Somewhere, someday, somehow: the American musical has always turned on words like these. So it is fitting that the first of the great 1970s shows in which Stephen Sondheim revolutionised the form should conclude with a “someone”, the notional lover who Bobby, the single, relationship-curious protagonist of Company, imagines will hold him too close, sit in his chair and ruin his sleep.
“Being Alive” is an unusual kind of love song. Neither lament nor celebration, it belongs instead to a sub-category that Sondheim has made his own: the inquiry into commitment itself. As always, the music flowed from the story he had to tell, about a New York bachelor on his 35th birthday who observes the lives of his “good and crazy” married friends and wonders whether, just perhaps, he should follow their example.
Drawing on the shared experiences of his friend Mary Rodgers, Sondheim made good progress on the score. The problem was the ending: how to resolve a narrative whose dominant mood was ambivalence? Two attempts at a final statement for Bobby had already been set aside by the time of the Boston try-outs, which were confronted with “Happily Ever After” and its bleakly Sartrean vision of “Someone to bleed you of all / The things you don’t want to tell — / That’s happily ever after, / Ever, ever, ever after / In Hell.”
“It was the bitterest, most unhappy song ever written, and we didn’t know how devastating it would be until we saw it in front of an audience,” recalled the producer-director Hal Prince. Sondheim, conceding that the dramatic irony wasn’t quite cutting through, agreed to write a last-minute replacement.
The solution he found was to begin with the same lyric but send it in a different direction, pivoting on a moment halfway through the song when Bobby shifts from second to first person and “Someone to” becomes the syllabically equivalent “Somebody”. Thus with the minimum of movement — and here Sondheim the lyricist fuses with Sondheim the composer, whose melodies often stay relatively still while everything changes around them — the observations became requests and the song a journey “from complaint to prayer”.
Dean Jones, the actor who originated the role of Bobby, performed “Being Alive” with operatic intensity on the first cast recording; Larry Kert, who replaced Jones early in the run, took a more conversational approach, with less vibrato and closer attention to the quieter moments. But it could be that the defining version came decades later, in the 2006 Broadway revival of the show. Raúl Esparza was a charismatic lead with a voice capable of both power and delicacy, and helped by a bold, stripped-down production that found ingenious ways to prepare audiences for his character’s transformation — something Sondheim and Prince feared they had not done enough.
By this point many artists had taken “Being Alive” out of its theatrical setting, from regular Sondheim collaborators Patti Lupone, Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin to more mainstream stars such as Barbra Streisand. The song changes in the process, often to the chagrin of purists. But that is unavoidable, and the French jazz singer Cyrille Aimée made a good case for taking a few liberties in her brassy, uptempo, salsa-infused interpretation last year.
Sondheim has a birthday of his own, his 90th, to celebrate on March 22 — an age at which even the most precise and prescriptive of composers will observe new meanings accruing to their work. With “Being Alive”, this is well illustrated by Noah Baumbach’s recent film Marriage Story, in which Adam Driver delivers a very postmodern piano bar rendition that starts as wry homage and ends in pained regret, echoing his character’s progress from flawed husband to more engaged, self-aware divorcee.
Or take Rosalie Craig’s wonderful performance as “Bobbie” in the 2018-19 West End production of Company, a revival that is due to arrive on Broadway next month with Katrina Lenk in the lead role. Comment at the time focused on the gender switch, though perhaps the bigger change was elsewhere: some of the anxiety had gone, in the audience as well as in the show. Craig’s Bobbie observes her dysfunctional married friends with affection rather than concern; you sense that wherever she ends up, she will be equally forgiving of herself. The epiphany still comes and alone is still alone, not alive. But suddenly, 50 years on, the problem looks much more like a state of mind.
What are your memories of ‘Being Alive’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Masterworks Broadway; Nonesuch; Angel Records; Columbia; Mack Avenue Records; Arts Music
Picture credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images