They are one of the greatest combos in the history of musicals. The Pulitzer-winning pair behind Into the Woods talk about bumpy first nights, how to read audience coughs – and why shows today are too loud

Stephen Sondheim once gave James Lapine, his friend and longtime collaborator, a useful if inadvertent piece of advice. The two first worked together in the mid-1980s on Sunday in the Park With George, and a revival of their second musical, Into the Woods, is transferring from the US to London this summer. They are very different, says Lapine, when we meet in a rehearsal space near Times Square in New York. Although in life, Sondheim is “the dark soul and I’m the light one”, when it comes to work, Lapine characterises himself as the gloomier of the two. “I just think everything will flop,” he says, while Sondheim once shocked him by saying: “‘You know, I think everything I do is going to be a huge success.’ I said really? Why? He said because it’s so interesting to me, I assume it will be interesting to others.”



The lesson of this is to confine one’s anxieties to the project at hand. When I see Sondheim a day later at his home in New York, he confirms that Into the Woods was not written as a critique of the contemporary world, nor with an eye on the box office nor the potential longevity of its appeal. “I was just thinking about telling these fairytales,” he says. “I had no sense of anything but showbiz.”



Lapine thinks everything will flop – while Sondheim thinks everything he does is going to be a huge success

The 2013 movie adaptation of Into the Woods, directed by Rob Marshall and starring Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Anna Kendrick, renewed interest in the musical, which weaves together classic Grimm Brothers fairytales, before complicating each story and rolling it on. The revival, by the Fiasco theatre company, is what Lapine calls a “ground-up” production, driven by the ethos of “let’s get in a room and play” and against what has become the unwieldy mega-musical of Broadway.

Sondheim has only praise for the group, which is not always the case with revivals. Legally, a theatre company is prohibited from changing a single word of the text without running it by the author, but “quite often they say to hell with that, and they do it anyway”, he says, and cites the example of a production of Merrily We Roll Along, staged at a university in Long Island in which the entire timeline of the musical was reversed. “They only had a week’s worth of performances but we stopped it,” says Sondheim, who diagnoses the problem as one of “directors showing off”. This is, he says, “particularly true of student directors. They take it upon themselves to distort in order to draw attention to themselves.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The new ‘ground-up’ production of Into the Woods, at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory. Photograph: Catherine Ashmore

If this sounds a little stern, it is. Lapine and Sondheim have, through long experience, learned that the effects of even minor tweaks on a show can catastrophically – or, miraculously – affect its impact. The question, for the creators, is when to tweak and when to leave be, a decision made by interpreting tiny fluctuations in the response of an audience.



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Before it ever got to that stage, the two men would meet once a week to go over the work in progress and, Lapine says jokingly, for him to “make sure [Sondheim’s] working. I’m sort of the go-getter. I’ll throw anything on a piece of paper, I don’t give a shit. And he’s like ... everything’s so meticulous. It’s hard for him to let go of things. We’re a good combo that way.”



“No, not at all,” says Sondheim, when appraised of this assessment. “No, no, no, no. The point is, writing a scene is one thing; writing a song is another. Writing a song you are restricted; you have certain rhythms and meters and rhymes. You can’t just go–” (he makes a retching sound) “–whereas you can write a scene that should be two pages long and is eight pages, and just vomit on the page and then you cut back and edit and go to your collaborator. But that’s not the same thing.”



Sunday in the Park was their first collaboration and it was, Lapine believes, a mark in his favour that he wasn’t a huge Sondheim devotee before they met. “I’d only seen one show he had done. I knew of him of course, but I wasn’t a fan. That was kind of good. I think in retrospect he must have liked that it wasn’t somebody who’d seen everything he’d done and was so impressed with him.”



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For the most part, he says, writing a musical with someone else is so much “silly fun. Stimulating, and he’s so funny, and we enjoy each other’s company. And there’s real excitement to it. It never feels like work.” How would conflict be resolved? “Easily. He always said whoever cares most, wins. We’ve never had an argument. Never. The nice thing about the theatre is you can always change it. With a movie, once it’s there, you’re stuck with it.”



Depending on the collaborator, Sondheim sees each of his shows as inhabiting a unique and “entirely different colour. George Furth was very urban and contemporary. John Weidman was very political. James is a poet. They’re writers of distinction. They have their own whatever-it-is.”



The hard part is what Lapine calls the “birthing process” and many of the musicals had a bumpy first run. In 1994, he and Sondheim wrote a musical called Passion, to which the reaction, says Lapine, “was just so hostile that we had to change it. We knew we hadn’t solved the fundamental problem. It’s one thing if people don’t like it, and you like it. It’s another when they’re not getting it. Then you have to solve it. And then if they don’t like it, it’s fine.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Oh, now you like it’ … Sunday in the Park With George, inspired by the painter Georges Seurat. Photograph: Jacques Demarthon/AFP/Getty Images

This, Lapine says, was the case in 1984 when Sunday in the Park opened. The audience, he says, “didn’t know what they were seeing; it wasn’t what they wanted. Then the night after the review came out in the New York Times, we got a standing ovation. And it made me go, “Ew.” Like, oh, now you like it?!”



Sondheim says: “It’s not as simple as that. The New York Times wrote a favourable review and it may have affected the audience, but it certainly didn’t change it from everybody booing to everybody standing on their feet.” This only happened over time. For Sondheim, “the most important principle is to start at the very beginning of the show and say: does the audience understand what’s going on in this scene? Do they understand what the musical’s going to be? The point is when you fix something for the better, it affects everything that follows. I mean everything. I mean an hour and a half later, you’ll suddenly get a laugh on a line you never got a laugh on.”



Are focus groups ever useful? Sondheim makes a face like Dracula being struck by a beam of sunlight. “Focus groups are the death of all entertainment. Some forms of entertainment depend on that kind of death.” Instead of a focus group, he says, you listen to the audience. “You can tell from silences, from restlessness, sometimes from coughing. Sometimes from the quality of the applause.” The key is not to rush into a response. “It’s a great mistake just to go home and rewrite. Or just fire an actor. To zero in on what’s wrong immediately is always wrong. You gotta let it play.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim in 2014. Photograph: Vera Anderson/WireImage

One of the biggest rewrites he did was in 1962 on the musical A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, which bombed in its out-of-town tryouts. Then he changed the opening number – from a “sweet romantic” song, which set up the wrong expectations in the audience, to something more raucous that announced the “burlesque” show to come – and it opened to a rapturous reception in New York.



Hamilton aside, the current health of Broadway musicals relies heavily on stage adaptations of blockbuster movies, something regarded critically by both men. “Most musicals are real crowd pleasers,” says Lapine. “They just want to fuck the audience.” Sondheim sees the effect on Broadway musicals of “pop music where the idea is to sing loud. That’s what it’s about. Make loud songs. And so musicals are now very loud. Over an evening, that can get tiresome.”



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Does he think they pander to the audience, that they’re market driven? “I suppose. I’m not sure that the people who write and produce the musicals know the difference.”



Sondheim’s art is a question of specificity. Story is all. “I don’t think the theatre is about converting people to new ideas,” he says. “I think it’s about confirming ideas you have by dramatising them and making them human. As opposed to novels which, as Tolstoy proves, can teach you things.” At its most basic level, it’s “about how you combine song and dance and libretto to make a whole. That’s what it’s about; it’s an exercise in style.”



“It’s making a puzzle for yourself to solve,” says Lapine and, as Sondheim says, in the spirit that has defined his career – there is only one way to do that. “You have to try to be free, and try not to worry about what people think.”