A Conversation with Kurt Peterson

"It's a forever thing." Follies' original Young Ben on Sondheim past, present, and future

It’s a huge honor to welcome Kurt Peterson to The Sondheim Hub. Peterson was the original Young Ben in Follies, organizer of the first-ever Sondheim tribute concert, and a close friend of the man himself. From starring in Lincoln Center’s West Side Story, where he first worked with both Bernstein and a young Sondheim, to dinners at Sondheim’s home, Peterson’s candid reflections on the creative process, the evolution of Sondheim’s work, and their personal friendship paint a portrait both historically significant and deeply moving.

Our conversation begins below:

There are so many places we could begin, but I’d love to start with Sondheim: A Musical Tribute. You’re responsible for the very first such evening dedicated to Sondheim’s work. I’d love to hear how you reflect on that time now.

It was quite an evening. Anyone who was anyone in the theatre was there that night, either in the audience or on stage introducing Steve. The poster has all the performers, but it doesn’t have all the people who attended, like Lenny Bernstein and Sheldon Harnick and George Furth and Hal Prince, and all of the people who introduced these numbers, which made it even more powerful.

I’m just so proud of it. I wish I could say I was the Cameron Mackintosh who put it all together single-handedly, but I think it was something that the universe put together, along with Steve’s talent and presence. It started as just an afternoon with a number or two at the Plaza Hotel that students were going to sing. And all of a sudden, it grew.

I asked Craig Zadan to be involved, and he wanted to write a book for it. Neil Appelbaum designed the beautiful poster [see below]. We just started talking to people, and all of a sudden it turned from this little afternoon into a whole evening. Then I talked to Hal Prince, and said, “You know, A Little Night Music is opening here at the Shubert. Can we use the theater?” And he said, “Of course.” So we were given a Broadway theater for free. And everybody gave their time and energy for free. As I say, the universe really made this thing happen.

And when asked about those special evenings dedicated to his work, of which there were many, Stephen said, “My favorite? Well, as with all virgins, the first is most memorable.”

Kurt Peterson and Stephen Sondheim, 1973

When do you first remember being aware of Sondheim and his work, before you came to meet him?

I think the first spark would have been back in Wisconsin. I bought the album to West Side Story in 1960, and I fell in love with the score. At that point, I didn’t really know who Lenny Bernstein, or Stephen Sondheim, or Arthur Laurents, or Russ Tamblyn, or any of those people were. I just knew I loved the music and the show.

I came to New York, went to school for a couple of years, and then my girlfriend Victoria Mallory and I auditioned for the Lincoln Center West Side Story. We did the first major revival of West Side Story together there, as Tony and Maria, just eight years after I had listened to the album. That was the first time that I really met Steve, Lenny, and Richard Rodgers, who was the producer there. It was quite a thing.

That’s quite some lineup. I’d love to know what your memories are of Bernstein and Richard Rodgers from that time.

Lenny was Lenny. It was 1968, and I think Steve was busy thinking about Company. But Lenny was right next door, because he was at the Philharmonic. When we were in the rehearsal halls, he could just come right through the doors from the Philharmonic over to where we were, and be more hands-on. He sat down at the piano with us; he would play through the score and give us musical notes.

There’s one story that most people don’t know. Despite recording almost every evening that Richard Rodgers produced there, they didn’t record West Side for some reason. There is a pirate recording out there that’s floating around… But they hired me first of all because I was young, and they wanted unknowns—and both Vicki and I were certainly unknowns. When I auditioned, I sang a lot of the score, but I never sang the high B flat in “Maria.” And so we were in rehearsal, and we were going through “Maria,” and it gets to that point where it goes soaring up to that note. I stopped before we got to that note, and I said, “Well, I can’t hit that note, I don’t have a B flat.” They went, “What?” I said, “No, I’m a baritone.” And they went, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

They took me to a voice teacher who taught the tenors over at the Met, and he tried to make me sing a B flat, and that didn’t work. They called Lenny, and Lenny said, “No problem. I’m going to write an obligato.” He wrote it out on a yellow legal pad, this little obligato that I would sing in that section—but it didn’t work. We did it once for Lenny, and he said, “No, I have a better idea.” He got the three tenors to go up to the B flat at that moment, while I sang the “I’ve just met a girl named Maria” phrase underneath it. No one ever commented! But I never sang the B flat in West Side Story.

