Stephen Sondheim Tribute

I get mildly annoyed when my wife scrolls through her iPhone in bed at night. There is nothing mild about it when she deigns to play audio, almost always a song-and-dance number from some local theater production. On this particular night, in  early December, I was not annoyed but rather engaged. It was a choral rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday” coming through her small speakers, and I was well aware the great Broadway composer had died just a few days earlier. Twisting myself uncomfortably in bed, I watched Lin-Manuel Miranda and a throng of well-dressed New Yorkers sing their musical respects, as S held it out for me to see.

The choice of song was apropos, and not just for being the right day of the week. The song is the near-title song of his best under-appreciated musical, Sunday in the Park with George. Sunday is a show about art: doing art and being an artist. Though the subject matter is the painter Georges Seurat and his impressionist masterpiece “Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte,” the audience “knows” that it is as much about Stephen Sondheim and the creation of the American musical itself. Really, it is about the role of art and creativity in all our lives.

For, Sunday–that great invention of the modern world, that weekly day of rest, which has since expanded into a two-day weekend–is nothing if not a metaphor for the opportunities for leisure and art. Leisure to stroll a well-manicured municipal park, share time with friends, have the headspace to reflect on one’s own existence. Art to pull us outside of ourselves, consider different points of view, see the world anew. Seurat’s painting captures the leisure, and it is the act of capturing it that elevates strolling into transcendence. The capturing, importantly, requires the vision and the artifice of the artist.

That’s where Stephen Sondheim (and his artistic team) comes in. His shows, his music, his lyrics are elevating, not for being “uplifting,” but for stirring thought and emotion of the deepest kind. The kind that makes us more connected to humanity, more forgiving of ourselves, more fully alive.

Years ago, I felt moved to express this and some of what follows to the man–the artist–who gave me and the world these thrilling musical creations. I thought better of it. He had received no dearth of appreciation in his lifetime. I would wait until he died and write down my thoughts then, as a tribute him, sure, but more as a remembrance for me. What follows is a chronicle–in chronological order!–of my discovery and appreciation of the Stephen Sondheim musicals that have enriched my life.

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A Little Night Music (1973): 1983, 2014

Favorite Song(s): “The Miller’s Son”

Hummable Song(s): “The Glamorous Life,” “A Weekend in the Country”

Song(s) that Make Cry/Bring a Shiver to My Spine: “Send in the Clowns”

Song(s) that Stretch the Bounds of Broadway: “Now/Later/Soon”

Memorable Lyrics:

• “She wouldn’t…therefore they didn’t…/So then it wasn’t…not unless it…would she?/She doesn’t…/God knows she needn’t…therefore it’s not./He’d never…therefore they haven’t…/Which makes the question absolutely…could she?” (In Praise of Women”)
• “It’s a rip in the bustle and a rustle in the hay/And I’ll pitch the quick fantastic/With flings of confetti and my petticoats away up high” (“The Miller’s Son”)
• “Isn’t it rich?/Are we a pair?/Me here at last on the ground/You in mid-air” (“Send in the Clowns”)

Stephen Sondheim gave me my start in theater. Literally. I was a freshman at Brown University. Someone whose identity is lost to history roped me in to being props master for the theater department’s production of A Little Night Music. Odds are I barely knew the person who, it could be said, changed my life. I knew but a handful in my class of fifteen hundred, so I would have been honored by the attention of this invitation, never mind that I was just a body they needed. I might have spurned the offer as an attempt to use me, but at that age I had no ability to say no.

My parents had introduced me to the joys of live theater by taking me and my brothers to shows at Ithaca’s summer stock theater, called the Hangar Theater. (It was housed in a retooled plane hangar.) Witness for the Prosecution, The Fantasticks, Arsenic and Old Lace, and many others enthralled me. They have made me into a life-long theater-goer, even if I didn’t know it at the time.

The magic of theater works because the backstage, behind-the-curtain doings are a mystery to the audience. As a nineteen-year-old (actually twenty), I was suddenly being initiated into those mysterious doings, which had the paradoxical effect of demystifying the whole process.

The limits of memory: I don’t even remember the props I was in charge of. I just remember actors hustling to get in position and make their entrances. I don’t remember what I thought about Sondheim’s music. I don’t remember if certain tunes wormed their way into my head and wouldn’t go away. None of that. I do know I recognized one of his songs, “Send in the Clowns” which had been a pop song played on the radio in my junior high school years. I hadn’t liked it. Too schmaltzy and earnest for my teenage tastes. But I was older now, an existential sadness infecting overall outlook. The song touched me in a new way, especially hearing it night after night from the darkness of my stage left post. (This may be so, partly so, or I may be making it all up.)

