My tenuous six degrees of separation from Stephen Sondheim and the most darkly comic incident of my life.
So my mum is an actress and so I grew up around theatres and
many family friends were actors, directors and so on. One of them, Peter Noble,
was one of the funniest people I have known. He had been in the original Australian
production of “Hair”. When he told my mum this, she replied “I saw that, but I
don’t remember you” and he said “would it help if I took my clothes off?” (if
you aren’t familiar with musicals, there is a scene halfway through where the
whole cast get their gear off – it’s meant to signal re-birth or something.
Anyway, it's arty). He was also in the original Australian production of “Jesus
Christ Superstar”. He understudied Pontius Pilate. He got a chance to go on,
too. He described his performance thus: He was doing Pontius Pilate’s big number in
the musical, which occurs while Jesus in on trial. He described Trevor Knight (who
played Jesus) kneeling on stage, looking solemn, portraying the feeling of “I’m being tried, I’m being tried”…looks over
at Peter giving it 120% and thinking “now I’m really being tried”.
Anyway, he gave my parent’s a copy of the original London cast
recording of “Side by Side by Sondheim”. It had been given to him by a friend
of his who had once been romantically involved with Sondheim. The album had a
sticker on the front that said something along the lines of “not for commercial
use”. I can’t remember exactly but it indicated this particular recording wasn’t
widely available. I would put up a photo, but my mother appears to have
misplaced it. All I can find online is this blurry photo…
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I was on one of those guided bus tours of Europe and had recorded
many records onto cassette (it was 1993), so I had a decent soundtrack to my big
trip. I was on one of those guided bus tours and as we were going through
Austria, the tour guide said we were close to Mauthausen Concentration Camp which
was open to tourists (it doesn’t seem right to call it a tourist attraction)
and asked if we would be interested in going to see it, even though it wasn't on the itinerary. I also remember he
said that, unlike Auschwitz, it had been cleaned up a bit so didn’t really give
a proper idea of how horrific conditions were there.
So we are at this Nazi Concentration Camp, and I’m pretty
sure the land around it remembers what happened because while the rest of Austria
was lush and green, this area was brown and stark. As for it not giving the
full picture, what I saw was quite bad enough. I walked down some stairs in the “hospital”
building and found myself in the gas chambers. Those walls remember, too, and I
turned and left not just the building but the whole compound very quickly so foreboding was the feeling. Andrew
Denton once described it as a feeling of things suddenly stopping and that is
as accurate a description as I’ve heard.
So everyone in the group gets back on the bus and the
feeling is sombre. No one is talking as I guess everyone was reflecting on what
they had just seen and probably having some sort of existential crisis about being
human, because we’d just been confronted with some of the worst of human
behaviour.
I decided I would lift myself out of the funk with some
music. I get out my Walkman and press play, not remembering what I had put in
there last. It was the recording of Side by Side by Sondheim and the first song
to play was “Something for you and something for me and something for everyone –
a comedy tonight!” (from “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”).
If anyone asks you for a definition of black comedy, feel free to use this story.
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