Lenny and I worked together several times. Later I did By Bernstein, which was his leftovers, a lot of his cut tunes and things. He was always very supportive, and Steve was, too. But Lenny and Richard Rodgers, of course, were so much more established than Steve at that point.

I can’t resist any longer: let’s talk about Follies. Company came out the year before—did you see it? Were you specifically wanting then to do a Sondheim show, or was it a case of right place, right time?

Yeah, I did see Company. It was so exciting. So exciting. I said, “Oh, that’s Stephen Sondheim.” It became one of my favorite shows. Follies was going into rehearsal, and they had just changed their leading man from Jon Cypher to John McMartin. And a young Jon Cypher didn’t look like a young John McMartin, so they had to find a new Young Ben.

I was one of the very last people hired, and it just happened that I was close enough to John McMartin to, on one of the last days, go in and audition and get the job right there. I was asked, “How old are you?” And I said, “Well, I’m 23.” The response: “No, you’re not. You’re 22. I’ll see you in rehearsal.” But it was a fluke. If that cast hadn't changed, I wouldn’t have been in Follies.

How close was the score when you first saw it to the show that we would recognize today?

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the backers’ audition tape with Steve singing… Would you have put money into that show? At first, we were going, “Well, okay, let’s see how it goes…” And then, of course, the magic started to happen. His genius was in not only the lyrics and melodies, but he also provided really specific orchestration notes, which turned into such wonderful things.

With a show like Follies, we were all just little pieces of the puzzle, so we never really got a sense of what it was going to be, even being in it. I don’t think I fully realized what the show was until I left it to go and do another one, and I got to see it for the first time. I remember saying, “Oh, my God! This is what I was in. Why am I leaving?”

📸: Van Williams

“Waiting For The Girls Upstairs” was there from the start, but “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow / Love Will See Us Through” wasn’t written. Most of the numbers in the Loveland sequence were not written yet. I remember Harvey Evans [Young Buddy] and I, when we first got our scripts, we went through them like any actor would. “Where are my lines? Where are my lines?” There weren’t very many. It really was a work in progress, a lot of it. We just jumped in and took it by faith that we’d be okay. And we were.

And you later did a very special one-off version of Follies with your original quartet of younger characters playing their older selves. You must have stayed very close with that original cast.

Yes, we did. When you’re part of something that special, you stay in touch. Harvey especially. Harvey and I, we were dressing roommates, so I was very close with him. The fact that we got to do it as the older characters in Michigan, with a full orchestra, was such a gift. Every note, every lyric, every line, even every note of the orchestration was so much in our bones, because we spent so much time with that show. It was like compounding the ghosts. There were ghosts on ghosts on ghosts.

That gets to the heart of something I’d like to ask you about more generally. Because Follies is a show so steeped in the ghosts of the past, it must be particularly moving to look back on it more than 50 years later. Is it quite an emotionally charged experience for you to watch the show? Are you always curious to see how it changes with each new production?

I guess I must be curious, because I do go see most of them. Of course, the first one was so special. Even the sets that Boris [Aronson] designed, the fact that the stages were on levels that moved—it’s never been done that way again.

In terms of the story, it becomes more meaningful and much richer the older you get. Actually, one of the productions of Follies that moved me the most was a little community production where they just had two elderly showgirls in the background. It was really just the book, music, and lyrics telling the story, and that remains one of the most moving renditions of the show I’ve ever seen.

I always say I was cast because I was young and half-conscious. And that’s what our characters were. They don’t know what’s going to happen to them. We were cast because we all had that quality as kids, as juveniles and ingenues. Had we known what older Ben had known, we wouldn’t have been cast. We’d have been very old souls in young bodies, and we wouldn’t have been right.

I’d love to ask about the relationship that you had with Sondheim over the years. How did it develop in the years after Follies and your tribute concert?

