Stephen Sondheim On Writing Lyrics

 by Kirk Woodward

[First, let me say that I really enjoyed reading "Stephen Sondheim On Writing Lyrics."  Kirk’s done his customary bang-up job on a topic about which I could never be competent, and he does so with clarity and perspicacity.  I even learned some things about Sondheim and his music/shows from Kirk’s article. 

[An instance in point: his comparison of Sondheim and Tennessee Williams as fellow experimental dramatists, which is a very interesting idea.  Williams thought of himself as an experimentalist; he wrote a letter of which I went in search some years ago (and eventually found; see my Rick On Theatre article “A Tennessee Williams Treasure Hunt,” 11 April 2009) in which he blamed critics for not letting him do anything different from what he’d succeeded at before. 

[As for Sondheim, I taught a theater appreciation class at a college in Connecticut and one of the attendees (who was a faculty member) asked one evening if I thought Sondheim was an experimental playwright.  I told him I didn’t because he was too well established and his plays were too well accepted by the mainstream audiences and press. 

[Based on Kirk’s examination, however, I’m prepared to say that perhaps in his heart (if you will), Sondheim was more experimental than he allowed himself to show in his public work.  In that respect, he may be more like Williams than I realized.

[See what you find in “Sondheim On Lyrics.”]

Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930), the acclaimed Broadway composer and lyricist, has written two books that contain most of the lyrics he has written, with comments, stories, opinions, descriptions, principles, guidelines, and verdicts that he delivers as he goes along.

The two books are Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes (2010) and Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany (2011).  Both are published by Knopf. (“Finishing the Hat” is title of a song from Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park with George.)

To review, in the early part of his career Sondheim wrote lyrics to other people’s music for West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959). Then he wrote both music and lyrics for, among other musicals, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), The Frogs (1974), Pacific Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Sunday In the Park with George (1984), Into the Woods (1987), Assassins (1990), Passion (1994), and Road Show (2008) – an extraordinary body of work.

It is an extraordinary body of work, for which he has won eight Tony Awards (including a Special Tony Award in 2008 for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre), eight Grammy Awards, an Academy Award (Best Original Song for “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)” from 1990’s Dick Tracy), and the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Sunday in the Park with George (shared with librettist James Lapine). 

Sondheim was also nominated for or won many more, including Drama Desk Awards, Off-Broadway’s OBIE and Lucille Lortel Awards, and London’s Laurence Olivier Award (special award in 2011 for his contribution to London theater). In 1993, he became a Kennedy Center Honoree. The composer-lyricist was elected to the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2014 and in November 2015, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. 

As the books’ expansive subtitles make clear, Sondheim, with a lifetime of experience to write about, doesn’t skimp. He includes lyrics that didn’t make it into shows, as well as those that did, or, occasionally, were written for other purposes, and he talks about why they belonged in their shows or not. He tells stories; he provides contexts; he discusses other lyricists; he exhorts, complains, clarifies, laughs and rages.

Sondheim is revered in today’s theater, and he won his position through hard work, focused on one activity, musical theater songwriting. I have several friends who have spent time talking with him, and they have found him cordial and helpful. (I myself have spoken with him exactly once, after the opening performance of Sweeney Todd in 1979. I said “Congratulations,” and he said, “Thank you.”)

On the other hand he can also come across as prickly, for example in his response to the Sound of Music medley performed by Lady Gaga (b. 1986) at the 2015 Oscar Awards. "She was a travesty," he said. "It was ridiculous, as it would be from any singer who treats that music in semi-operatic style. She had no relationship to what she was singing. What people liked was her versatility."

He appears to be one of the few people who would feel that “travesty” was an appropriate word for that (to me) thrilling performance. All the more reason, then, that he comes across in these two books as  charming. Sondheim’s books are inspirational, stimulating, and often funny and often warm-hearted, with a great deal of the humor directed at himself. Not known for sentiment, he criticizes the work of others (the dead, however, almost never the living) but criticizes himself at least as much.

