Henny Ray Abrams/AP Photo
Stephen Sondheim, center, is honored by the Broadway community as the lights on the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on West 43rd St. in Times Square are lit for the first time, September 15, 2010.
For the generation of great songwriters who’d created the classic musicals of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, the coming of the rock revolution left them stranded on a steadily depopulating shore. While some of their songs featured a daunting complexity (neither the Arlen-Mercer “Blues in the Night” nor Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ On the Ritz” lend themselves to singing in the shower), most of their signatures nestled comfortably within the hit parade. In Rick Atkinson’s history of the U.S. Army in World War II, there’s an account of GIs at the front singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin,’” with more than a touch of irony as they greeted a new day under German shell fire. If that’s not an example of mass appeal, I don’t know what is.
Rock changed all that. With the coming of Elvis, a new mass audience arose, attuned to sounds and rhythms that were alien to the old guard (and in the opinion of more than a few aging composers and lyricists, beneath them). By the mid-’60s, as the Beatles, the Stones, and almost countless other performers took the stage, the songs that the ancien régime still produced weren’t getting airtime or making hit parades.
Every modern generation has its distinctive popular culture, of course, with new icons who entrance the young and bewilder their elders (see, e.g., Frank Sinatra, 1942). But the rock revolution was more sweeping than its predecessors. The broadly shared prosperity of the postwar decades turned out so many young’uns with so much discretionary income (at least, when compared to their predecessor generations when they’d been young) that they completely dominated the music market. In the 1950s, the older songwriters were still working in and adapting the musical language laid down by George Gershwin in the 1920s and the musical theater forms set by Oscar Hammerstein (Stephen Sondheim’s mentor) in the 1940s. But with the coming of Elvis, the shock of the new found a huge, pent-up market for change.
Sondheim believed that all manner of subject matters were suited to musical treatment.
Musicals still opened on Broadway after Hammerstein’s death in 1960, but they didn’t command the hold they’d once held over popular culture. Most didn’t seem even to grasp what popular culture had become. (The film musicals that the Hollywood studios turned out in the late ’60s—Doctor Dolittle, Oliver!, Paint Your Wagon, Hello Dolly!—were so alien to the zeitgeist that they barely found an audience at all.) If the musical was to persist, it clearly would have to change.
It has persisted, of course, chiefly through two very distinct adaptations. The first was the incorporation of spectacle, from the schmaltz shows of Andrew Lloyd Webber to Les Miz to Broadway’s many Disney-fications. These shows preserved a mass audience for musicals much as the Marvel superhero films have preserved a mass audience for movies. They’re big, shiny, mindless enjoyments, suitable for children no less than, and probably more than, adults.
The second adaptation (which chronologically preceded the first) were musicals that acknowledged that the mass audience had left the stage and were attuned to more elite, or at least more grown-up, sensibilities. Stephen Sondheim, who died last week at the age of 91, was not totally alone in going this route, but he personified it and, uniquely, practiced it at a genius level.
To be sure, Sondheim consciously built on the legacy left by the Gershwins, Rodgers, Loesser, Kern, Harburg, and the greatest talents of the classic musical. But he differed from them in both subject matter and tone. Most of his predecessors’ songs sought to express joy, exuberance, or yearning and lament for loves lost or not yet realized. Songs of ambivalence, like Sondheim’s “Marry Me a Little” from his first true breakthrough show, Company, are harder to find in his predecessors’ oeuvres, much less on old-time Tin Pan Alley.
More fundamentally, the very subject matter of the shows Sondheim created thereafter—the Grand Guignol of Sweeney Todd, the consideration of art’s travails in Sunday in the Park With George, the American dream gone psychotic in Assassins, the American bewildering of foreign lands in Pacific Overtures, the adult-ification of children’s tales in Into the Woods—these were all subjects that his predecessors, geniuses working in a then-popular medium, would never have touched. They would and did touch social concerns—see Show Boat, South Pacific, and Finian’s Rainbow on racism, for instance—but not Sondheim’s concerns. Arguably, all of Sondheim’s work was the adult-ification of a medium that children could easily understand.
Compounding the tragedy of Sondheim’s death is the fact that he was working on a show with what seems to me a perfect Sondheim theme: a two-act musical, with the first act based on Luis Buñuel’s film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in which a bickering, disconsolate band of bourgeois-niks wander around trying to find a place to eat, and the second act based on Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which a disconsolate band of bourgeois-niks find themselves unable to leave a dinner party though there are no external obstacles to their leaving, and descend into hatred and violence. The upper-middle and upper classes, living amongst themselves, unable to leave, to find another world, condemned to their anxieties, fears, loathings, loves, and ambivalences: Was there ever a better story on which Sondheim could go to town?
Sondheim’s distinctive subject matter mattered perhaps more than anything else. As he more than generously documented in the first volume of his books on his, and the songwriter’s, art, Finishing the Hat, there was genius aplenty in his predecessors’ generation, to some of whom he acknowledged a clear debt. He particularly appreciated Frank Loesser’s achievement of individuating songs to particular characters and circumstances in Guys and Dolls and The Most Happy Fella, much as he individuated his own songs to those dramatic demands. “Adelaide’s Lament” in Guys and Dolls and “The Ladies Who Lunch” in Company are songs that don’t travel well outside their particular characters and plot points, but both are perfect in their contexts, delightful and uproarious without ever violating the syntax and dispositions of the characters who sing them.
By the same token, Sondheim expresses a rather astonishing contempt in Finishing the Hat for the songs of Cole Porter, due in part of their lack of individuation. “Anything Goes,” “You’re the Top,” “I Get a Kick out of You,” and so forth all have immensely clever and witty lyrics that tumbled naturally from Porter, but have nothing to do with the character who sings them. Sondheim’s verdict on such Porter standards is the same cold sentence he pronounced on his own West Side Story song “I Feel Pretty,” whose lyric, he noted, would have sounded appropriate if sung in a Noël Coward drawing room but was completely out of place and character for Maria in a West Side slum.
Even more surprisingly, at least to me, Sondheim also castigated the work of Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers’s great pre-Hammerstein lyricist. If ever there was a song whose lyric matched its character, it’s Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” Maybe the rhymes are a shade too clever for the character, but they most certainly express the character’s innermost feelings: “Couldn’t sleep / And wouldn’t sleep / Until I could sleep where I shouldn’t sleep.” Moreover, “Bewitched” was written for the only classic musical whose story seems to be on Sondheim’s wavelength: Pal Joey, about a distinctly unlovable nightclub heel, at a time (1940) when musicals weren’t about distinctly unlovable heels. Read Times critic Brooks Atkinson’s takedown of Pal Joey and compare it to New Yorker critic John Lahr’s takedown of Sweeney Todd: Both say the subject matter isn’t suited to a musical treatment.
Sondheim believed that all manner of subject matters were suited to musical treatment. As much as anything else, that set him apart from his predecessors. His music was wonderful and endlessly complex, but then, so was Gershwin’s and Arlen’s, just in an earlier idiom. His lyrics were breathtaking and crafted to the character, but then, as he acknowledged, so were Loesser’s and Harburg’s. His subject matter, though—the ambivalence, anxiety, dread, insanity, obsession, compulsion—had no real precedent in the American musical theater. Musicals for grown-ups, executed at a level of genius: That’s the legacy of Stephen Sondheim.