I never actually saw A Little Night Music from the audience until a community theater production decades later. A friend of my daughter’s played Frederika. I recognized all the songs from the CD I had purchased several years before, not from the work I had done as props master thirty years before.

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West Side Story (1957): 1988, ca 2007

Memorable Lyrics:

• “When you’re a Jet/You’re a Jet all the way/From your first cigarette/To your last dyin’ day.” (“Jet Song”)
• “I like the island Manhattan/Smoke on your pipe and put that in!” (“America”)
• “Got a rocket/In your pocket/Keep coolly cool, boy” // “Take it slow/And Daddy-o/You can live it up and die in bed.” (“Cool”)
• “Which? What? Where? Whom?” (“I Feel Pretty”)
• “Dear kindly Judge, your Honor/My parents treat me rough/With all their marijuana/They won’t give me a puff” // “Hey, I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!” (Gee, Officer Krupke”)
• “Hold my hand and we’re halfway there.” (“Somewhere”)

My future wife introduced me to the vibrant music, thrilling dance, and exciting action of West Side Story in our first year together, 1988. One of us must have acquired a VCR by then. I have no idea where the VHS came from, but then again, it was S. who found it and had me sit down and watch it. I still remember the opening scene, with camera approaching the Manhattan skyline from the air (pre-drones), soundless for seconds before the faintest and slowest crescendo made a sinister chord audible; the eventual turning of the camera straight down, like a plumb line, onto an upper-West Side basketball court and the sudden, Drop-Zone-like zoom in. I was hooked for the next two hours.

Bernstein’s music deserves its own encomium, but I am here to acknowledge the artistry of Stephen Sondheim, who was the show’s lyricist. The twenty-seven-year-old was obviously talented enough already to be tapped by the America’s most famous living composer. I want to say that his lyrics are strong enough to have stood the test of time, but that is not quite true. Apparently, Rita Moreno refused to sing some of Sondheim’s original lines, including, “Puerto Rico, you ugly island. Island of tropic diseases.” Nothing if not adaptable and skilled, Sondheim reworked the words to make them less offensive. Indeed, the 1961 lyrics do stand the test of time by highlighting the push-me-pull-you emotions of the immigrant. “America,” in the 1961 revisions, approaches the issue of immigration with both humor and insight. It avoids judgment or preaching, but does not shy from provoking potential discomfort.

As evidenced in the examples above, Sondheim is also able to capture the sound of the street, the texture of mid-century, urban cool. As humorous as it is, “Officer Krupke” addresses the serious mid-century concern for juvenile delinquency. More, it summarizes two decades of psycho-social explanations of same, all in the wittiest of Broadway songs. Sondheim has no difficulty writing words to fit the needs of Bernstein’s poignant songs, beginning with Tony’s first number: “Could it be? Yes, it could/Something’s coming, something good.”

Another Stephen, Spielberg, has produced a new filmed version of West Side Story, released just days after the lyricist’s death: the power of Bernstein and Sondheim given new life.

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Sunday in the Park with George (1984): 1988, 2022 (prospective)

Favorite Song: “Sunday”

Hummable Song: “Everybody Loves Louis”

Song(s) that Make Cry/Bring a Shiver to My Spine: “Sunday,” “Move On”

Song(s) that Stretch the Bounds of Broadway: “Finishing the Hat,” “It’s Hot up Here,” (Really, the entire show)

Memorable Lyrics:

• “It’s so mechanical/Methodical/It might be in some dreary Socialistic periodical” (“No Life”)
• “Ruff! Ruff!/Thanks, the week has been rough!/When you’re stuck for life on a garbage scow/Only forty feet long from stern to prow/And a crackpot in the bow-wow, rough!” // “While he ‘creates’/We scrape their plates/And dust their knickknacks/Hundreds to the shelf/Work is what you do for others, Liebchen/Art is what you do for yourself”
• “Forever/By the blue/Purple yellow red water/On the green/Orange violet mass/Of the grass” (“Sunday”)
• “Look, I made a hat/Where there never was a hat” (“Finishing the Hat”)
• “It’s hot and it’s monotonous/…The soldiers have forgotten us…” (It’s Hot up Here”)
• “Art isn’t easy” // “Advancing art is easy/Financing it is not/…A vision’s just a vision/If it’s only in your head/If no one gets to see it/ It’s as good as dead”  (“Chromolume #7/Putting It Together”)
• “Stop worrying if your vision/Is new/Let others make that decision/They usually do” (“Move On”)
• “Order, design, tension, composition, balance, light, harmony” (“Sunday”)

