, assembled with sufficient care that the pieces cohere. Bit by bit, it becomes something. And in the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall later this month, 40 students—performing artists and scientists, Sondheim obsessives and curious newcomers—are finding that out for themselves as they turn Manchester into Manhattan.
The party, it turns out, is always bigger than the original invitation suggested.
If you’re in the UK and would like to see the production of Putting It Together discussed above, click here for more information and to buy tickets.
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Have seen the film many times but finally broke down and bought the DVD!