Stephen Sondheim
You’ve heard Amy Kaiser direct the St. Louis Symphony Chorus in a thundering Carmina Burana, or maybe Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. But picture her in Brooklyn at age 12, making her way into the city with a friend to see West Side Story and both of them weeping inconsolably at the end.
“What’s wrong, girls?” someone asked kindly. “Did the gunshot scare you?”
Kaiser rolled her eyes at adult idiocy. Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics and that tragic ending? Why wasn’t everybody weeping?
Kaiser’s been immersed in words and music ever since, and Monday night, she gave a talk for the Saint Louis University Library Associates, paving the way for the literary award Sondheim will receive here on October 4. Her small audience, crowded into Lana and Ted Pepper’s Central West End condo, was rapt, their glasses of wine forgotten under their chairs.
“He’s been called the Shakespeare of American musical theater,” she said. “The depth of emotion, the range of subject matter, the fact that however you want to characterize him, he is outside of that category…”
Photo by Joe Clarkson Carpenter
Photo by Joe Clarkson Carpenter
Sondheim never tried for hummable tunes; Kaiser suspects that the humming in Sunday in the Park with George is a jab at the critics who longed for more melody from him, less evocative, beautiful dissonance.
Sondheim didn’t try for pop hits, either; he had only one, “Send in the Clowns.” But he managed to rack up 12 Tony’s—more than anyone’s ever won for lyrics) and eight Grammys and 18 Drama Desk Awards and an Oscar and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
He’s not a poet, though. He’s a poetic lyricist, Kaiser reminded her audience. Lyrics can’t live a full life without their music. “And music takes time, so the words have to be even more spare than the words in a poem.” They can’t lean on mystery or wait for pondering; they must be simple, immediately graspable. Yet Sondheim manages a polish and sophistication previously unheard of. And his rhyme schemes are brilliantly clever (though he hates the word). Consider Sweeney Todd, sung to a waltz beat that “gives a frothy, fun feeling to cannibalism!”:
It’s fop.
Finest in the shop.
And we have some shepherd’s pie peppered
with actual shepherd
on top.”
Each Sondheim show is sharply different from all the rest, in tone and form and subject. What they share is extraordinary artistry—and a radical honesty.
He wasn’t quite there yet with West Side Story: “Every time he hears Maria singing, ‘I feel pretty, oh so pretty,’ he gets the creepy-crawlies,” Kaiser said, “because it’s way too sophisticated for [that character]. He was merely being clever for the sake of a rhyme.”
The rhymes stay clever, but the work deepens and grows more incisive. Kaiser plays one example after another, chuckling over Madeleine Kahn’s rapidfire patter and rising hysteria in “Getting Married Today” and Elaine Stritch singing “The Ladies Who Lunch” in a throaty, whiskey-soaked voice, stanzas ending, “I’ll drink to that.”
Here’s to the girls who play wife—
Aren’t they too much?
Keeping house, but clutching a copy of Life
Just to keep in touch.
Her claws are partially sheathed—until the liquor kicks in.
Another chance to disapprove,
Another brilliant zinger,
Another reason not to move,
Another vodka stinger.
The American musical is one of our most original gifts to the world, Kaiser said. “Sondheim is the major creator for the American musical for the second half of the 20th century. And we will have him in our midst.”
The Broadway Work
- Saturday Night, written 1954 but not produced until 1997
- West Side Story, 1957. Sondheim’s debut as a lyricist. The show’s revered—but his work now embarrasses him.
- Gypsy, 1959 (and it’s about to play at the Muny). Oft-called the greatest American musical.
- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 1962. Sondheim’s first turn as both composer and lyricist, and it won a Tony.
- Anyone Can Whistle, 1964. A flop—only nine performances before it closed. But it’s resurrected often these days.
- Do I Hear a Waltz? 1965. Also a flop.
- Company, 1970. Here Sondheim found his voice.
- Follies, 1971. It won seven Tony Awards and was the most costly production on Broadway at the time.
- A Little Night Music, 1973. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman and made into a film with Elizabeth Taylor.
- The Frogs, 1974. Inspired by Aristophanes and first performed in Yale University’s gymnasium swimming pool.
- Pacific Overtures, 1976. Considered Sondheim’s most ambitious and difficult work, its harmonies are both Japanese and western, and gradually commingle. The original production was staged kabuki style; it received 10 Tony nominations but closed in six months.
- Sweeney Todd, 1979. So brilliant, it busted all genres: Operas perform it, theaters perform it, musical theaters perform it.
- Merrily We Roll Along, 1981. A cult favorite to this day. The action moves backwards, and early audiences had trouble following.
- Sunday in the Park with George, 1984. A Broadway musical that won the Pulitzer for drama but was overlooked for a Tony; it’s a challenging, personal story about an artist’s process, and it yields insight into Sondheim’s creativity as well as Seurat’s.
- Into the Woods, 1987. The antidote to Disney, both whimsical and dark.
- Assassins, 1990. Yes, it’s about famous assassins. We’re a long way from Rodgers & Hammerstein now…
- Passion, 1994. It won a Tony, a Grammy, and a Drama Desk Award.
- Bounce, 2003, remade as Road Show, 2008. Lukewarm reviews, but Sondheim’s “extraordinary gift for stealthily weaving dark motifs into a brighter musical fabric is definitely in evidence,” wrote The New York Times.