This under-appreciated show came second in my Sondheim education at the hands of my (as-yet still-future) wife. Keep in mind, I didn’t know this was a Sondheim education. The name probably meant nothing to me yet. But it is possible that S. explained the connection between the this latest musical video and the previous one. The lyricist was now the lyricist and composer. Unlike West Side Story, which was filmed on location in New York City and in New York-inspired sets, George was a filmed stage production. It was just as entrancing.

A musical about creating art? About the creation of an iconic impressionist painting? Where the subjects of the painting (including the dog!) are given voice, both while they are alive and as unmoving products of another man’s imagination for all eternity? (“There are worse things than sweating by a river/When you’re sweating in a picture/That was painted by a genius/And you know that you’re immortal/And you’ll always be remembered/Even if they never see you….”) This was entirely new for me, as it would have been for pretty much everyone else when it came out in 1988. One viewing is not enough to consider all the provocations of this musical work of art. What is the relationship of the artist and the art-consuming public? Can the artist live humanely in the world he examines in his work? Does art clarify or distort reality? (It also makes me ask, was there ever a show that better showcased the talents of Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters?)

The music, the show, and the experience of it became a touchstone for me and my eventual wife…before it faded toward obscurity, being a show that is almost never done, anywhere. But when we hit our show stage in the 2010s, we remembered our love for George and easily purchased a CD from Amazon. Listening to it on the stereo, we rediscovered this unicorn of a Broadway show. Now, we have just learned that CCM plans to put up a production this spring. We will to do whatever it takes to get tickets.

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Into the Woods (1987): ca 1990, ca 2000, ca 2010

Favorite Song(s): “Children Will Listen,” “It Takes Two,” “Any Moment”

Hummable Song(s): “Into the Woods,” Hello, Little Girl”

Song(s) that Make Cry/Bring a Shiver to My Spine: “No One Is Alone,” “Children Will Listen”

Song(s) that Stretch the Bounds of Broadway: Act I Prologue (for propelling the audience into a musical rich in plot with eleven minutes of multiple interwoven narratives and musical motifs) “Witch’s Entrance” (In 1987, it was innovative to give a character a rap song. After three decades and the production of Hamilton, Sondheim’s number feels a clumsy facsimile. But it is still entertaining.) “Your Fault” (for the constant switching of voice in the search for an ultimate cause for the effect of their tribulations)

Memorable Lyrics:

•  “He was robbing me/Raping me/Rutting through my rutabaga/Raiding my arugula/Ripping up the rampion, my champion, my favorite!” (“Witch’s Entrance”)
• “There’s no possible way/To describe how you feel/When you’re talking to your meal”  (“Hello Little Girl”)
• “When the end’s in sight/You’ll realize:/If the end is right/It justifies/The beans!” (“Maybe They’re Magic”)
• “…I really got scared/Well, excited and scared”  // “I know things now/Many valuable things/That I hadn’t known before/Do not put your faith/In a cape and  hood/They will not protect you/The way that they should” // “And though scary is exciting/Nice is different than good” (“I Know Things Now”)
• “You are everything maidens could wish for/Then why no/Do I know?” // “The girl must be mad/Agony that can cut like a knife/Ah well, back to my wife” (“Agony”) “It’s no sicker than your thing with dwarves…/Dwarves are very upsetting” (“Agony, Reprise”)
• “The roof, the house, and the world you never thought to explore/And you think of all of the things you’ve seen/And you wish that you could live in between/And you’re back again only different than before/After the sky” (“Giants in the Sky”)
• “A bit more/And we’re done/We want four/We had none/We’ve got three/We need one/It takes two” (“It Takes Two”)
• “Life is often/so unpleasant–/You must know that, as a peasant–” // “Every moment is of moment/ When you’re in the woods” (“Any Moment”)
• “Must it all be either less or more/Either plain or grand?/Is it always ‘or’?/Is it never ‘and’?” // “Oh, if life/Were made of moments/Even now and then a bad one/But if life were only moments/Then you’d never know you had one” (“Moments in the Woods”)

• “People make mistakes/Holding to their own/Thinking they’re alone” // “Witches can be right/Giants can be good/You decide what’s right/You decide what’s good” (“No One Is Alone”)

