Sondheim at 75

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The New York Sun

The publicity photographs for “West Side Story,” taken at rehearsals during the summer of 1957, show Stephen Sondheim as a nervous but hopeful-looking young lyricist in a pale jacket, standing next to three of his collaborators and Broadway’s heaviest hitters: librettist Arthur Laurents, choreographer/director Jerome Robbins, and composer Leonard Bernstein. This was the moment of Mr. Sondheim’s astonishingly quick ascension to the top of the art form he had dedicated himself to. He has been there ever since.


Incredible as it is to believe, this past Tuesday, March 22, Mr. Sondheim turned 75. He has lived long enough to see his work revered and rejected, to himself become an icon. In “Camp,” one of the best films about Broadway (though it’s set not there but upstate, at a theatrical summer camp), one aspiring performer places a framed photograph of Mr. Sondheim by his bed, which a fellow camper shockingly fails to recognize.


On the night of the camp’s big show, though, out of the one limo with New York license plates steps the man in the photograph, arousing trepidation and ecstasy: Sondheim is here! You couldn’t have made that joke about Andrew Lloyd Webber.


Mr. Sondheim is the uncontested master of his art form, the Broadway musical. Yet his is a moribund art form. And though Mr. Sondheim’s status is assured, his legacy is far from clear. He has achieved far more than his contemporaries and outlived his peers. He has no competitors, let alone successors. He needs both if the American musical is to continue to evolve.


After “West Side Story,” Mr. Sondheim collaborated again with Robbins, on “Gypsy,” with music by Jule Stein. But soon he was presenting musicals full of his own songs; they form the longest and greatest lineup of musicals the genre knows, including “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1962), “Company” (1970), “Follies” (1971), “Sweeney Todd” (1979), “Sunday in the Park with George” (1984), “Assassins” (1990), and “Passion” (1994).


Mr. Sondheim faced the same contradiction as all those who make musicals: People pay to see such works primarily to have a good time, but the form at its most refined is capable of so much more. Broadway’s best creators struggle to square the demands of entertainment and the obligations of art, and a handful have succeeded: Rodgers and Hammerstein, Kern, Bernstein, Weill, and Mr. Sondheim. Most other important composers and lyricists wrote great songs for less-than-great musicals.


Mr. Sondheim learned a lot from Kern, and Bernstein, and Cole Porter, and his works are packed with parody and homages to them – an entire show, “Follies,” contains songs comprising an awe-inspiring feat of commemoration and mastery. His work can sound as genuine as Gershwin, even as schmaltzy as Rodgers. But something bigger than Broadway separated Mr. Sondheim from those great forebears – the bloody middle of the 20th century.


In musicals as in the rest of culture, the naiveté that animated the age’s earlier decades no longer seemed honest, or even possible. Life and art demanded more. This helped put an end to certain artists and genres (the Hollywood musical, despite attempts like “It’s Always Fair Weather” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” never recovered). But it liberated Mr. Sondheim’s particular genius for melodic invention and lyrical abracadabra.


Mr. Sondheim’s songs sport an inventiveness of rhythm and rhyme that remain unsurpassed. They move with surprising speed and deftness, often with unexpected, even startling subjects, as when Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett imagine sampling a meat pie stuffed with the gizzards of a London neighbor:



Mrs. Lovett: It’s priest. Have a little priest.


Todd: Is it really good?


Mrs. Lovett: Sir, it’s too good at least.


Then again they don’t commit sins of the flesh.


So it’s pretty fresh.


Coupled with his lyrics are surprising, sometimes daunting, ways with melody. Madonna, performing Sondheim numbers for the movie “Dick Tracy” (1990), publicly worried over learning songs written in key signatures with so many sharps and flats! Mr. Sondheim’s tunes don’t just aim to please: They alert the listener that more than song and dance are at stake.


Mr. Sondheim has probably sighed more than once over the appellation “Broadway’s Rebel” – the guy who wrote shows too smart, tough, or “difficult” for Broadway. Indeed, he made this predicament part of one of his plots. In “Merrily We Roll Along,” a young composer and a librettist play their songs for a Broadway producer. “That’s great, that’s swell,” he sings, “the other stuff as well” – but then he calls them to a halt. “There’s not a tune you can hum,” he gripes, to a quite catchy collection of notes (the very notes he’s just had sung to him!),”there’s not a tune you go bum-bum-bum-de-dum. … Give me a melody.” He briefly bumps past tonality in the middle of “melody,” then walks off humming “Some Enchanted Evening.” This moment gets a huge laugh – but the frustration experienced by the guy who imagined it is also obvious.


