Stephen was fond of puzzles. Puzzles gave him solace in the aftermath of his parents divorce. When his parents split, nothing made sense anymore, as he described it to his biographer. It was like building a house on sand with human beings and their relations. Puzzles had a solution, they created terra firma on which your feet could rest.
Sondheim collected puzzles and games. He was a subscriber for decades to the Listener, a magazine published by the British Broadcasting Corporation, which was specifically for its crosswords, which are puzzles in which the clues are themselves complex word problems filled with anagrams and puns and complicated wordplay.
In an alternate universe, Stephen Sondheim became a mathematician rather than the greatest musical theater composer/lyricist of all time. He had little visual imagination as a child and had little love for art or music. His love of games helped him befriend Jamie Hammerstein, the son of Oscar Hammerstein II. The boy was taken to see his new musical when he was 13 by the elder Hammerstein. The book musical, a musical in which the songs and script work together to tell a coherent and fully integrated story, was the dominant form musical theater would take from then on.
Hammerstein was the first mentor to Sondheim. Hammerstein told Sondheim to say what he felt as opposed to what other people felt. Hammerstein gave him crucial feedback on his work and told him to take the job of writing the lyrics for West Side Story, a project that was intensely ambivalent.
The 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 His lyrics were too poetic and clever. They showed off too much. In 1977 he said that lyrics exist in time. The audience gets one chance to hear it. Unintelligibility is the only sin on the stage. In West Side Story, he committed this sin frequently. The rhymes did not call attention to the right words, but to be clever, and the words didn't always sit on the music. It was a big logic puzzle and lacking a human heart. The way he had written his cryptic crosswords was the way he had approached writing the lyrics. He would later call them bloodless.
West Side Story lacked characters. The people in the show serve a purpose. Maria and Tony are The Young Lovers, they have few other qualities and few things to base a song on. The duet "Tonight" was a bunch of flowery poetry, which meant nothing to Sondheim. For most of us, the lyrics for West Side Story are the kind of thing that we would have written ourselves. He would be one of the great artists of any art form, because of his relentlessness, his desire to solve the puzzle of writing a song that expresses character, theme, and situation, while also sitting properly on sophisticated music.
His achievement is Shakespearean. He was able to inherit an art form and theater scene from a previous generation and push the boundaries of what theater could do again and again. No one, before or since, has done more to make the American musical appealing and accessible, and no one in theater has been more successful in making experimental gambits and aesthetic difficulty appealing and accessible. He wrote a comedy called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and a romantic drama called A Little Night Music, but he also wrote a musical calledSweeney Todd.
Pacific Overtures is a musical about the United States forcing 19th century Japan to open to trade through the eyes of everyday Japanese citizens. One of the show's greatest songs is "Someone in a Tree," in which a major meeting between Commodore William Perry and the Shogun's counselors is recounted through multiple layers of distance. A boy saw the event from a hiding place, but he could not hear it. A warrior was unable to hear the conference. The song ends with a list of small things that add up to something much larger than they appear.
The day is not the fragment.
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The pebble is not the stream.
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It is not the sea.
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That is happening.
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The beam is not the building.
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The stone is not the garden.
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Only a small amount of tea.
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And history.
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Someone is in a tree.
He would repeat it again and again, from Into the Woods' list of ingredients, to Company's list of joys and struggles that make up a marriage in the song "The Little Things You Do Together."
Like Shakespeare's work, Sondheim's is filled with surface delights, but deeper rewards and deeper engagement. There is always a new layer to be found in his work, whether it is a musical theme or some kind of grace note. I have never cared for the musical assassins, but I was struck by the prophetic power of the song "Another National Anthem." It showed how white resentment and feeling of grievance would blossom into entitlement and violence, and how there are those who thrive on chaos and despair. Both Shakespeare and Sondheim pushed their characters to a deeper engagement with the human condition, and both made the book musical deeper in character with each show. Like Shakespeare, Sondheim was obsessed with the idea of setting two opposing ideas against one another and letting them duke it out. He used to call this his favorite thing to write about, because it was the way he felt and it wasn't dealt with very much on the musical stage.
At times in his career, he was accused of being too intellectual or cold. A state of deep feeling is what ambivalence is. The song "Send in the Clowns" from A Little Night Music is perhaps the best example of this. The song is sung by a woman. The man she has loved for decades confessed that he loves her but will not leave her. Hal Prince convinced him that the song in the scene was not meant to be a singing part, and that he should have sung it. The song would have to be written to her strengths and weaknesses since she was not a trained musical theater performer. It was a puzzle solved by using short phrases that ended in vowels, so that notes would not have to be held for long, and keeping the melodic phrases simple within a fairly narrow range. The results give the song a restraint that makes its bitterness all the more powerful, as its opening lines (Aren't it rich?/ Are we a pair?) slowly give way to a darkly comic grief. The power of the song comes from the use of irony and subtext. It is warm. It is a puzzle that is infused with spiritual meaning.
Road Show, a revised version of Bounce, did not fare much better when it opened off-Broadway in 2008. The 21st century has incomplete projects and rewrites of older shows like The Frogs. Even though he recently announced on Late Night with Stephen Colbert that he hoped to see the premiere of Square One next year, I never believed it would happen. His death Friday at the age of 91 was not unexpected, but I am devastated nonetheless. We can't help but grieve the man who gave us so much.
The impact of Sondheim on the theater community is felt. In his final interview before his death, he talked about how excited he was to see Dana H. and This is A Room, two experimental theater productions. The new Broadway revival of Company has been rewritten to make it seem like it's a musical instead of a play, and he greenlighted a production of Sweeney Todd where the cast all played their own instruments and the audience ate real meat pies. Even though Lin-Manuel Miranda's artistic mission of reconciling the Broadway musical with the popular musical form of hip hop is in many ways a reversal of Sondheim's own version of the popular musical, he still received a mentor in the form of Sondheim.
This is a reason we mourn him. His work follows us through each stage of our own lives, adding complexity and illuminating depths we struggle to articulate. From Into the Woods, which takes the materials of childhood and spins them into a profound morality tale about selfishness, community, and storytelling, to Follies, which examines aging and regret, has given us profound, moving, complex, brilliant looks at innumerable moods: desire, revenge, the creative To enter a musical with both artistic and humanity expanded is a must. Words and music can create meaning between them that neither was capable of on its own, so it is to hear language anew and reconsider how words and music can create meaning. It is to know that there is someone who will hold me back. It is to look at the unsolvable puzzle of life and find endless wealth.
A previous version of the story stated that the final musical wasPassion. The show was called Bounce.
