NQR : Topgallant : Rants

On Sondheim.

Originally posted April 20, 2003:

For

jessindistress and anybody else wondering who this Sondheim person is I'm always on about:

Sondheim is, has, will always be, my god and the keeper of my heart. My ex used to joke that he was one of only two men in my life--Sondheim being the other.

Sondheim musicals aren't for everybody. And many of them aren't for every generic musical fan. Every Sondheim musical speaks to us on a different level but they *all* have something to say, and usually the way they say it blows you away.

Sondheim began his Broadway career as a lyricist. His surrogate father was none other than Oscar Hammerstein (of Rodgers and Hammerstein, if you don't know who they are you might want to stop reading at this point and go get out your parents' LP library), who was his lifelong mentor. Sondheim once said that he didn't have a choice in careers: if Hammerstein had been a mathmetician Sondheim would have been a mathmetician, simple as that: he just wanted to follow in Hammerstein's footsteps. And Sondheim was smart enough to have done whatever he wanted, too. He used to go sit through films and come out able to play their soundtracks from memory. He worked as a screen writer in Hollywood for the TV series Topper, and used to invent clever, elaborate party games for his friends.

But his main goal was to be on Broadway. As a kid he wrote practice musicals which he would take to Hammerstein, who would critique and correct and guide him along his way. He studied with (semi-minimalistic) composer Ned Rorem after graduating Williams College; he wrote a one-act musical for Yale called The Frogs based on a Greek comedy that was written for and designed to be performed in (and was) a swimming pool. He had set a goal when he was a teenager--he'd sworn to himself that he'd make it to Broadway by the time he was 30.

In 1957, Sondheim made it to Broadway. The musical was West Side Story. He was 27.

How's that for making a splash?

When he first started out as a composer Sondheim was often ridiculed because his music wasn't singable. Critics would deride his songs for their apparent lack of melody and their overemphasis on words that would become a Sondheim trademark. But Sondheim's shows, both at the time of their original productions and still today, remain the most ground-breaking, consistently innovative and daring, and systematically challenging body of work of any composer in the theatre since Rodgers and Hammerstein. His shows experiment with structure and form, and typically take traditional assumptions of plot and storytelling and subvert them (in Merrily We Roll Along, for example, he tells the entire story backwards, like Harold Pinter and Memento; in Into the Woods he goes to great lengths to give us neat pat resolutions to a series of complicated interwoven fairy tales, only to unravel each resolution and prove the happy endings utterly deceptive in the second act).

His songs are cynical and sophisticated. They are not designed to be heard on the radio. His single most popular song, "Send in the Clowns," is a far cry in its popular rendition from the wry, pathos-laden statement it is onstage. What is arguably his second one, "Children Will Listen," is deceptively moralistic. Morals are not often found in Sondheim--or, if they are, they are dubious and vague. Consider these closing lines from Sweeney Todd: "to seek revenge may lead to hell--but everyone does it, and seldom as well." Or the song which was to have closed Company but which was cut because it was found to be too cynical for the era in which it was received. The song, which gives the main character Bobby's final thoughts on marriage after watching all his friends tie the knot, was called "Happily Ever After," and many feel that the show is only fully realized in the rare production in which it's included, with its opening lines "Someone to hold you too close--that's happily ever after--in hell."

His political statements are damning and destructive. Assassins, which is far and away the best musical of the 90's, closed a month after it opened because its anti-patriotism during the Gulf War was too much for audiences to stomach. In

minervacat's journal, she describes what happened in the wake of the revival production eloquently and movingly, and she's absolutely right (although she didn't mention that after the U.S. premiere folded it was produced in London where it ran to smash reviews and mass critical and popular acclaim and had a virtually sold-out run for six months).

His best moments have been parodied by everybody from the Simpsons to Joss Whedon (there are more direct Sondheim homages in "Once More With Feeling" than you can shake a stick at). His influence on up-and-coming musical theatre writers is so great that it inspired a witty song-parody called "Everybody Wants to be Sondheim" ("primed every time to rhyme internally") and a homage from Disney lyricist David Zippel back when he was still writing for the stage: "if my lyrics fail to move her/ I'll apply the Sondheimlich maneuver." And in Rent the only other musical theatre person Johnathan Larson gives homage to (at least literally--there are all sorts of homages throughout) is a toast to his mentor, Sondheim.

I also credit Sondheim with being the primary influence on my thoughts and ideas about the world growing up, with Southern Baptist theology trailing a distant second. You can see how much of that I kept. But Sondheim, haha--Sondheim mantras like "anything you do, let it come from you, then it will be new" and "witches can be right, giants can be good" are still with me, will always be with me.

If I could give the world one thing, as I've said before, I'd give the world Sondheim. I'd give him to each of my friends--and, haha, in fact I think I have. You can bet every one of my closest friends knows who Sondheim is and knows at least *something* about him, whether they want to or not.

If you're thinking of listening to Sondheim or introducing yourself to his musicals it helps to know a bit about what you're getting into in advance. Sondheim shows are so difficult because they're so wordy that you really have to concentrate on the lyrics (Forbidden Broadway did a parody called "Into the Words")--but that's also a stereotype of his shows that's rather misleading, because when done well you won't even notice. Sweeney Todd is the best example i can think of, of this--the words and music are so intricate throughout you don't even stop to think, especially during performance, about, "oh, how verbose that was," because you're just too busy enjoying yourself.

