from Kendra

Stephen Sondheim
No single person has had more influence on the form of American musical theater in the 21st century than Stephen Sondheim. His shows have consistently pushed the envelope in terms of what is acceptable for the genre in content, form and style. Though Broadway recently has gone in a more spectacle oriented, easily accessible, Disneyfied direction from the one Sondheim has been paving since the beginning of his career, his shows are widely considered to be the pinnacle of what the genre can be.
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930 in Manhattan. His parents were in the fashion industry and were pretty well off. They divorced when he was ten and his mother got full custody. Sondheim’s relationship with his mother was extremely troubled. She blamed Sondheim for his father’s leaving and made him believe it, as well as used him as a replacement for his absent father (Secrest 30). To escape this environment, he spent a lot of time in the country in Bucks County, PA with his friend Jimmy Hammerstein’s family. Jimmy’s father was none other than the Broadway lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, who took on the young Sondheim as a sort of protégé. Sondheim looked up to his new mentor and wanted to write for the musical theater just like him (“Stephen Sondheim Biography”).
Sondheim’s first Broadway jobs were writing lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy. His first produced Broadway musical was the successful 1962 musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Anyone Can Whistle opened two years later and closed almost immediately. He wrote the lyrics to Richard Rogers’ music for Do I Hear A Waltz? and after that insisted on writing both music and lyrics for his shows. His career really got started with Company in 1970, followed by Follies and A Little Night Music. Those three musicals won consecutive “Best Musical” Tony Awards for Sondheim. Next was an adaptation of The Frogs for the Yale School of Drama, then Pacific Overtures about the opening of Japan to foreign influence. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street opened in 1979 and closed a very successful decade in Sondheim’s career. Then came the most upsetting flop of Sondheim’s career (though one of his best scores) in Merrily We Roll Along. After that show’s run lasted only two weeks, Sondheim ended his longtime collaboration with producer/director Harold Prince and quit the high-stakes Broadway process. His next show, Sunday in the Park with George, started as a workshop at Playwright’s Horizons before eventually moving to Broadway and winning Sondheim a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Into the Woods, possibly Sondheim’s most accessible show, came next, followed by Assassins and Passion in the 1990’s. His latest musical, Road Show, is currently in previews on Broadway and is set to open on November 18th (“Stephen Sondheim Biography”).
Possibly the biggest factor that separates Sondheim from other theater artists is that the bottom line is never the raison d’être for any of his work. His shows have almost never been commercially successful, and he certainly never produced any Andrew Lloyd Webber-style smash hits. He took risks in the shows he was involved in, oftentimes at the expense of commercial success.
In America after World War II, Broadway theater reflected the sense of “complacent self-confidence” and was an art form that was purely escapist. It “did not mirror life as it was, but as it should be” (Gordon 2-3). By the 1970’s when Sondheim’s career was taking off, there was more of a sense of “sterile disillusion” in America after the social strife of the 1960’s (Gordon 3). It didn’t make sense for Broadway to remain a fluffy fairyland, and Sondheim recognized the need of the theater to reflect and comment on the times. Some critics decry Sondheim’s departure from the form as it was, and call his work “sterile, cynical, over-intellectualized, and arid” (Gordon 3). Those charges are pretty harsh. His shows aren’t always the easiest to “get,” but they’re extremely rewarding and entertaining to an intellectually engaged audience member.
Company was Sondheim’s breakout show, the one in which he finally seemed to find his voice as a composer and lyricist. It truly revolutionized the genre. Not only was the subject matter a complete departure from the escapist fluff of the previous decades on Broadway, but it was the first “concept musical” with a nonlinear plot. The music was inspired by a buzzing busy signal and the frenetic pulse of New York City; “Another Hundred People” rivals George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” for the best, most complete musical representation of the city. The orchestration doesn’t just support and echo the melody, as is the case in a lot of musical theater songs (especially those of Andrew Lloyd Webber). It mimics a noisy city street, honking horns, chattering passers-by, and the vocal line just sort of floats on top and even gets embedded in the rich orchestration. The harmony is as important in Sondheim’s music as the melody is, if not more so.
Sondheim uses his music to add another layer of expression beyond the lyrics. In his musicals, it’s definitely not just there to be pretty to listen to, but has a character- or plot-driven reason for being exactly how it is. For instance, in the opening number of Company, the entire company sings to the lead character, Bobby, “we love you.” They hold the word “love” for five measures (in the original production, that amounted to 15 seconds) and it’s a dissonant ii7 chord in the key of C. There’s a dissonant G as the lowest note in the bass and the highest note in the soprano, so the dissonance really stands out. For the entire five measures the listener is waiting for the chord to resolve to a V on the word “you.” Instead, the word “you” is just an even more dissonant-sounding inversion of the ii7. So much information about the characters can be garnered from these two chords. The “love” they feel for Bobby is dysfunctional. They sing the word for a very long time, especially when heard in the context of the rest of the quickly-moving song it’s in, and that corresponds to the characters’ putting on the appearance of true affection, as opposed to a real connection. When the chord fails to resolve on the word “you,” we get that the relationships Bobby has with these characters aren’t fulfilling or beneficial for the parties involved. This kind of complexity in musical expression is another trait of Sondheim’s that sets him apart from other musical theater composers (Sondheim Company 13).
Sondheim also has a way of allowing his characters to go through epiphanies in song. Sweeney Todd’s Epiphany comes near the end of Act I in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. He takes his sights off of his own personal situation, his craving to kill the judge who wronged him years ago, and vows to fight his injustice more indiscriminately, singing “they all deserve to die… and I will get him [the judge] back, even as he gloats/in the meantime I’ll practice on less honorable throats” (Sondheim Sweeney Todd). Maria, in West Side Story (music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Sondheim), has a similar moment at the end of Act II. After her lover, Tony, was killed in gang violence, Maria instantly goes through the same kind of immediate loss of faith in humanity that Sweeney went through. Bernstein, however, didn’t or couldn’t compose a song to take her through the change, and the show closes with a monologue. I would argue that Sondheim is more skilled than his predecessors at using music to articulate the human condition. Musical theater as a genre often gets labeled as mindless and silly entertainment, but if more composers used the music as Sondheim does, as another layer of expressive possibility, the form would gain respect as legitimate art.
Stephen Sondheim can be credited with giving legitimacy to American musical theater. He brought it from an easy, fluffy, escapist genre to a legitimate, complex, thought-provoking form of artistic expression. Though his shows aren’t as lucrative as spectacular Disney adaptations or other easier, more accessible musicals, the benefits of producing his work outweighs the possible loss of revenue. Even since his earliest shows in the early 1970’s, no mainstream Broadway musical has been as revolutionary, as intellectually engaging, or as complex as any of Sondheim’s shows. His work represents the best that the musical theater genre has to offer.