Thank you for bringing up Kazan and Streetcar.
I do feel the need to jump in and say something about Merman. I'm not sure that Sondheim thought so little of Merman's acting abilities. If he had, he wouldn't have mentioned her Rose as one of the great performances. We know that she was never able to do a couple of things as he'd hoped. On at least one of those things, I think he was the person who screwed her up by giving her an unhelpful note. On the demo of "Rose's Turn," she nails the "Momma's gotta let go" better than anyone else. Then he gave her that stupid note about stuttering and Jessica Tandy (speaking of Streetcar) so she kept trying to stutter, which doesn't seem necessary, and she was not good at that moment.
Arthur Laurents is the one who said terrible things about her, and he's the one who said that Sondheim said rather nasty things about her, but there is evidence to suggest that Laurents was misremembering what Sondheim said, remembering it as he wanted to remember it. (Although I'd guess that Sondheim probably got pretty pissed off at her sometimes, especially when she refused to learn the verse he wrote for "Some People.")
Laurents wrote that Sondheim used to call her "the talking dog." Maybe he did, but in the Sunday Times interview with Rich, this is what Sondheim said: "I've made a joke that is both glib and I suppose slightly tasteless about her being an illustration of the old anecdote that it isn't remarkable that the dog lost playing chess -- it's the fact that the dog plays chess. What was remarkable was watching a woman who everybody assumed couldn't act, act. Now, it's a limited kind of acting. She didn't quite understand what 'Rose's Turn' was about."
So he's basically complimenting her acting, saying that she was a better actress than people realized, if still a somewhat limited one.
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