He comes across as intelligent, restless, focused, critical (as much about his own lyrics as about anyone else’s), and demanding. His enthusiasm for his line of work is irresistible. Writing a lyric is much like devising and then solving a puzzle, and he notoriously loves puzzles.

As befits a lyricist, he is precise with language. He makes a distinction I endorse between a reviewer and a critic: a reviewer gives an immediate response to a show, while a critic takes a longer view in a broader context. And he distinguishes between a “song” and a “number:”

I use the word “number” as opposed to “song” carefully. It may seem to be a trivial matter, but it’s an important distinction. A song concentrates on one idea, one story, one emotion – it is a distillation. A number is an extension of ideas and/or stories and/or points of view; it involves development.

Sondheim, of course, is a master at writing “numbers,” for example, the fifteen minute long opening of Into the Woods, the “crowd” number “The Best Pies in London” from Sweeney Todd, and many more.

His work ethic is formidable. “There are not many [pleasures] to be found in lyric writing,” he writes. It’s work, and we see the evidence that he does the work – one brilliant lyric after another. I can’t imagine how anyone can read these books and not finish them with a determination to do better at whatever they do in life.

Sondheim provides a deep dive into a writer’s process. He has, of course, an advantage over writers in other genres in telling his story. How does one know, for example, if a novel is a “success?” Reviews? They take a while to come out, and are hardly conclusive. Book sales? Except in spectacular cases, who knows?

But for a writer in the theater, like Sondheim, each show is an adventure with a clear climax, when the show either opens and succeeds, or it doesn’t. His story, in other words, is dramatic. Of course it is! But the drama of drama intensifies the excitement of the narrative, making his books very nearly “page turners.” The saga of The Frogs, for example, is a masterpiece of suspense.

Sondheim provides numerous insights into the creative life. For example, there’s the difference between “bad” songs, which just fail, and “wrong” songs, which may be well written but don’t belong in a particular show:

I have a pretty good internal censor which prevents bad songs from either being finished or escaping from my study, but wrong songs are another matter. Wrong songs take just as much time to write as right songs, and are frequently good ones, but they are often impossible to spot as wrong until you see them in performance. And what a disappointment they are, especially when they’re good.

Sometimes an excellent song fails for a fundamental reason, as with the number “The Plan” in Into the Woods:”

Stopping to sing a song, no matter how relevant, impeded the pace of the story. The situation was better presented in dialogue which was briefer and more immediate. The song was cut.

Similarly he distinguishes between “bettering” a moment in a show and “fixing” it, so that in Merrily We Roll Along

we fell victim to the age-old illusion that blinds all rewriters: by the time opening night arrived, we thought we’d fixed the show. What we had done was bettered it, not fixed it, and the critics and theatrical “community” . . . were merciless.

One fascinating aspect of these books is that they demonstrate what many writers have claimed: that people’s ideas of why writers wrote particular things are generally wrong, or at least wide of the mark.

An example is the song “The Little Things You Do Together” from Company, which I have always felt illustrated Sondheim’s attitude toward marriage, and in particular straight marriages.

In fact, Sondheim tells us that, having no experience with marriage himself, he had no idea how to write the song, so he asked his friend Mary Rodgers (1931-2014), the daughter of the composer Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), what she knew about marriage, and used her ideas for the song.

Sondheim makes no secret of how difficult it is to write song lyrics. It has to be remembered that any aspect of writing a musical is a truly difficult thing to do. Sondheim frequently writes about the need for concision in musical lyrics; one of his three guiding principles is “Less Is More.” (The other two are “Content Dictates Form” and “God Is in the Details.”) Sondheim writes that concision

is unavoidable, if for no other reason than that the presence of music can not only supply what’s written but resonate beyond it. Still, it’s a precept hard to follow, since it takes so much of the fun out of writing by putting the brakes on flamboyant cleverness, ostentatious imagery, decorative elaboration, overly insistent emphasis and rhythmically repetitive lists like this one.

