Happy 88th birthday Stephen Sondeim !!! (delayed)

Oh, I thought Sheila’s music was fine for what it was, and Bette Midler’s “Friends,” at the end, is ironically hilarious (or hilariously ironic?).

Sondheim and Perkins did actually write two more mysteries—one of which, The Chorus Girl Murder Case, was a musical—neither of which ever got produced, unfortunately. Great piece about both of them here. 

So I just read the script for the one other Sondheim murder-mystery that was produced (written with frequent collaborator George Furth), a Broadway play called Getting Away with Murder, and it’s—er, it’s not really good.

Minor Spoilers for Getting Away with Murder, but nothing that really warrants a “spoiler” tag.

I found out that my library had a copy, surprisingly, and it’s a fast read. Very strange structure: it’s a whodunit for the first act and then turns into a Columbo-style ‘howcatchem’ for the second. Well, OK, but then in the first act we have random flashbacks and even false-flashbacks—but then in the second act we get none of that. The ending comes too quickly and is far too confusing, and it becomes more of a bloodbath than Sheila ever was. There’s a major development near the end that comes out of nowhere and seems just plain wacky—I can’t imagine that a specific company would behave in a specific way. There’s a good mystery gimmick that is of a kind with Sheila’s main trick, but it’s both obvious and comes too late.

The biggest problem has less to do with the plot and more to do with the dialogue, though. There’s one good character who seems a take-off of Dyan Cannon’s Christine in Sheila—Sondheim borrowing from himself, I’m sure. Other than her, though, none of the characters sound like real people; Sheila’s dialogue might have been witty, even bitchy, but thankfully it was naturalistic. I’m guessing Perkins was responsible for the naturalism there? Sondheim has said that he was primarily responsible for the plotting and Perkins for the dialogue.

The play was interesting, and I’m not unhappy that I read it, but I’m also not surprised that it flopped. More a footnote in the great man’s career than anything else, of course.