Sondheim says that Opening Doors is the most autobiographical of the songs that he wrote.
I never heard about the Rodgers/Hammerstein connection
I think Opening Doors as the most
biographical song he ever wrote: It's
my life, damn it! On
On the Brink, someone wanted to cast a girlfriend, I rewrote old stuff, and we arrived, one day for rehearsal, to a locked theatre.
It's more likely based on the greatest collaborative team
after Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bock and Harnick. After 13 years of writing the most brilliant musicals together (The Apple Tree, Fiorello, Fiddler on the Roof, She Loves Me, and my recent headache, Tenderloin), they had an ugly fight and didn't talk to each other for decades. Friends of Sondheim's, too.
Stephen Schwartz often points out, at the ASCAP workshop, that the film of Harold Pinter's
Betrayal shows that running scenes in reverse
can work. Each scene creates a mystery in the audience's mind: Why are they acting this way? What's in their history together? How did they come to this? And subsequent scenes scratch that itch while planting more mysteries.
I wouldn't be too quick to pin all the blame on Furth. When one collaborator says to another, what we've done is good enough to produce, they're both responsible for each component.
The world of popular music changed radically from 1959 to 1981: the mindless teen rock with only four chords, the squeaky clean Pat Boone stuff, the British Invasion and the countless innovations of the Beatles, acid rock and disco. So, why does
Merrily We Roll Along keep sounding exactly the same whether it's (sing it now) nineteen-seventy-five or nineteen-sixty? Is this supposed to be some comment on Frank's inability to change with the times? Well, whatever we do, let's blame Furth.