If you're started off with the wrong Sondheim show you could be totally turned off and never want to go back (I shudder to think what would have happened if I had started off with Pacific Overtures.) Since Into the Woods and A Little Night Music are easily his most widely popular, most-performed, and most mainstream, they're the safest bets. But if you're looking to really sink your teeth into something you can love, here's a sample of what you have to choose from.

If you're not a massive musical fan, but you love a good mystery and like to be left with your mind churning after a book you've read, i would recommend that you start with Sweeney Todd--though if you're not used to opera, that could be a bit much. While not technically an opera, Sweeney Todd is almost totally sung throughout, the character of the music (the Dies Irae from the latin Requiem mass is used as a recurring motive throughout) and many of the voice parts call for trained opera singers (though in a concert production of the show in LA a few seasons ago, Kelsey Grammar sang the title role). For those of you who don't know, the whole name of the show is Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It's based on a London Jack-the-Ripper type legend uses it to make a chilling, brilliant point about the dehumanization of the Industrial Revolution. It uses Wagnerian leitmotifs, massive staging effects, and what is arguably Sondheim's most lush and beautiful score. But mostly it's just a tale about a barber who kills people and a mad lady who cooks the victims for meat pies. Most people consider this his masterpiece, but if you're a fan you think they're all masterpieces.

if you drool over Politics, then start with Assassins. It's easily his most devastating and controversial work and it has yet to have a successful production in the US because--oh, . What you need to know is that it's what's called a concept musical and doesn't have a plot in the traditional sense--instead it takes you through history and--well, get the cast album. it's pretty much all there laid out in song.

I will warn you, though--it is devastating.

If you prefer fantasy (and hey, harry potter fan), then start with his most popular work to date, and arguably his most mainstream: Into the Woods. It's hilarious, beautiful, Barbara Streisand and Mandy Patinkin and Frank Sinatra all sing the hits from it, and Bernadette Peters is on the original cast cd. The revival last season was a hit and the guy that played Milky White did a Milk ad.

It's also my personal favorite of all his musicals. It was the one I discovered first, and the one I most wanted to be in. "No One Is Alone" is my favorite song of all time, and when I did the production I cried backstage every night during "No More." A lot of people overlook ITW because of its lightness, its fairy tale subject matter. But it's important to me because what it says about community and communal responsibility, and about choices and consequences, is something that I've always struggled to accept and understand with growing up. This musical really helped me do that.

As artists, i think the one show that speaks to me the most on the most different levels is Sunday in the Park With George. This is another concept musical, though it has a more stable plot (slightly): it's also postmodern as hell and won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. It's a beautiful musical, based on the famous Pointillist painting by Georges Seurat--you can hear the pointillism in the music. Mandy and Bernadette made this one what it was and that's probably why it hasn't been revived since then. "Finishing the Hat" and "Move On" and "Sunday" unfailingly blow me away, and I know scores of people, myself included, who have told me that they wind up weeping during "Children and Art." Most of all, what I love about this musical is the way it grapples with the artist's desire to simply connect--to himself, to other people, to the world around him--to his art. That is the story of my life. I really firmly believe that this musical is a universal one, but specifically, one that should speak to every artistic temperament out there.

If you're a cynic and single, then you should unquestionably start with Company. *Especially* if you're afraid of commitment. Company was uber-radical when it was written back in the 60's. Today its themes are passe but the music and the witticisms and ultimate insecurity expressed in the lyrics are timeless. (Oh, and generally you want the original cast recording, if only for Elaine Stritch's brandy-soaked version of "Ladies Who Lunch"--but if you're one of those cynical types then you might want to try the 1996 revival recording (it's pink-red) with the ending song I mentioned, "Happy Ever After" as the finale as opposed to the more well-known and more non-committal "Being Alive.")

A Little Night Music. Any other time I could write a book about the Mozart-ian ness (the title comes from Eine Kleine Nachtmusic, of course) and the Shakespearean-ness (it's Midsummer Night's Dream for the Modern age, only maybe as Ibsen would have written it), and the leitmotifs and the imagery and etc, etc. but I'm tired. So I'll only say that the entire musical, in keeping with the light airiness of the themes and the emphasis on the lapse of time that drives the musical, the whole show is written in 3-4 or some variation of three-fourths time. This show has a wealth of beautiful music and great songs. So many good lines I don't know where to begin. It's also the most optimistic of Sondheim's shows (save for the farcical straight-up comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Sondheim's first), and it has a very ethereal quality befitting the midsummer dream setting. Mismatched love triangles are at the center of this one. It's about as far a cry from Assassins as it's possible to get, but it's definitely one of Sondheim's best.

The others you should probably stay away from if you're just getting into Sondheim. As far as I know, Anyone Can Whistle and Pacific Overtures never made anybody into Sondheim fans on first hearing, and Merrily We Roll Along, for all its good intentions and lush score, is so confusing plotwise that it flopped after something like only 8 performances and prompted Frank Rich to write that "to be a Sondheim fan is to have one's heart broken at regular intervals." Follies is considered by die-hard Sondheim fans to be the pinnacle of his achievements, but it's really really tough to introduce to a newcomer because there are so many different versions of it with so many different cut songs reinstated or cut again that you start to feel you can't understand the appeal of Follies without buying three different albums or box sets. Passion is gorgeous but out of print, and Forum is great but it's not truly representative of what a Sondheim show is. It's a worthwhile listen--in fact, all of these are worthy and wonderful in their own way, but only after you've really been broken into the Sondheim way of doing things.