A mong all the birthday tributes to Stephen Sondheim this month, there was one from an eminent US radio journalist, who recounted the first time he saw Sunday in the Park With George, Sondheim’s musical inspired by a Georges Seurat painting. It opened on Broadway in 1984 to — typically for a new Sondheim — critical division, audience confusion and, from this particular commentator, an experience so profound he had to leave the theater at the interval, because it was “too much.”
It’s a telling detail: you don’t turn to Sondheim for comfort, or at least for the comforts traditionally associated with musical theater. “Everybody dies,” sings a character in Company, a musical about a single man with commitment issues, and that’s pretty much the Sondheim consolation: You get cheered up by facing things, rather than evading them, even if they’re dreadful; knowing is all. Like opera, Bergman and the hard-core blue cheeses, you are supposed to grow into Sondheim, not only because the music is choppy and difficult and you don’t, at first, know what you are listening to, but because he is so uncompromisingly grown-up. People in Sondheim are sly with unhappiness, neurotic, cutting, self-aware. His lyrics could only have been written in the age of generalized anxiety disorder.
Often overlooked, the humor is so layered with irony that his songs at times seem almost back-combed, their lyrics running against the grain of the melody and vice versa. He is often accused of being too clever, of putting thought before feeling, as if the two weren’t connected, and so the biggest surprise when you first encounter Sondheim is the force of it all: He can make you cry more efficiently than Erich Segal.
You have to know something inside-out before you can subvert it, and so it was with Sondheim, whose early professional years were spent working with the great writing teams of the American musical. As a teenager, he spent a lot of time with Oscar Hammerstein, a family friend and father figure after his parents divorced. After college, he auditioned for Leonard Bernstein and was taken on as the lyricist for West Side Story, and after that for Gypsy (he was originally offered the job of composer, too, but Ethel Merman thought him too green; the job went to Jule Styne).
In the meantime, he developed a style and approach that would, when he began to write shows single-handed, take the principles of the old-fashioned musical and radically modernize them. Sondheim’s tricky, compact, dense lyrics work almost like puzzles (he is a big cryptic crossword fan), and draw from his earliest instincts about music and art. He was a math student in college and only took a course in music because the tutor promised to strip it of romanticism and approach it, said Sondheim, as a “mathematical art.” The geometry of things, how they connect and draw attention to their own composition, is a presiding interest, as is technical precision — good pronunciation is all in the work of Sondheim.
He has said the biggest influence on his professional life was the failure of Allegro, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that came after Oklahoma! and Carousel. He worked as production assistant for the original 1947 Broadway production; on its opening night, an actor caught his tap shoe in a track, ripped every ligament in his leg, and had to be carried, screaming, from the stage. It proved that even the best in the business could still make mistakes. As he told BBC Radio 3 last week: “I’ve spent my life trying to fix Allegro.”
The notion of failure (“the sand in the oyster that isn’t a pearl,” as he wrote in Anyone Can Whistle) was quickly incorporated as a theme, along with ambivalence, mild irritation, petulance and panic — states and sentiments that traditional musicals shove aside for the bigger, blowsier ones. “There is someone in this dress, George,” huffs Dot, as he paints her that Sunday on the island in the Seine. In Company, the chorus, with its superficially cheerful tone, becomes progressively madder and more sinister as it tries to pull Bobby, the single man, into the unhappy life of the couples around him. The anti-love songs — lines such as “deeply mal-adjusted/never to be trusted”; or, in A Little Night Music, the song Every Day a Little Death — are Sondheim at his best, their music managing, through a grinding chirpiness, to comment on modern life before you even get to the lyrics.
Cold fury and furious delight
The performers of these songs are of a recognizable type, reflecting the writer’s preference for the doyenne over the ingenue. You certainly wouldn’t start a fight with any of Sondheim’s leading ladies: Judi Dench, Angela Lansbury, Carol Burnett; the latter’s Ladies Who Lunch is a boozier, more desperate affair than Elaine Stritch’s more famous version. Five years ago, Stritch appeared at Sondheim’s 75th birthday gala and, fists clenched and grimacing, sang Broadway Baby from Follies, at the age of almost 80. There’s a cold fury and a furious delight in Sondheim, the two mingling and shifting. Ladies Who Lunch, from Company, turns from a slight, frivolous number into a rage against the darkness in a way that puts you in mind of Stevie Smith’s poem Thoughts About the Person from Porlock, in which the person from Porlock is not, as one is encouraged to believe in the opening lines, an annoying neighbor, but death itself.
“It’s anyone’s guess whether the public will be shocked or delighted,” wrote a critic in the New York Times in 1984, after the first production of Sunday in the Park With George. People are allowed to be sad in Sondheim and they are allowed to break the rules — most notably to sing up against the ceiling of a note and tip, occasionally, into flatness, as will happen in life — but they are also infused with the essentially romantic American spirit. The characters might be cynical, but the net result is not cynicism, nor desiccated wordiness, nor mathematics.
“Anything you do, let it come from you, and it will be new,” sings Sunday’s Dot to her grumpy lover, who, despite his grumpiness, tyranny and solipsism, is motivated by love. So is everyone else in a Sondheim production — and, as the writer has said himself, so is he.
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