Any musical is a carefully balanced combination of components, any one of which can upset the balance and send the whole thing crashing. It’s by no means as simple a matter as taking a story, adding songs, and there you are. Sondheim makes this clear, and illustrates it repeatedly.

An example of the difficulty is the matter of how a chorus in a musical is presented:

One of the most unconvincing things about [a chorus] is that as a crowd, whether of peasants, soldiers, convicts, reporters, cocktail party attendees or any other general congregations, they all sing the same lyric; that is to say, they apparently all have exactly the same thought at the same time. Most people in most audiences accept this convention . . . but . . . this one irritates me.

Writing for a chorus becomes more difficult with the conviction that it ought to represent different points of view. Sondheim frequently takes on this task, for example in “God, That’s Good!” from Sweeney Todd.

Another problem a lyricist faces is how much or how little information to give the audience:

[There is] a subtle trap in the show, and indeed in any show based on fact: the lure of authentic, interesting and irrelevant information . . . the tendency to utilize incidents simply because they really occurred and characters simply because they really existed.

Sondheim’s two books are full of insights of this sort. So why do I have reservations about Sondheim’s brilliant work at all? He summarizes the answer better than I could, in describing the attitude toward his shows of the reviewer John Lahr (b. 1941):

The most egregious example of critical resentment was probably that of John Lahr, who panned [Sweeney Todd] in Harper’s Magazine.  It was part of an essay propounding the thesis that I represented the death of the American musical, having taken all the joy and spontaneity out of this beloved, exuberant American art form and infused it with an impotent sourness.

I am afraid that I sometimes feel that Lahr’s view is correct, for reasons which naturally may represent my own background and limitations. On the one hand, although Sondheim was doing celebrated work before I reached my formative years, the musicals I grew up with were not his.

I began by listening to the albums (on 78 rpm records) of Kiss Me, Kate (1948) and Oklahoma! (1943). Then I fell deeply in love with My Fair Lady (1956), and subsequently discovered Guys and Dolls (1950). These are musicals, one might say, on the “up” side – although Oklahoma! certainly begins to peer at the darker elements of life.

On the other hand, Sondheim doesn’t attempt to disprove Lahr’s thesis. I can’t help thinking there’s something to it. (“I seem to have a penchant for nervous breakdowns” by characters, Sondheim notes.)

A friend felt I was too severe in a monolog I wrote that demonstrated my ambivalence toward Sondheim. I agree with him; however, I can affirm that the sketch does show how some of Sondheim’s music strikes me in my worse moments:

My name is Stephen Sondheim, and today I’m going to show you how I go about writing a musical. Now here I have a story I’m thinking about. It’s the story of a small Iowa town, and into it comes a traveling salesman. I’m thinking of turning this story into a musical. How this salesman left a woman degraded and pregnant, that one corrupted some babe with a bribe, this one was the favorite of twenty hearts and left them all broken. The rhythm will be a train rhythm –

 

            (Plays a jagged, angular rhythm)

 

Like a train rolling over broken glass. And the chorus will be something about marriage, about why marry when you can have a lot of women, one in every town. Then the most corrupt, cynical one turns his suitcase around and we see that he’s the main character of the story – we’ll call him – Harold Hell! What an opening!

 

Now we move to, let’s say, the town square, where we see the citizens of the town. They’re doing what all small-town Americans do – bribing each other, stealing when no one’s looking, and poaching deer. Typical Americana. Ruling over the town – maybe we’ll put him on a tower, with a bullhorn and a searchlight – is the Mayor. Let’s see – his name is – Mayor Sin! And he’s got a wife, of course, they all do, a horrible, overbearing woman who’s the social dictator of the town – it’s a marriage of convenience, like all marriages. And there’ll be an urban rhythm under it, like the sound of glass breaking when a rock is thrown through a window – like this –

 

(Plays another jagged, angular rhythm)

 

Into the town comes the salesman, Harold Hell – tricky, manipulative, devious. He sizes up the crowd and cynically speculates on what they all want, something he can pretend to get for them by crooked means. Since this is a musical we’ll say he decides what they need is music. And the musical instrument he supplies will be – let’s see, a trumpet? No, that could be a reference to the last trumpet, too much encouragement for religion. A drum! Martial, stirring, and perfect for the rhythm of the town!