• “Children may not obey/But children will listen” // “Careful the wish you make/Wishes are children/Careful the path they take/Wishes come true/Not free” // “Careful the tale you tell/That is the spell/Children will listen”

This was the third Sondheim VHS that my not-quite-yet wife and I saw on our laptop-sized TV screen. It was the London stage production. Again, I was enchanted (so to speak). Sondheim and James Lapine produced a musical mash-up of fairy tales with the second half left aside to consider what happens in the “happily ever after.” As young teachers in training, the show seemed to carry special significance for us: stories for children made into a musical drama of vital importance to adults. Childhood was behind us yet full adulthood still an aspiration. I dare say, the show was instructive in that goal.

As the title Into the Woods suggests, fairy tales evoke the dark side of human psychology. In the show, Little Red encountering the Wolf is innocence meeting experience. “Isn’t it nice to know a lot/And a little bit not.” The scariness is not elided. Nor is the attraction. Fascination in the full meaning of the word.

The Baker and his Wife are perhaps the central characters, and their song, “It Takes Two,” is perhaps the most adult of all “love” songs in the Broadway canon. It is not about falling in love, which is always mixed with lust and infatuation. It is about falling in love again, a couple becoming stronger as a team in their struggle against adversity. Later, when the baker’s wife has an encounter in the wood–that dark place where scary things lurk alongside the possibility of exciting discoveries, not least about ourselves–her “moment” with Prince Charming evokes no disapproval, no judgment, from the audience. In Sondheim’s lyrics, we hear her struggle to understand the meaning of her encounter. She respects the moment enough not to dismiss it out of hand, nor to elide its difficulties. When she is crushed under the Giant’s foot in the very next scene, the audience understands it is not punishment but closer to sanctification. (Also another bitter irony in the Sondheim canon.)

Even the Witch is a fully developed–that is, human–character. The cruel act of locking up Rapunzel comes from an otherwise irreproachable source: parental love. As cruel as her love-inspired protectiveness is, the Witch shows a wisdom the other characters can hardly perceive. Her song, “Children Will Listen,” is perhaps the greatest song about parenting ever written. This from a man who never married, let alone had children.

I saw my first live performance at my wife’s high school. It was excellent, especially for a high school production. It wasn’t until a performance at CCM, though, that I felt I saw the show fulfill its possibilities to the fullest. I have no doubt that Into the Woods is Sondheim’s greatest achievement. It is both ground-breaking and universally appealing. It covers as full a range of human experience and emotion as any show ever produced. It is to the Broadway musical what Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro is to opera. I won’t see another production of it unless I can be confident it will at least equal my previous one.

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Company (1970/1995): 2004, ca 2017

Favorite Song(s): “Marry Me A Little,” “Being Alive,” “Barcelona”

Hummable Song(s): “Company,” “The Little Things You Do Together,” “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” (really, almost any number in this show)

Song(s) that Make Cry/Bring a Shiver to My Spine: “Marry Me A Little,” “Being Alive”

Song(s) that Stretch the Bounds of Broadway: “Getting Married Today”

Memorable Lyrics:

• “It’s the… concerts you enjoy together/Neighbors you annoy together/Children you destroy together/That keep marriage intact.” (“The Little Things You Do Together”)
• “You always are what you always were/Which has nothing to do with, all to do with her.” // “Good things get better, bad get worse./Wait, I think I meant that in reverse.” (“Sorry-Grateful”)
• “You impersonate a person better/Than a zombie should./I could understand a person/If he wasn’t good in bed./I could understand a person/If he actually was dead.” (You Could Drive a Person Crazy”)
• “Smart! And into all those exotic mystiques–/The Kama Sutra and Chinese techniques./I hear she knows more than seventy-five./Call me tomorrow if you’re still alive!” (“Have I Got a Girl for You”)
• “Another long exhausting day,/Another thousand dollars,/A matinee, a Pinter play,/Perhaps a piece of Mahler’s./I’ll drink to that./And one for Mahler!” (“The Ladies Who Lunch”)
• “Somebody, hold me too close,/Somebody, hurt me too deep,/Somebody, sit in my chair/And ruin my sleep/And make me aware/Of being alive,/Being alive.” (“Being Alive”)

Company was the first Sondheim musical I encountered live in a theater. Cincinnati’s Playhouse in the Park was staging a new production by John Doyle in which the actors double as members of the orchestra. S, who reads the arts section of our paper, was not going to let us miss it. I’m glad she didn’t.

