When Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) passed away a few years ago and the entire theatrical world went into a mass keening we marked the occasion with held tongue. I find the reverence the world has for Sondheim unfathomable. I like some of his work, I find his life interesting, but the idea of him being a God of the Theatre whose entire canon as a unit moves mind and body to endless spasms of rapture eludes me. I just do not get it. I confess that I have a bias against the privileged class, though many an artist has broken past that threshold on the way to my heart. I do very much admire HOW he cultivated himself, and the very high level of attainment he achieved as both as a wordsmith and a composer. That he possessed copious amounts of grey matter, and the character to harness it, there is no question. And though I well and truly love plenty of the products of his pen, somehow he’s not my hero in the way that he seems to be a hero to so many. It’s an alienating feeling, but I’m not gonna fake it just to fit in. There are many in the theatre who tend to operate that way, but that’s not me. You can accuse me of having a blind spot. It’s okay by me. We all have many.
Yet Sondheim is widely considered THE figure of his time, and there is plenty about his life and career that interest me, so we add him today to our annals.
Sondheim would be the first to admit that he was born under a lucky star. Oscar Hammerstein II began to mentor him when he was just a boy when they were neighbors in Buck’s County. Thus, you can consider him a sort of adopted child of the Hammerstein dynasty. I’m not overawed by OH2 as a lyricist either, another facet of my outlier status, I reckon. I like his work with Kern much better than his work with Rodgers, and I love Show Boat without qualification. (Well, who the fuck do I admire? you’re surely wondering. Among Oscar’s contemporaries: Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, Kalmar & Ruby, and Arlen & Harburg And among the Hammersteins, I love the founder of the dynasty, OH1, and Willie, the booker at the Victoria).
Under Hammerstein’s tutelage, Sondheim’s juvenilia included musical theatre adaptations of George S. Kaufman’s Beggar on Horseback, Maxwell Anderson’s High Tor, and Mary Poppins. He also studied music theory and composition with the modernist composer Milton Babbitt. Hammerstein + Babbitt would perhaps be an unfairly facile summation of Sondheim as a songwriter, but it seems pretty apt.
No one ever talks about this, but Sondheim’s first professional job in show business was writing scripts for the TV show Topper during its 1953-54 season. His first professional musical was Saturday Night (1955), based on the play Front Porch in Flatbush by the Epstein Brothers, the guys who wrote Casablanca, although the show never opened. Then he got lucky a second time when he ran into Arthur Laurents at a party, which resulted in Sondheim being hired to write the lyrics for West Side Story (1957). As I wrote here, West Side Story is one of the musicals I know and love the best, but we don’t really think of it as a Sondheim show. It’s more of a Jerome Robbins–Leonard Bernstein show, though Sondheim did great work on it. And I have similarly warm and enthusiastic feelings for Gypsy (1959) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), both of which I am overdue to write more about, but again we tend to think of these shows as belonging to his collaborators as much as, or more than, Sondheim himself.
With Arthur Laurents, who had written the books to West Side Story and Gypsy, Sondheim then wrote songs for Anyone Can Whistle (1964) and Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965), replacing the recently deceased Hammerstein on the latter. In 1966 he contributed a song to The Mad Show, an off-Broadway revue produced by Mad Magazine. This was followed by an original musical for television called Evening Primrose (1966) which starred Anthony Perkins as a young man who liked to hang out in a department store with mannikins. A very Twilight Zone/ Outer Limits sort of concept; the show it aired on was called ABC Stage 67. Sondheim was to become good friends with Perkins, and collaborated with him on several subsequent projects.
In 1968, he collaborated on an intriguing all-star production that didn’t come to fruition. Called The Race to Urga, it was an adaptation an adaptation of the Brecht one act The Exception and the Rule, intended for the then new rep company at Lincoln Center, with Bernstein as composer, Robbins as choreographer, John Guare as book-writer, and Sondheim doing lyrics. Substantial work was done on the project and it was later workshopped, but Robbins pulled out suddenly and the project collapsed.
Company (1970) was Sondheim’s first of many collaborations with Hal Prince. It was a series of vignettes, originally conceived as short one act plays about marriage, written by George Furth, now with songs by Sondheim. “Ladies Who Lunch”, performed by Elaine Stritch, is best remembered, because Stritch remained associated with it. The original Broadway cast is surreal: Dean Jones, Barbara Barrie, Charles Kimbrough (later from Murphy Brown), George Coe (later from Saturday Night Live), Pamela Myers (later from Sha Na Na), Len Cariou (who went on to star in many future Sondheim productions) et al. It was immortalized by the documentary Original Cast Album: Company (1971), made by D.A. Pennebaker after Don’t Look Back (1967) and Monterey Pop (1968).
Follies (1971) is of particular interest to me because the premises is a reunion of middle-aged ex-Follies girls and their husbands, and reflects the subject aesthetically. In the show “Ziegfeld” has been fictionalized to “Weismann”. The original cast included Gene Nelson, Yvonne De Carlo, Ethel Shutta, and Fifi D’Orsay, et al. It was my good fortune to see the 2001 Broadway revival, which had Judith Ivey, Blythe Danner, Gregory Harrison, Treat Williams, Polly Bergen, Betty Garrett, and others. “I’m Still Here” is probably its best known song.