 

            (He beats out a jagged, angular rhythm)

 

No, that’s not it, not a drum, either. We need something that offers melody and harmony. I know – the devil’s own instrument – the trombone! We’ll have a number called “Six Trombones”, played by an onstage sextet, and it’ll have a mocking, angry sound, like –

 

(He plays, no surprise, another jagged angular rhythm. Sings on one note:)

 

“Six trombones in the market place…”

 

The marketplace, you know, where people are bought and sold in marriage. Oh, I’m starting to love this. I’ll call it . . . “The Music Demon.” See you later . . . I may write this one faster than I usually do . . . This material is a natural . . .

So I admit to a sometimes hands-off attitude toward Stephen Sondheim’s work. Not by any means always - I have directed both Company and Into the Woods with pleasure – but what seems to me his constant pessimism is not generally my cup of tea. I always wished that he and Woody Allen, another entertaining but basically gloomy mind, would write a musical together. That would be something to see.

When Sondheim tries to overcome his pessimism, the result, to my mind, is irritating. In the musical Into the Woods the capstone song is “No One Is Alone.” The sentiment of this song is broad enough to appeal to anyone from atheists to fundamentalists, but what exactly does it say? Why is no one alone? Are we talking about God here, or about social interactions, or about the plot of the play? Fundamentally the song, it seems to me, is a cheat.

I have always felt that Sondheim in particular attacks heterosexual marriage, epitomized in his song “Every Day a Little Death” from A Little Night Music, where the title says it all. His mother, in particular, was apparently one of the most difficult people who ever lived, especially for him. This would not brighten one’s idea of straight marriage. (Of course none of his musicals are specifically about his mother.)

So my first reservation concerns the tone of Sondheim’s work. My second has to do with his complaints about other songwriters, which are both general and specific. On the general side, he writes:

Prior to the late 1930s lyrics tended [italics mine] to be generalized and gooey (“You Are Love” – Hammerstein), arch and gooey (“I’ll Follow My Secret Heart” – Coward), strenuously effortful . . . or at best unadorned and repetitive . . . all of them perfectly satisfactory for theater songs of the time . . . . [Songwriters of earlier eras] were too comfortable with traditional musical comedy to think in terms of creating songs to fit characters because there were no characters in musical comedy, only personalities . . . .

Sondheim acknowledges that we may be disappointed with what followed:

Even today, a lot of people (including critics) deplore the loss of what they see as the lighthearted silliness of the old musicals. For songwriters and playwrights, however, involving an audience in a story with singing characters who are more than skin deep is much more interesting work. . . . Most of the lyrics [he has written] belong to the mouths of particular characters in particular situations, characters who are only partly knowable without the context of the dialogue and actions in their stories.

“Lighthearted silliness” is a bit of a special pleading. It hardly summarizes the qualities of a score such as, for example, The Boys From Syracuse (1938, book by George Abbott, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart), or for that matter Pal Joey (1940, by Rodgers and Hart, with a book by John O’Hara, with one suspects a substantial assist from George Abbott). I imagine Sondheim would object if I referred to his songs as “music about people with furrowed brows” – another broad generalization.

In any case, Sondheim’s use of the word “tended” gives away a good bit of his case. He is overgeneralizing to beat the band (so to speak). Songwriting is, and has always been, much more complex than one would gather from his summary.

For example, in 1897 George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), in a weekly theater review, wrote of a production that “the music shews [sic] the modern tendency to integrate into a continuous score, and avoid set numbers,” and Shaw points out that Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and Charles-François Gounod (1818-1893) had both worked on the same thing. The “modern” tendency!

