Something Just Broke - Remembering Stephen Sondheim

by Ted Hoover

It is, probably, a bit melodramatic for me to say that a corner of my world evaporated. But something suddenly vanished and, honestly, I can't see that void being filled ever again.

I still remember vividly the first time I heard a song and knew that a.) it was by a man named Stephen Sondheim and b.) my understanding of theater had been unalterably changed.

It was in the early 1970's and I'd just checked out from the main branch of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library the cast recording of a show called "A Little Night Music." I don't remember why I'd checked it out and certainly didn't know anything about the Ingmar Bergman movie on which it was based, but in the first act there was a song called "You Must Meet My Wife" in which a man sings about his new virginal bride to his old love and it was the first time I experienced how an immaculate lyric set against a crystalline melody could be an almost invisible extenuation of speech.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHPyh4cxguU&ab_channel=GlynisJohns-Topic

Also included in that score is the 3-act-play-as-a-song "Now/Soon/Later" and the theatrical (and lyrical) pyrotechnics of "A Weekend in the Country." Little wonder that I kept checking out that album again and again for the next few years. (Interestingly, a while back I read an interview with Billy Porter and how he used to continually check out the cast recording of ALNM from the same library … What with Pittsburgh being the sort of cultural backwater that would use public money to build three sports stadia but have only one lending copy of "Night Music" I like to think that some of my Sondheim enthusiasm stuck to that vinyl disc and was passed on to Porter.)

By the time "Sweeney Todd" opened I'd saved up enough money to buy the cast recording and, again, I still remember my first time listening to it:  Laying on the floor of the dining room next to the record player (in those days stereos had the same footprint as a hatchback) wearing headphones the size of grapefruits and, from the opening factory whistle, being transported into Sweeney's (and Lovett's) world. Etched in my mind like acid on crystal is my first hearing of the show's climax and the startling/heartbreaking surprise ending. Up until that time I'd lived in a cast recording world of, among others, "L'il Abner" and "My Fair Lady" (which I still love!) but here was story telling transported to a mind-bending level.  It was at that moment I became the proto-, if not stereo-, typical Sondheim freak. With each show my appreciation and adoration just grew and grew. (Several years ago I had the great good fortune to appear in the Pittsburgh premiere of "Assassins" … although tellingly I was cast as Sam Byck and, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn't have a solo to sing.)

My Sondheim mania is partially rooted in the fact that there has never been anyone before or since with his lyric writing abilities. (Who else would have the chutzpa to rhyme "personable" with "coercin' a bull"?) In ALMN here he is just showing off:

Which leaves the suggestive
but how to proceed?
Although she gets restive
perhaps I could read.
In view of her penchant
for something romantic
de Sade is too trenchant
and Dickens too frantic.
And Stendhal would ruin
the plan of attack 
as there isn't much blue in
"The Red and the Black."
de Maupassant's candor
could cause her dismay.
The Brontë's are grander
but not very gay.
Her taste is much blander
I'm sorry to say.
But is Hans Christian Ander-
son ever risqué?

In a world where triple rhymes are considered a feat, here he is rhyming "candor," "grander," "blander" and "Ander" while, at the same time, rhyming "dismay," "gay," "say" and "risqué." It makes my head spin.

Now that might be dismissed as frippery (Sondheim himself considered those lines to be little more than a lyricist calling attention to himself), but in "Pacific Overtures" he used his skill at lyric writing, musical pastiche and storytelling to recreate the opening of Japan in the 18th century to foreigners … but as told through Japanese theatrical conventions: (You could write a graduate thesis on the history of both geopolitics and musical theater from this number)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8WiudDlTBw&ab_channel=BroadwayClassics

But what I love most specially about Sondheim — and perhaps the reason he never achieved the commercial success as such schlock masters as Andrew Lloyd Webber — nothing's ever easy in a Sondheim show. Good people do bad things, bad people do good things and there's more than two sides to every one of life's difficulties.  When working on "Into the Woods" he said he was drawn to Cinderella's story and trying to figure out why a young woman would run away from a prince?  Here he musically dramatizes her ambivalence:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2fJXcE6ZS4&ab_channel=SomeDaysYou%27reBarbra

Maybe I'm revealing too much about myself or maybe it's because I'm a Libra (although, conversely, I do think astrology is nonsense) but life, at least my life, has never been a clear matter of "either/or" and it's enormously comforting to know that someone else understood that.

A major drawback in writing this is that I don't know enough about music to discuss it intelligently. (Although when have I ever let something like that stop me?)  And minds far greater than mine adamantly proclaim that Sondheim's gift for composing is even greater than his ability as a lyricist.  So here's the hilarious Seth Rudetsky talking about the musicality of a song from "Company."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFaWBmVrCAM&ab_channel=masterworksbwayVEVO

There's no question I'm going to be very, very sad for quite some time (Sondheim's work has been irretrievably intertwined in my world for decades and decades) so I think today it's essential for me to focus on this life embracing philosophy he musicalized— especially the last few lines:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSr_Gm7aXNI&ab_channel=ChristopherBowen

But this is all too, too personal.  Sondheim is a genius whether I appreciate him or not, whether he speaks to my own life experience or not, or whether I have any history with his work.  He is what he is … I really have no part in that.  (But I sure am lucky to have been around to enjoy it.)

In case anyone asks, this is what I consider to be musical theater's most glorious moment:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-KYp2YUUlA&ab_channel=auroraspiderwoman

And here, in my opinion, is the most beautiful piece of music ever created in the history of the world:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE0YUsQr5Xk&ab_channel=BuyKurious

Oddly enough my favorite Sondheim lyric is one which doesn't rhyme.  In "Sunday in the Park With George" he has the main character sum up the back-breaking work of creation with two lines of utter simplicity:

"Look, I made a hat
where there never was a hat."

So many hats …