John Rubinstein and Jane Lanier are a couple who, though they live in Los Angeles and have worked regularly in film and TV, were shaped definitively by the New York theatre during an age that in retrospect seems the end of an era. Rubinstein won a Tony for Children of a Lesser God and starred in Pippin, M. Butterfly, Ragtime, and in the revival/revision of Merrily We Roll Along. He met dancer Lanier when she was appearing in Jerome Robbins' Broadway, and Lanier's other credits include the Fosse-directed Sweet Charity, Anything Goes, and most recently the dance revue Fosse.
Now the two are bringing their various talents to a new production of Sondheim's waltz-time marzipan A Little Night Music, which opens next weekend at the Interact Theatre's Equity 99-Seat space in North Hollywood. Rubinstein is directing and starring as the dissatisfied middle-aged Swedish lawyer, Fredrik (interestingly, his last starring roles at Interact were in Sondheim's Into the Woods and as a lawyer in the Ovation-winning Counsellor-at-Law), and Lanier is playing Petra and choreographing. Back Stage West met them recently at the Eclectic Café to talk about those two theatrical giants Sondheim and Fosse, and to discuss the art of acting a song.
John Rubinstein: One of the reasons I personally want to do Sondheim is that he does all that acting for you. You almost don't have to have an approach or make any sort of decisions. He lays out a song as though it were a genuine monologue, like Shakespeare laid out "To be or not to be." You still have to execute it, and there are many choices of how you can go, but it's not like singing a Richard Rodgers song from Oklahoma! It's a beautiful melody, it's true to the character—"Oh, what a beautiful morning"—but you are stuck saying that several times. I'm not denigrating those lyrics but saying that the acting isn't done for you. You have to find some way to make that Curly character mean what he's saying while lilting on that lilt.
Sondheim cuts right to the chase. He makes you think and talk the way your character would, so the approach is to get those words out as clearly as you can, to not fall into singing a song, to always remember that you are thinking a thought, and try to hit the notes—try to get 'em right, because they jump around, they're hard, they're demanding, they go against the accompaniment sometimes. Technically you've got to be really on your game to make it look easy. But acting-wise, he's done all the work for you.
Jane Lanier: I get to sing "The Miller's Son," and it's like putting on a comfortable pair of clothes: You can luxuriate in it, and if you just let yourself sit in that and sing those lyrics and sing that melody, it's fabulous because he gives you all that, so you can be secure, as long as you remember your lyrics, and just go and play. To me, it's about life—it's what my character wants eventually, but right now, she's enjoying the moment. When the grandmother makes a toast at dinner and says, "To life, and the only other reality… death," that hits my character, and so in the song I sing afterwards, "I'll not have been dead when I die." Sondheim allows you to be free and play and find out those things. And the sounds of the words: "the pinch and the paunch and the pension."
John: He writes lyrics that are real lyrics. It's not just like writing a stream-of-consciousness monologue and then putting complicated music to it. He doesn't. His rhymes are right on the money. They make the point and they're singable. I've done shows with wonderful songs and smart lyrics and everything good about them, except where you have to deliver the most important emotional moment is on a syllable that is really hard to sing, on a note that is just a bit too high or a bit too low, and you do your best, but you're always working against something rather than flowing with something. Sondheim never does that. He never has. He gives the actor what he needs, emotionally. It's a gift.
Jane: The end note in the beginning of "Miller's Son" is so low, but I guess that's a resting point, and that's where she's going to land.
John: Also, like with any artist, he paints on the particular wall that he's painting. Once they were cast and the cast members showed up, he started adjusting them. I've worked with him, I'm proud to say, myself, and have experienced that. He'll change the song for your voice. He wrote a song for me that I introduced in the revival of Merrily, "Growing Up." It was the new song that Frank sang by himself at the piano. I had read that he would come up with songs by calling up the actor during the rehearsal process and saying, "What are you doing in that scene? What's going on with you?" And suddenly my phone rang one afternoon in New York: "Hi, it's Steve. When she leaves, what are you thinking there?" Ah! This is that phone call, I thought. I told him, and it's not like he copied what I said, but that song was perfect for that moment; the transition time in that character. It was constructed very much for my voice, which is relatively limited. It's not a big-sounding voice with a giant range, but it's expressive. And I play the piano, so he wrote special piano things for me to play. And I whistle well, so he wrote me to whistle. So I whistle through the song. Sunday in the Park With George he wrote for Mandy Patinkin, and it's unsingable by humankind.
Jane: It's a dream to have somebody write music or choreograph a dance for you. When I did Jerome Robbins' Broadway, "Mr. Monotony" was the only number that had never been seen on a New York stage. It had been cut twice. So when he recreated it, he let us play. Call Me Madam was the last time it had been done, with Allyn Ann McLerie, and Ethel Merman sang it, but they cut the dance and then cut the song.
John: Ethel probably said, "Get that girl off the stage! I'm singing a song out here!"
Act First
John: I worked with Bob Fosse, and I actually hit him up about two weeks into rehearsal for Pippin and said, "I am very honored to be playing the title role in a big musical on Broadway that you are directing and choreographing, but you've got to give me a dance. I can't be in this show onstage the whole time and not dance." So he got me and Ben Vereen together and choreographed a number for us, called "On the Right Track," which became our pas de deux. The point of it was that I couldn't dance, but we don't have to say that!
Jane: We were all actors. He treated us as actors. What I learned from him is that every step should mean something. It's gotta come from an acting place or don't do it. Why bother? I try to do that and have from an early age. It comes from someplace that way, and that's why his choreography was so brilliant.
John: I would think of mosaics, when I was a little boy, going to St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, and seeing those little bits and how they make up those giant works. That's how Sondheim works, and that's very much how Fosse worked. He'd spend three hours of a rehearsal on a 15-second moment onstage when he needed every single dancer on that stage to be doing exactly what he needed them to be doing. He wouldn't let it go by. With Jerome Robbins' Broadway you had six months of rehearsal!
Jane: It was great, but insane.
John: After the fourth or fifth month, I asked a friend who was in that show, "What does he tell you about that number? You knew that number four months ago. What are you rehearsing for five months?" My friend said, "He's always working on something."
Jane: That's the thing about those greats: They never were satisfied. It had to get better. Even with this show, Night Music, there's so much to try to get right. We've restaged numbers two or three times, when we don't have time.
John: We think we solved all the problems last time and bang! Here's another one.
No Respect
John: At our theatre, we're such a family, it's like we're all married to each other. Nobody has any respect for anyone's privacy. My understudy, Norman Large, out of the generosity of his heart, is helping during rehearsal as a stand-in so I can see how it looks. And yesterday one actor said, "Y'know, when Norman did that, it was so much better. Can you try to do it the way he did, please?" No respect!
Jane: It wasn't me! When we co-directed The Music Man, you were doing "76 Trombones" and I said, "I liked most of what you did, but here…" and you said, "Oh! She liked most of what I did." The whole company laughs when I direct you.
John: We always have fun. BSW