It is certainly true that up to the middle of the Twentieth Century, individual characterization in songs was not as much a matter of the speaker of the song as it was of the personality of the songwriter. This is not to say, for example, that Cole Porter’s “Ten Cents a Dance” doesn’t personalize a “dancehall girl;” but it could characterize any dancehall girl. Songs closely linked to a character – for example, Frank Loesser’s “Adelaide’s Lament” (from Guys and Dolls, 1950), could be sung by any character wanting to get married.

However, I would claim that even in pre-Rodgers and Hammerstein days, even the most self-contained, plot-independent song from a “silly” musical was likely to be stronger in structure than its non-musical theater counterpart.

The fact that in theater everything progresses from a beginning to an end must have influenced the most egregious hack composer to at least subconsciously think in terms of structure, and I claim it frequently did.

Moving from the general to the specific, Sondheim has particular scorn for aspects of the work of Noël Coward (1899-1973), Lorenz Hart (1895-1943), and Ira Gershwin (1896-1983).

Coward:

Most of Coward’s lyrics come in two flavors: brittle and sentimental. The brittle ones are condescending, either implicitly or explicitly . . . . The sentimental ones are florid, sometimes extending into unintentional camp. . . . Most of his list songs . . . state the same idea over and over.

Hart:

The laziest of the preeminent lyricists, and one of the most disconcerting . . . . Hart’s pervasive laziness manifests itself in three areas: mis-stressed syllables, convoluted syntax and the sacrifice of meaning for rhyme.    

Gershwin:

He makes you feel the sweat. . . . He is often undone by his passion for rhyming, for which he sacrifices both ease and syntax . . . . You can almost always feel the straining for lapidary brilliance, especially when he crams the rhymes together . . . .

As I mentioned, he makes no unfavorable comments about writers who were living when he wrote his books, which means there is only a passing reference to Jerry Herman (1931-2019), who was often thought of as the anti-Sondheim during the period they were both writing. By the way, he also doesn’t like Gilbert and Sullivan much either.

I am not saying he sees no merit in the writers he criticizes, but he feels strongly about their flaws. Of course he is writing as a craftsperson in a specific field, and, as the saying goes, “To a hammer everything is a nail.” He sees the pitfalls he himself intends to avoid as a lyric writer. But where does that leave those of us who love these lyricists?

I would say that he oversimplifies, and of course my objections may be simply a matter of emphasis. Sondheim acknowledges numerous flaws (as he thinks of them) in his own lyrics. As he knows and points out, these can arise from many causes, among them the pressure to write a new song right now because it has to be tried out in the next rehearsal.

But suppose that haste is not a primary reason for the flaws (as he calls them) in the songs of the writers he criticizes. What would have been the result if all the songwriters he criticizes had listened to him, corrected themselves, and written the way he wanted them to? Would their work have been “better?” My guess is no, because in that case they wouldn’t have been themselves.

Do we want all writers of musical scores to sound like Stephen Sondheim? I don’t see why they should. To take one writer Mr. Sondheim severely criticizes, when I listen to Noël Coward’s songs, what attracts me to them is that they’re vigorously and unmistakably Noël Coward’s songs.

Sondheim speaks of “the sense of exhausted repetitiousness that marks so many of [Coward’s] patter songs.” This has not been my experience. I remember seeing a friend in an extremely uninspired Music Hall kind of program, when all of a sudden a song came along that had me sitting up in my seat. It had brains, it had structure, it had a point. When I was able to find a program, I learned that it was a Noël Coward song.

I like the songs of the writers Sondheim criticizes because they sound like themselves – that is, they have their own styles. Sondheim has his too – someone recently played for me a few bars of a recording of a Sondheim song I had never heard before, and I immediately knew without being told that he had written it.