It was especially personal in the beginning. I was doing Dames at Sea when I started rehearsals for Follies. Steve said, “What are you doing tonight?” I said, “Well, I’m doing Dames at Sea.” He said, “I haven’t seen that one. Can I come over?” I said, "Yeah, we’re going to do a little put-in rehearsal this afternoon,” and he said, “Can I come with you?” So Steve and I came over and we started rehearsing. I was up on stage helping the new person come into the cast. The musical director looked down, and he said, “Who’s that in the audience?” I said, “Well, that’s Steve Sondheim.” The musical director almost had a stroke.

But Steve stayed and watched the whole rehearsal, and then hung around to see the performance that evening. And he would have us over for dinner. He would show us movies. We saw Evening Primrose at his house. Steve and Lenny’s families were real close. They would create movies together, and we would see the movies they made.

When A Little Night Music was up in Boston, I went to see Steve for dinner, to talk about ideas for the tribute. He said, “After dinner, I have to go and do some writing.” I said, “Could I come and watch you write?” And he said, “I’m sorry. I always do it alone.” But I always wonder which song he wrote when he left me after dinner. I kept hoping it was “Send in the Clowns,” but I think that happened earlier.

Year later, one of the bigger projects I did with Steve’s work was the national tour of Side by Side by Sondheim, which of course started in the U.K. We did the tour for two and a half, maybe three years, and there were many, many changes, which we went back and forth with Stephen about. I stayed throughout as the producer, and as the leading man. We got the rights to do it from Music Theatre International. I don’t know if Steve ever went back to the original English creators and told them about the changes, but we were sending in the royalty checks, so we got away with it. And it was a terrific production.

I later did a concert with Vicki Mallory called When Everything Was Possible. We made a few changes to Steve’s work for that, and he was always so supportive. I’d love for younger people to see that show, and hear our stories. [Click here for a taste of that show]. We changed the beginning of “Being Alive” in that concert a little, because we needed to get more quickly from protest to prayer. He said, “I understand totally.” And then he said, “It’s clunky, but use it”—which was just so Stephen.

Since Sondheim’s death, there has been a palpable surge in people seeking to produce his work in various different contexts. You’ve been doing that producing work for so long, preserving and presenting Sondheim’s work in so many ways. Do you think you were somewhat ahead of the curve in that respect?

I think I was gifted with a little bit of a creative curiosity. When I was doing Follies, the stage manager of Follies, Fritz Holt, and his partner, Barry Brown, were raising money for Gypsy in London with Angela Lansbury. I knew they were having trouble, so I asked them if they needed help. When I was in California, I would have lunches with people, and I raised a quarter of the budget for Gypsy. So that was my first producing thing. From then on, I always had a mindset that I could be part of making things happen as well as being cast in them. I never was afraid of that.

And obviously, when we did the tribute, I was deeply in over my head, but I had the support of Steve and Burt Shevelove and Jonathan Tunick and Donna McKechnie. Oh, my God, that team! So I was in good hands. And sitting in the back of the Shubert Theatre for almost the whole evening, on the steps with Stephen, I said, “This is what I want to do.” I’d never felt more gratified than I did on that evening.

Finally, if you think about Sondheim’s legacy, and how his work continues to live and breathe, how healthy do you think that overall picture is today?

I think it’s enduring. And it’s going to continue to endure. Of course, there are shows that are done more than others. I never imagined that Into the Woods would be as popular with 12-year-old kids as it is, because I’m still trying to figure it out totally myself! And there are waves of people discovering his work: performers, singers, actors, producers, and theaters around the country. I think it’s a forever thing.

I have a house in Bridgewater, Connecticut, which is a mile away from Steve’s house. Every other weekend when I’m up there, I drive by his house. I just drive by and say hi to him. I actually did that the day after he passed, because I was up there at the time. His work, his generosity, his skill, his commitment—it connects to us cerebrally, of course. But I think he connects to our hearts as well, and that’s why we miss him so much.

Click here to view “On the Steps of the Shubert,” Kurt’s short film celebrating the 50th anniversary of Sondheim: A Musical Tribute.

Click here to view “There”, a video created by Michael Lee Stever, put together in honor of Kurt and Victoria Mallory’s “When Everything Was Possible” concert at New York City Center.