A Little Night Music (1973) contains Sondheim’s most successful song as both composer and lyricist, the oft-covered “Send in the Clowns”. (Judy Collins‘ 1975 single reached the top 40). The show was based on the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night, and featured Glynis Johns and Hermione Gingold. Harold Prince directed a film of the musical in 1977, with Gingold, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Rigg, et al.
Also in 1973, the non-musical movie The Last of Sheila, which I wrote about here. Co-written with Anthony Perkins, and directed by fellow Broadway vet Herbert Ross, this “locked-yacht” mystery was based on puzzle-like parlor games the pair had devised for Hollywood parties. In 1975 the pair wrote a follow-up entitled The Chorus Girl Murder Case, which mashed together elements from Bob Hope’s wartime comedies, plus Lady of Burlesque, and Orson Welles’ magic shows, but the film was never made. Ditto their seven part script Crime and Variations, which they wrote for Motown productions about a decade later. While we’re on the subject of mysteries he also wrote a song for the 1976 Sherlock Holmes film The Seven Percent Solution, also directed by Ross.
Meanwhile there had been a 1972 revival of Forum, with Phil Silvers in the lead as originally intended (he’d passed on the project a decade earlier). The cast also Larry Blyden, which I only mention here because Blyden starred in Sondheim’s next musical, an adaptation of Aristophanes The Frogs! Now that is my cup of tea! But it’s had a bumpy history. It premiered at Yale in 1974 with a cast that included a young Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, and Christopher Durang. There were some regional and off-Broadway productions, but then Nathan Lane did some revisions and finally opened on Broadway with it in 2004, in the wake of his major success in The Producers.
Sondheim explored colonialism and Japanese culture in Pacific Overtures (1976), and then went on to what may be his most successful show Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979). This one too will get its own post here in future, incorporating the musical, the original penny dreadful, the many plays that were based on it, and screen versions. In 1981 came Merrily We Roll Along (1981), his second George S. Kaufman adaptation, after Beggar on Horseback. The structural conceit of this one (the scenes go backwards) leant itself well to Sondheim’s by now well-established love of formal experimentation. That same year, he also contributed music and songs to Warren Beatty’s blockbuster motion picture Reds.
When I lay it out in an inventory like this I realize that it’s really the two James Lapine collaborators Sunday in the Park with George (1984) and Into the Woods (1987) that convince me that I don’t like Sondheim. I have no idea how anyone can sit in a chair for two hours for that stuff.
In 1990 came the controversial Assassins, in which several historical Presidential assassins, and attempted assassins compete at some sort of existential carnival shooting gallery. New York Times’ critic Frank Rich famously assassinated the show, though, like nearly all of Sondheim’s shows it went on to have a devoted following and more successful future outings. Still the composer went on to have better luck that year with the music he wrote for Dick Tracy, his second movie with Beatty.
Several projects followed in the ensuing decades, the most interesting of which (to me) was his non-musical Getting Away with Murder (1996) which reunited Sondheim with Company‘s George Furth and the mystery themes he had explored with Anthony Perkins.
Now, here’s a question: is Sondheim a modernist or a post-modernist? I tend to think the former, which is an indication that the theatre always lags several decades behind the other art forms. He’d have been a much more logical adapter of the T.S. Eliot material that became Cats for example. Though in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s hands it became a record-breaking hit. In Sondheim’s, it mightn’t have. Is it the fact that Sondheim is not a populist that I can’t fully embrace him? I admit that’s part of it. I actually happen to love opera, but even within opera I tend to favor the likes of Puccini and Verdi and Gilbert and Sullivan who plant tunes in your head that won’t leave. So, yes, this vaudeville lover don’t understand the point of having unsingable songs in a Broadway musical, other than giving us opportunities to marvel at the rare singer who can carry them off. That doesn’t feel communal to me. I’m a classicist, and a traditionalist, in the theatre anyway. Yet there have been countless experimentalists (the Absurdists, for example) whom I have loved immoderately, because I have grasped what they were trying to do. When I think of his shows, I think of something visually static — a bunch of people in chairs, with unfocused eyes, singing interior monologues. In Beckett, it’s because we’re all alone and we’re all going to die. In Sondheim, I have no idea. It’s supposed to be daring, but to me it feels cliched. There can be no greater indictment of commercial theatre in the late 20th century than the fact that sort of static presentation was considered daring. Chairs! I’d love to have given Clint Eastwood a song to sing for his bit at the 2012 Republican National Convention. I want to put tacks or a woopie cushion on all those goddamn chairs. Stand up! Cross the stage! Shake your fanny! Have a sword fight! What the hell? “What was the show about?” “Well, a bunch of old ladies are sitting around in chairs”. “That’s it?” “Well, there’s his other show, the one where there’s a bunch of people in a park, standing.”
Sondheim, that lover of puzzles — yeah, that’s a mystery I just can’t seem to solve. But be warned: anyone who attempts to explain it to me will be speedily and unsentimentally assassinated.