Sondheim is aware that he has his own style. He frets about this, particularly now that he is older:

I find myself using the same chords and the same tropes over and over, and I fight against it; but when I lose the battle, I rationalize it as being a matter of style, my style, a style I’ve developed over the years, an identity as unchanging as my signature. And to a certain extent it is – but not as much as I tell myself.

I suspect that more than one artist has run into limitations, found that they could not avoid them, and declared that their limitations were a style, perhaps one that should become a rule for others.

Sondheim’s style evolved in part from the music that interested him most in his childhood, which was, of all things, background music in movies. Sondheim tells how he put the idea of movie scoring to use in composing Sweeney Todd, but it seems to me that film music also must have helped shape the idea of show songs as related to character – because I contend background music in movies must be related to character.

At the same time, movie music has its own characteristics. Listened to out of the context of specific films, it is frequently musically more aggressive, more radical, than conventional song – good examples are the scores for films like Alexander Nevsky (1938) composed by Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), or, closer to Sondheim’s interests, the scores of Bernard Hermann (1911-1975), particularly for a film called Hangover Square (1945) which Sondheim greatly admired.

A stylistic question, then, is how much Sondheim’s love of film music influenced the way he wrote his scores, including lyrics, for musicals. The answer seems to be “a great deal,” and certainly there are other stylistic influences on his work as well. My point is that the same is true for other lyricists – different influences, different styles.

One might object that Sondheim doesn’t write the books of his shows but composes songs to fit the books of others, but in fact he has suggested many of the ideas for musicals that others then helped carry out (for example, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and Road Show). And he became involved practically at the beginning of a number of other musicals, for example Follies and Passion.

Looking at those shows, one has to notice that many are, at a minimum, novel ideas for musicals. Why not? Why shouldn’t the range of the musical be expanded? Sondheim was unwilling to leave the form the way he found it. But there are risks, beyond the obvious one that audiences might not find the results entertaining.

Specifically, how clear are the intentions of the shows, and how dramatically strong are the plots? These questions dominate the story of Road Show, which took over a decade to take a shape its creators considered “final.” Similarly the book of Follies is famously weak in comparison to its score.

More than once Sondheim mentions what we might call “an idea behind the idea.” For example, he wanted Pacific Overtures to sound like “historical narrative as written by a Japanese who’s seen a lot of American musicals.” He wanted the characters of Merrily We Roll Along to be “expressing themselves through stultified song forms.” He wanted Road Show, initially, to be staged like a vaudeville.

The results are mixed, and the question should be asked: are such ideas dramatic, or are they not, rather, concepts, images, pictures, “bright ideas?” They are supposed to support the story – but suppose they don’t? Sondheim is aware of the dangers of “imagination and cleverness which too often, instead of enriching each other, draw attention themselves.”

[Kirk has discussed and defined the concept of the “Bright Idea” in past posts on Rick On Theatre. It was in the context of directing, rather than play- or song-writing, but the sense is the same: “an idea utterly unsupported by the script, and an idea that offers no worthwhile results.” Kirk mentions the Bright Idea in “A Note About Hamilton,” posted on 6 December 2016, and again briefly in “Falsettos,” 5 January 2017.

[His fullest discussion of the concept, which Kirk attributes to drama critic Eric Bentley, is in “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With,” (25 June 2019; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2019/06/directors-youd-rather-not-work-with.html). I, myself, discussed the notion and quoted the Bentley passage in the afterword to my report on a production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (8 April 2017; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-glass-menagerie.html).  ~Rick]

Surely Aristotle (384-322 BC) is correct – plot is the soul of tragedy, and in fact of all drama. If the story isn’t solid, everything else will be problematic. Far too many musicals are based on weak ideas or clever notions, and few of those succeed. Writers must be certain they, so to speak, have their stories straight.

