Stephen Sondheim Regrets
When I was a young girl I remember reading a book from the library called How to Audition for the Musical Theater. As many young girls do, I had a dream of being a Broadway star, and so I pored over every page. The advice included: don’t bore the panel with a familiar song; choose something obscure and ideally out-of-print that no one else will sing. Wear something interesting; people will mostly remember you largely by what you wore. And avoid singing the songs of Stephen Sondheim, unless you’re very, very good — the songs themselves are works of genius, the book argued, but they’re full of traps for the under-rehearsed, including unexpected key changes, odd pitch choices, tongue-twisting lyrics, and subtlety of emotion that in the context of a three-minute audition will be difficult to convey. At the time I didn’t know who Stephen Sondheim was, but the book wrote about his songs so reverently and with so many hints at their dangerousness that I decided I had to learn.
I got the Follies soundtrack out of the library and from then on I was a Sondheim fan. When I think about which living artists I hold in total reverence, which artists I’d beg for an autograph with shaking hands, he’s the first (and sometimes the only) name that comes to mind. Some of his songs so reliably make me emotional that I only have to think of them to start getting teary. They include:
We Do Not Belong Together (Sunday in the Park with George)
Every Day a Little Death (A Little Night Music)
Being Alive (Company)
When I was young I took his genius at face value, and there are times that I wonder if my worldview was shaped by his, or at least the perspective that emerges from his shows. Its prime tenets are:
Getting what you want is unlikely to make you happy, and in fact will probably make you even unhappier than before. This is stated most baldly (and, in my opinion, a bit tritely) in Into the Woods, in which various fairy tale characters get their wishes and are disappointed in the results, but it’s a theme woven through almost all of his most famous shows. The archetypal Sondheim character has had things go well for them, and is absolutely miserable about it.
True love and authentic friendship are impossible to achieve, because they are always adulterated by nostalgia, pride, ambition, and self-delusion. In this way he’s a lot like Proust. It’s rare for a Sondheim musical to admit to the possibility of joy without a heavy layer of irony, and the prime message of Company, despite its affirming closing number, is that marriage, most of the time, can only be sustained by lies.
I have to wonder how much of this worldview was shaped by the fact that Sondheim was extraordinarily lucky early on in his career. At school he made friends with the son of the legendary Oscar Hammerstein (who was part of the team that wrote The Sound of Music, South Pacific, and Oklahoma!), who then mentored him in theater and songwriting when he was still in high school. His first two Broadway musicals as a lyricist were West Side Story and Gypsy, both of which were massive hits, both of which are firm contenders for greatest musical of all time, and both of which premiered before Sondheim was thirty years old. His first musical as both composer and lyricist, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, won the Tony award for Best Musical. And then after a few years of speed bumps, he started collaborating with director Harold Prince, who has also since become legendary. Their first project, Company, swept the Tony awards that year, when Sondheim was forty.
I have to wonder if being widely lauded as a one-of-a-kind genius well before reaching the age of Lifetime Achievement Awards contributed to his cynicism about ambition and success. Merrily We Roll Along, his last collaboration with Harold Prince and a famous flop, can be difficult to embrace largely because its main character spends the show’s first half being successful, miserable, and kind of a dick.
As for his distrust of love and friendship, this is somewhat more mysterious not only because Sondheim has always been famously secretive about his private life, but because even when he discusses his own work it’s clear that he’s uncomfortable discussing emotions outside the context of a song. In his collections of annotated lyrics, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat, he has very little to say about the subject matter of his songs — longing, lost love, disappointment, regret. Instead, he delights in pointing out the cleverness of his rhymes, tells backstage anecdotes, and discourses on theatrical technique. He also has lengthy sections where he evaluates, often negatively, the songwriting prowess of Cole Porter (“a sniggering adolescent penchant for double entendres so blatant that they become single ones”), Noel Coward (“[Coward’s] lyrics come in two flavors: brittle and sentimental”), Ira Gershwin (“Effortfulness is the defining characteristic of Gershwin’s lyrics… his technique isn’t good enough to hide the strenuousness of his applying it”) Lorenz Hart (“the laziest of the pre-eminent lyricists”), Alan Jay Lerner (“If I had to describe the central quality of his lyrics in a single word, I’d call them pleasant.”) and others. These make for uncomfortable reading, embedded as they are in a collection meant to celebrate Sondheim’s own reputation as a master lyricist. The keen emotional subtleties of his lyrics are confined to the stage, and some observers point out that he sometimes seems to misunderstand even his own work.
His antipathy to uncomplicated emotions and rousing bring-down-the-house numbers is both the engine of his brilliance and, in his lesser shows, often his undoing. Without the killer theatrical instincts of someone like Harold Prince he sometimes wanders off into Concept, wanting to demonstrate a point or create a structural symmetry rather than engage the audience. And at the same time, I think that Sunday in the Park With George (decidedly not the work of killers) is something like a miracle. When I saw it on stage several years ago I thought the second act was a mess dramatically but I still cried the entire way through.
This is heresy to Sondheim fans (and perhaps even to me, in different moods) but I wonder if his moment of greatest brilliance wasn’t Rose’s Turn, from Gypsy, for which he wrote lyrics but not the music. He gives us what looks at first like a traditional show-stopper but then turns and subverts it, making it into a Mad Scene in the grand operatic style. The number, even though its big brassy chords were written by someone else, is still the quintessential Sondheim number: it’s about someone whose dream has come true, and who is made miserable by it.