Mr. Sondheim was a protege of the man who wrote the lyrics to “Some Enchanted Evening,” Oscar Hammerstein III, whose collaborations with composer Richard Rodgers (“Oklahoma,” “Carousel,” “The Sound of Music,” “South Pacific”) permanently changed how people defined the American musical. Despite coming from a venerable New York show family, Hammerstein was a Broadway rebel, too, favoring songs that were not diversions from the plot but contributions to it. “Oklahoma!” was the path-breaking Hammerstein musical; it and his other collaborations with Rodgers can be played today intact, whereas Gershwin and Porter shows usually require extensive work – revamped or completely new books and jokes, juggling songs from other parts of the story (or even from other musicals) – to make them palatable.


Mr. Sondheim took Hammerstein’s adventurousness very far. His shows are set all over the world and in many historical periods. They have arresting concepts, and often feel as driven and tightly structured as the best dramatic thrillers. Mr. Sondeim’s characters are often colorful: murderers from all ages, uneminent Victorians, native Japanese, foreign imperialists, show people facing ghosts in a doomed theater, frustrated fin de siecle artists. They are also often lonely, unhappy people left behind the final curtain with less-than-happy endings. What in other shows might seem sweet is tougher to swallow when written by Mr. Sondheim.


“There was a barber and his wife / And she was beautiful,” goes a reiterated ditty in “Sweeney Todd.” Todd sings: “And she was beautiful / And she was virtuous / And he was,” and then the vocal line suddenly drops, “naive.” At the start of the show, the lullaby like tune can be admired for its beauty. When repeated, it sounds tragic: It arrives after the most gruesome night on Broadway, betrayal, revenge, murder, and cannibalism taking the place of gags and chorus lines.


Traditional musical values are evident in the superbness of Mr. Sondheim’s craft and his arresting sense of beauty; the real world crashes in through story, subtext, and impact. Sondheim shows can affect you like your real life (if better scored and arranged); at their very best, they become part of your life.


Mr. Sondheim’s career flourished during the saddest years of Broadway history, when New York’s fall to financial crisis and crime made tickets harder to sell, beloved theaters fell to the wrecking ball, and many in the theatrical community died from AIDS. “Sweeney Todd” seems an apocalyptic premonition of what was to come; later Sondheim, especially “Into the Woods,” and “Passion,” can be viewed as responses to what had happened.


Mr. Sondheim courageously pulled from these tough times a body of major work, but his weakest influence has been felt where it’s most needed: in other contemporary Broadway projects. Awards and admiration have coexisted with resentment. The work I believe to be his greatest musical, “Sunday in the Park with George,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 – but won only one Tony award. The amusing yet insubstantial “La Cage aux Folles” won Best Musical and Score, and its composer Jerry Herman assured his audience the old-fashioned Broadway musical was still around (the remarks earned him a loud hand). This seemed a slap at Mr. Sondheim, as if his musicals were a threat to ones Broadway wanted to make – rather than the other way around.


The damage such Broadway fundamentalism wreaks can be seen strewn all around the Great White Way, never brighter, never more expensive – and never more irrelevant to the rest of the culture. Mr. Sondheim may be wearing Broadway’s crown, but the realm is occupied by the likes of Mr. Webber and Frank Wildhorn, successful colleagues whose works are almost risibly inferior to his. (At least they do write musicals, rather than simply string together pop-song compilations). Broadway survives on fool’s gold, despite the blessing of having one of its most cherishable creators still very much alive and among them.


Revivals of Mr. Sondheim’s works have been, like all others, dependent on the whims of producers. The second go at “Assassins” was a vindication of one of the composer’s only shows not to make it to Broadway; the revival of “Into the Woods” was considerably less worthy. Yet keeping Mr. Sondheim’s work onstage seems to me especially important, so that it may influence the next generation of songwriters.


Why doesn’t somebody dedicate a fulltime Broadway company to the great musicals, all of them, on the boards year in and out, as the Royal Shakespeare does for the Bard and European and American institutional theaters do for Albee, Miller, O’Neill, and other playwrights? There are more than enough worthy shows to keep a theater filled year-round with delighted audiences; the complete works of Mr. Sondheim could get them started.


If audiences could experience, firsthand, the musical at it heights, Broadway’s contemporary quality crisis might be more starkly exposed. What’s Disney planning to do with the New Amsterdam, the theater Ziegfeld built, once “The Lion King” closes? The theater that unveiled Broadway’s most extravagant diversions would be a fitting home for the works of a man that took the art form farther than anyone else, and the masters that inspired him.


And perhaps some young audience member would be inspired to follow him – someone who could, with luck and support, make for Broadway’s future more than a tune you can hum.


“Passion” will be performed March 30 & 31 and April 1 at Rose Hall (Jazz at Lincoln Center, (Jazz at Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500) The March 31 performance (at which Mr. Sondheim is scheduled to appear) will be broadcast on PBS.


The Museum of Television and Radio’s retrospective, “Good Thing Going: Celebrating Stephen Sondheim,” continues until July 3. (25 W. 52nd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-621-6800).


The New York Sun

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