Sondheim claims that “under ordinary circumstances, articulating [what a show is about] isn’t necessary. In fact, if you do, you run the risk of becoming preachy . . . .” Point taken, but if the authors of a musical aren’t clear what a show is about, disaster looms. In his great book about Broadway The Season, William Goldman quotes the noted choreographer and director Bob Fosse (1927-1987):

I was doing a show once; we had opened out of town, and the reviews were terrible – terrible – and we were sitting around, and I was talking and the book writer was talking and the composer was talking, and it turned out we all saw three different shows. In our heads. We were all working on three completely different musical comedies. Now why didn’t we find that out sooner? We just didn’t – don’t ask me why.

Similarly, according to Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, a biography (2006) by Amanda Vallie about another outstanding choreographer and director, Robbins said that there were “only two things you need to know about a show: what is it about, and what’s the story?”

Sondheim acknowledges that he ran smack into this problem with Road Show, which went through four major versions over about eleven years while its creators tried to figure out what it was about and exactly what its story was. Art isn’t easy.

One of the principles that Sondheim frequently cites is “Less is more.” He also notes that “unless you can avoid the traps of banality and vagueness, Less Is Less.” But he also cites the principle that “Content Determines Form,” and if it doesn’t, well,

Thematic “relevance,” a favorite word of producers, directors, actors and especially publicists, in describing a show, is an outgrowth of character or it is nothing.

This may be a trap into which sometimes Sondheim has fallen.

Am I saying then that Sondheim should not have written the shows he did, or in the way he did? Hardly! The fact may be that in many ways, although he tells us he thinks of himself as a Broadway guy, he is really an off-Broadway composer in spirit – and, in fact, off-Broadway, regional theaters, and workshops have played an increasing role in the history of his plays as the years have gone on.

There are resemblances perhaps in the career of the playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), whose early Broadway successes convinced him that Broadway was his natural environment. He became frustrated as his plays became less and less successful on the Great White Way; but today it seems clear that he was basically an avant-garde playwright from the start. Perhaps Sondheim is one as well.

Or perhaps that thought tells us nothing about Sondheim. Styles change and so do popular enthusiasms. When Sondheim wrote his two books, he was aware that Hamilton (2015) was on the way, although no one then knew what a success it would be, and to his great credit Sondheim found its prospects exciting. Hamilton has expanded the possibilities of the musical. So, enormously, has Sondheim.

[I don’t have the ambivalence about Sondheim’s work that Kirk does—probably because I’m not as knowledgeable about music and musicology as he is.  When it comes to music, including musical theater, I just like something or I don’t and I probably could never tell you why.  Besides, I still just love musicals, a heritage from my childhood (see “A Broadway Baby,” posted on Rick On Theatre on 22 September 2010), and I find it hard to criticize them cogently.

[After I saw Evita, I decided I just didn’t like Andrew Lloyd Webber and wouldn’t pay money to see any more of his shows.  (I broke my vow to see Sunset Boulevard four years ago, much to my regret; see my report on 8 May 2017.)  Sondheim was the opposite—I loved everything of his I’d seen, from Funny Thing on.  (Pacific Overtures knocked me out—as my review, posted on ROT on 15 May 2014, clearly shows.)

[When I took singing lessons for a while, I worked on some of Sondheim’s pieces—particularly “Pretty Women” from Sweeney Todd.  One of the things I discovered, which made me appreciate him even more, is that both the lyrics and music are always surprising.  I expected Sondheim to go one way, and he went another.  It made learning the songs harder, but it made the compositions better—less ordinary.

[Incidentally, Kirk makes a statement above that raised a question for me.  He said that Sondheim was aware that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was in the offing when Sondheim was writing his books.  Since the books were published four and five years before Hamilton hit the boards, I wondered how this might have occurred.  Kirk told me that Sondheim never explains in the books.

[It turns out to be pretty straightforward.  Miranda was hired to do the Spanish translations for the 2009 Broadway revival if West Side Story that Arthur Laurents (the original book-writer) was directing.  Sondheim consulted with Miranda at that time and they remained in contact.  When Miranda started working on Hamilton, he consulted Sondheim on some of the songs as he was composing them.]