For better, and–through no fault of his own–for worse, Stephen Sondheim has become the dominant figure in American musical theater.
In the 29 years since his New York debut with ”West Side Story,”
Sondheim has created either lyrics or lyrics-and-music for a dozen Broadway musicals, not including the revues, anthologies, special tributes and concert versions devoted to his work. Nor does that list include the off-Broadway shows, the Broadway revivals, the opera versions, the original regional theater productions, the movie soundtracks, the odd film script (”The Last of Sheila,” with Anthony Perkins), or the lyrics later contributed to other people`s shows (”Candide”).
Today, at 56, and with his new musical, ”Into the Woods,” just launched at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, Sondheim stands at the top of his precarious profession as a Broadway composer.
Sondheim is not alone among composers who have enjoyed Broadway success in the last three decades. Marvin Hamlisch, Charles Strouse, Jerry Bock, Jerry Herman, John Kander and Stephen Schwartz, among others, have all had bigger hits in the same period.
Several Sondheim shows have made money–such as ”Gypsy,” ”A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and ”Company”–but others, including some of his most valued work–”Follies,” ”Sunday in the Park with George,” ”Pacific Overtures” and ”Sweeney Todd”–have lost money in their New York runs, and a few–including ”Anyone Can Whistle” and ”Merrily We Roll Along”–have been quick flops.
Though he won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for ”Sunday in the Park with George” and has picked up five personal Tony Awards as composer and lyricist –including a record-breaking three in a row for ”Company,” ”Follies,”
”A Little Night Music”–he has often been a loser in the Tony sweepstakes, too. ”West Side Story,” for example, lost to ”The Music Man” as best musical of 1958, and, in an unfortunately unfriendly competition,
”Sunday in the Park with George” lost out to Herman`s ”La Cage aux Folles” in 1984.
With the major exception of ”West Side Story,” no Sondheim musical has survived well in a movie version, and his one major venture into the mass medium of commercial television, the musical ”Evening Primrose” in 1966, is now all but forgotten.
For all these reasons, and also partly because he has kept his private life out of the celebrity gossip game, Sondheim, despite all the praise lavished on his ”genius” in recent years, has rarely made a direct crossover into wide, public fame. ”Send in the Clowns” from ”A Little Night Music”
is now a standard work, caressed by singers such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Collins and Barbra Streisand; but, in an era of music videos, his songs have seldom reached the big pop bucks.
Stubbornly and triumphantly, however, Sondheim has remained a Broadway composer, devoting most of his attention and skill to regularly producing new works for the musical theater. Even after the depression that followed the bitter failure of ”Merrily We Roll Along” in 1981, Sondheim was able to recover and press on to the next show, which turned out to be ”Sunday in the Park with George.”
Today, he is held in higher regard than at any other time in his career, and, according to friends and intimates, he appears happy and invigorated by his new collaboration with librettist/director James Lapine.
It was ”Sunday in the Park,” which dealt directly with the artist`s relationship to society, that boosted him to his recent state of high esteem. The musical, a contemplation on the creation of the post-Impressionist masterpiece ”Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte,” by Georges Seurat, addressed complex issues with a complex book and score, and, since such songs as ”Finishing the Hat,” ”Everybody Loves Louie” and ”Children and Art” seemed to be concerned with Sondheim`s personal concerns and frustrations, it produced a mountain of critical writing reassessing the body of his work.
Last year`s star-studded concert version of ”Follies” in Lincoln Center, which excited fresh interest in that magnificent show`s score, and the newly updated edition of Craig Zadan`s ”Sondheim & Co.,” an engrossing show- by-show account of Sondheim`s theatrical collaborations, also have helped generate increased interest in the progress of the composer`s career.
”Into the Woods,” which uses the enchanted woods of fairy tales as a metaphor for a place of both the peaceful refuge and the dangerous risks we find in our lives, is another show destined to be discussed intensely because of its symbolic relationship to Sondheim`s personal, risk-taking professionalism.
As Zadan`s thoughtful and affectionate view of the Sondheim shows points out, the composer indeed has had a wide range of subject matter and theatrical performance in his musicals, from the bouncy comedy of ”A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” his first show as both composer and lyricist, to the brilliant musical comedy pastiche of ”Follies,” to the bittersweet operetta of ”A Little Night Music,” to the operatic score for the horror story of ”Sweeney Todd.” ”Into the Woods,” a playful, yet philosophical mingling of characters and situations from children`s fairy tales, extends that range even farther, in its story line and in its delicately interrelated songs.
Certain elements in Sondheim`s career, however, have been consistent. A protege of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and a student of composer Milton Babbitt, he has remained faithful to those root influences in his devotion to the musical theater and in the complex, modernistic music he has created for that theater.
The basic facts of his personal life also are consistent with his work. The son of a dress manufacturer, he came from a well-off Jewish family in New York, and his musicals, whatever their immediate subject matter, have always been informed by a sophisticated urban sensibility. (For a while, no Sondheim musical seemed complete without its scene of bitchy talk at a smart cocktail party.)
When he was 10, Sondheim`s parents were divorced, an event whose trauma perhaps is reflected in the lyrics of ”The Little Things You Do Together”
from ”Company,” which refer to ”the concerts you enjoy together, the neighbors you annoy together, the children you destroy together.”
If you know that Sondheim has a huge collection of exotic games and is a devotee of difficult crossword puzzles, you also can see where some of the joy in intricate internal and trick rhyming comes from.
And regardless of the story of his musicals, Sondheim`s scores have an intense, insistent edge that is unmistakable. ”Sweeney Todd,” about a 19th- Century demon barber, and ”Into the Woods,” about the fantasy land of fairy tales, deal in extremely different worlds, but their music and lyrics clearly come from the same source.
Through the years, the hard-edged, citified cynicism of ”Company” has given way to a more reflective, less abrasive view of life`s disappointments; but Sondheim`s shows, as ”Into the Woods” specifically demonstrates, are not known for their ”happily ever after” endings. They show the worm in the apple, the character flaws in the handsome prince.
Sondheim`s lack of simplistic formulas and his unwilingness to follow predictable patterns have been used as defense and criticism of his work by the customers who want a more ”hummable” score and by the people who enjoy the challenges that listening to his songs demand.
There`s a need for such intelligent, ground-breaking work; and Sondheim`s career, which has attracted some of the most creative artists in the business, from directors Harold Prince and Michael Bennett to designers Tony Straiges and the late Boris Aronson, has significantly advanced the capabilities of musical theater in this country. The grandeur of ”Follies,” the
audaciousness of ”Sweeney Todd” and the insightfulness of ”Sundey in the Park” are major contributions to the form.
At the same time, there`s a market for the simple joys of easily repeated melodies and happily resolved stories, a need that is not being filled consistently by other composers. With so many of today`s pop composers busy elsewhere with the thumping hits of the more lucrative rock field, and with the risks of expensive musicals never higher, American musicals in recent seasons have had to scramble for existence. Ironically, this season it is the British, once scorned as incapable of creating successful musicals, who are getting most of the attention with such current hits as ”Cats” and ”Me and My Girl” and such potential blockbusters as ”Starlight Express” and ”Les Miserables,” both due on Broadway from London in the new year.
Alone among his American contemporaries, Sondheim has established an important track record of consistent, constant work. Alone among them he has been able to maintain the quality of his music and lyrics in shows that, more often than not, have drawn the best work from his associates in script, direction and design.
He`s a major figure not only because he`s good, but because he`s outstanding in a field that desperately needs more competition. That`s not only a great tribute to him, but a sad commentary on the state of the American musical theater in 1986.
