One of the hundreds of photographs accompanying his Collected Lyrics shows Stephen Sondheim at the piano in a publishing house sporting a fedora and a faintly rumpled expression. Looking like a cross between Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau — the innocence and experience of American movies — he’s actually acting in June Moon, a 1974 TV film of a play about a Tin Pan Alley composer. Although his screen performances have been extremely rare, character has been the driving force in the career of one of the key figures in 20th-century theater.
Lyricists tend to be good phrasemakers and Sondheim has made his fair share. “The ladies who lunch” was coined as the sung title of a song of galvanizing self-disgust written for Elaine Stritch’s uber-sardonic Joanne in Company. And before that, there was the first-act closer from Gypsy where Ethel Merman’s Rose, a fire alarm on legs, fixes her daughter with a look that could halt an oncoming train and launches into Everything’s Coming Up Roses.
Both those songs are designed to bring down the house. That they unfailingly do so is because the precision of the characterful writing allows audiences to understand who is singing and, crucially, why.
Sondheim didn’t invent the idea of developed character in the dramatically coherent musical, but an accident of geography meant he witnessed its birth. After his parents divorced, 11-year-old Stephen acquired a surrogate father in Oscar Hammerstein, his mother’s Pennsylvania neighbor. Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers were working on a musical called Away We Go!, which broke the already slightly cracked mold that dictated that musical comedies should aspire to the condition of elaborate line-ups of leggy chorus girls adorning idiotic love stories peopled by caricatures with balloons for brains.
Renamed Oklahoma!, it kissed goodbye to vaudeville, created the “integrated musical” and, because it ran for a record-breaking five years, pretty much everyone followed suit. And during that time, Sondheim lapped up everything Hammerstein could teach him. Having learned the rules, he became one of theater’s great iconoclasts. He writes musicals but, alongside Edward Albee and David Mamet, Sondheim is a game-changing dramatist.
In the “attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes” of the book’s subtitle, Sondheim is generous yet clear-eyed about his mentor. Hammerstein’s tendency toward thin characterization, philosophical naivety and self-conscious poeticisms don’t meet his pupil’s exacting standards. The line from the title song of The Sound of Music, “Like a lark who is learning to pray,” doesn’t escape his scorn.
And Hammerstein’s not alone. Dotted throughout the book are pin-sharp portraits of the techniques of all the great lyricists of the American musical’s “golden age,” which Sondheim defines as 1925 to 1960. Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Noel Coward and W.S. Gilbert are all skewered for sins including substituting rhyme for thought, redundant adjectival padding revealing more about the lyricist than the character and contrived syntax. Although his impressively omniscient disquisitions are laced with wry wit, it’s clear that he abhors laziness.
In Sondheim’s defense, he’s equally engaging about why easeful vernacular phrasing by such figures as Dorothy Fields (I Can’t Give You Anything But Love) and Frank Loesser (Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat) makes their writing so strong. And not only does he mostly refrain from commenting upon living rivals — “speaking ill exclusively of the dead seems to me the gentlemanly thing to do” — his harshest analysis is reserved for his own work.
From I Feel Pretty in West Side Story, where street-toned, Puerto Rican Maria suddenly comes out with the absurdly sophisticated “it’s alarming how charming I feel,,” to structural infelicities in his 16-performance flop Merrily We Roll Along, he openly interrogates his first 13 shows from conception to execution in a way other artists have only ever dared leave to critics. The result is an eye-widening treasure chest of manuscript sketches of first ideas and second thoughts, rehearsal shots, backstage arguments, lessons and, intriguingly, glimpses of the man beneath the material.
Not only does his book run counter to the autobiographical tendency toward self-forgiveness, Sondheim swats away attempts to locate his emotional life. The one song he concedes does draw on his own experience is Finishing the Hat, from Sunday in the Park With George, which captures the elation the artist feels creating art. Everything else, he argues, is about him inhabiting characters created by others — i.e. the “book writers” who provide his shows’ narrative shape and dialogue.
True, but A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Passion and Bounce were all his ideas. And what audiences see, understand and feel when watching them are all determined by his theatrical and musical choices.
Obviously, the one thing this handsomely produced book doesn’t do is allow you to hear that. The music, which in his best work so ideally coexists with these lyrics, is missing. But listening to the songs with this in your hands is doubly resonant. Despite the author’s protestations, reading and hearing the bittersweet Our Time from his beloved Merrily We Roll Along almost bursting with hope is profoundly revealing. Only a romantic realist could have written that.
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