The Secret History of Broadway's Greatest Song: Inside the Genius of Stephen Sondheim
“Move On” Is the Universal Anthem for Anyone Who Struggles, Worries, or Doubts
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On Saturday, June 12, 1982, the playwright and director James Lapine went sprinting through a massive anti-nuclear march in midtown Manhattan to the Turtle Bay townhouse of the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Breathless and nervous, Lapine rang the doorbell at the appointed hour, 5 PM.
Sondheim led the virtual stranger into a “long, dark living room; the one small window at the back of the room was stained glass and let in very little light. The walls were lined with fascinating antique puzzles and games. Two couches faced each other, separated by a large oblong table where small candles burned.”
The two men chatted awkwardly. Lapine had directed only one musical and was preparing to direct his first Shakespeare that summer. Sondheim had written the lyrics for West Side Story twenty years earlier but was coming off the flop, Merrily We Roll Along.
Here's what happened next, as Lapine described in conversation with Sondheim in the playwright’s recent book, Putting It Together. “After a few niceties were exchanged, you lit a joint and passed it to me.”
Sondheim: “I just figured that anybody of your generation smoked dope all the time, which was true.”
Lapine: “Somehow the dope put us both on the same plane.”
Sondheim liked working with collaborators, but he preferred getting the ideas for his works from existing intellectual property, like books or movies. Lapine, on the other hand, preferred working from images. At their next meeting, Lapine came prepared: He tossed a series of images in front of Sondheim, who was aghast.
The last image was of Georges Seurat’s 1880’s pointillist masterpiece, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte." Sondheim blurted out, “Oh, that looks like a stage set.” Lapine responded, “But the main character is missing.” Sondheim said, “Who’s that?”
Lapine said, “The artist.”
“Boing! All the lights went on,” Sondheim recalled. “That was the beginning of the race—a great moment.”
Sondheim, who was 52 at the time, was intrigued that Seurat had finished his painting at age 26 and died penniless five years later. “He led a double life,” Sondheim recalled. “On the one hand, almost every night he’d stroll over to his mother’s house for dinner…yet only a few weeks before he died, she discovered he’d kept a mistress and had had a baby by her.”
Sondheim and Lapine's structure— which jumps a century ahead in time for the second act—is one of the most intricate for any Sondheim work. Early on, the creators knew they needed to connect the two acts. The 11 o’clock number they created, “Move On,” weaves the two together effortlessly. It is, I believe, the greatest Broadway song ever written. (Vulture doesn’t agree with me, though they do have “Finishing the Hat” from the same show as the top song of the last 40 years.)
In "Move On,” Dot, the former lover of the artist, Seurat, visits their great-grandson in a dream and offers some inspiration. Dot addresses the struggling artist as if he were his great-grandfather—and her former lover.
Dot: Are you working on something new?
George: No
Dot: That is not like you, George
George: I've nothing to say
Dot: You have many things
George: Well, nothing that's not been said
Dot: Said by you, though, George
The song has all the great Sondheim tropes: Alliteration.
Look at what you want,
Not at where you are,
Not at what you'll be—
Also, lists.
And the way you catch the light
And the care
And the feeling
And the life
But it is the final message—words from the mouth of an artist who died too young at 31 and now from an artist who also died too young at 91—that speak to anyone who’s struggling, who worries, who doubts.
Who can’t move on.
“Stop worrying if your vision / Is new,” Dot says. “Let others make that decision / They usually do.”
And then this:
Anything you do
Let it come from you
Then it will be new
I have watched every version of this song on YouTube over the years. There’s a beautiful rendition by the original stars Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin from Sondheim’s 80th birthday celebration. (Peters’s first response to the script, according to Lapine: “I don’t do nudes.” Patinkin’s: “That’s pretentious.)
My favorite version is from the BBC Proms celebration of the same birthday.
But this week I found an even rarer version, Sondheim himself singing the duet, poorly and “too loud,” he says, at the memorial service for Michael Bennett, who was hurried into to help doctor the show in the weeks before it opened on Broadway to mixed reviews on May 2, 1984, a mere two years after that first meeting in Sondheim’s drug den.
“Move On” speaks to all of us who believe, even for an instant, that we can’t move on. But, it turns out, it’s not just us who feel that way.
Sondheim and Lapine (left to right)
At the end of Putting It Together, Lapine tells this story. Years after Sunday in the Park had completed its 604-show run, won the Pulitzer Prize, and become the masterwork that it’s viewed as today, Lapine was at home working on a new project. “The work felt labored and forced. I was not having a good workday. The phone rang and it was Steve, who was in a similar state of mind.”
The two chatted for a few minutes, then Lapine decided to take a break. He flipped on the television. “By some incredible act of the divine, the PBS telecast of Sunday in the Park With George was being broadcast at that very moment, and George and Dot were singing ‘Move On.’ They came to the final phrase.”
Anything you do,
Let it come from you.
Then it will be new.
Give us more to see…
Lapine immediately called Sondheim and told him of this otherworldly intervention. “We had written ourselves a message in a bottle,” Lapine says.
And it’s one that the rest of us get to open again and again and again.
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