The circular stage spun on axis, actors/players rotating with it, exiting or entering in a constant, spiral flow. The staging fit the show, whose “plot” is episodic, whose scenes are mostly a collection of New York apartments. Once again, Sondheim’s music and the power of live theater worked their magic on me. Each musical vignette, a mix of comic and poignant, enthralled despite their vaguely dated feel. Dated, as in: this dysfunctionality can only have been from the 1970s, a time when marriages were often ugly, frayed partnerships and divorce rates were surging. (In fact, the show premiered earlier than I had guessed, 1970, rather than, say, 1973 or 1974. Divorce rates were just starting to soar, which they would do throughout the decade before plateauing beginning in 1980.)

I had heard the show’s music on my wife’s CD at home with little interest. After experiencing it dramatized I had a radical change of view. I began playing it all the time. My kids noticed. Benjamin began objecting whenever I put it on again. I had to watch myself.

My daughter, infected by the Broadway mania in the household, majored in theater at college, not so much performance as production: lighting and stage managing. That didn’t mean she didn’t try out for stage roles once or twice a year. In her sophomore year she had the chance to perform in her first Sondheim show as Jenny. And I had the chance to watch her pretend to smoke marijuana and get high onstage.

A few years later my son performed “Marry Me a Little” in a revue put on by his children’s theater group. At eighteen, he could never have been confused for a jaded, worldly Bobby-Bubbi, but he sang with impressive control and it was thrilling to see him perform one of my favorite songs in front of a live audience.

Sondheim, of course, had no inside experience of marriage. But he seems to have had “good and crazy people, my married friends” who looked out for him, if not exactly badgering him as he has his characters do to Bobby in the show: “It’s amazing. We’ve gotten older every year and he seems to stay exactly the same,” or “You know, a person like Bob doesn’t have the good things and he doesn’t have the bad things, but he doesn’t have the good things either.” As a gay man living decades before the Obergefell decision, Sondheim may never have aspired to monogamy, yet that may have made him as well placed as anyone to comment musically on the curious state of marriage in the 1970s. Furthermore, as it happens, Sondheim lived long enough to take advantage of the legalization of gay marriage in 2017.

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962): 2005, ca 2012

Favorite Song(s): “Comedy to Night,” “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,”

Favorite Cut Song(s): “Echo Song,” “There’s Something About a War”

Hummable Song(s): “Comedy Tonight,” “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” “Lovely,” plus, just about every song in the show

Memorable Lyrics:

• “Something appealing/Something appalling” // “Nothing that’s grim/Nothing that’s Greek/She plays Medea later this week.” (“Comedy Tonight”)

• “I’m just a slave and everything’s free/If I were free, then nothing would be free!” (“Free”)
• “Panacea, with a face that holds/a thousand promises, and a body that stands behind each promise.” (“The House of Marcus Lycus”)
• “Everybody ought to have a maid/Someone who in fetching you your slipper will/Be winsome as a whippoorwill” (“Everybody Ought to Have a Maid”)
• “Then again, with love at my age/Sometimes it’s just/Impossible!” (“Impossible”)
• “There are lands to conquer, cities to loot, and peoples to degrade” // “I, oppressor of the meek/Subduer of the weak/Degrader of the Greek.” (“Bring Me My Bride”)

Forum was the next Sondheim musical I encountered on Cincinnati’s Playhouse in the Park stage. It showed me a new side of a composer/lyricist I was still just getting to know: “Tragedy tomorrow/Comedy Tonight.” The show is legitimately funny and also politically incorrect, especially after the #MeToo reckoning. But it wasn’t so incorrect that we shielded it from our pre-teen son, who, as it happened, took to “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” as much as I did. It was the “puttering around the house…quieter than a mouse”-type lyrics that appealed to him, and the way the song comes back to life after two false endings. The highly clever low-brow humor of the entire show appealed to him. The irony of Philia pretending the other man will be her beloved Hero: “When I hold him, I’ll be holding you/So I’ll hold him ten times as tight/That’ll show him too.” The insufferable macho vanity of Miles Gloriosus: “I’ve come to claim my bride/Come tenderly to crush her against my side” Pseudolus’s self-serving banter: “Let me put it this way: I play the part.” “OK, lie there and think dead thoughts.” “Oh, a fire pyre.” I have only a hint of how Sondheim’s musically-set humor affected B’s developing mind. My guess it was not insignificantly.

The Playhouse in the Park production we saw was excellent, yet I was taken aback a bit when Marcus Lycus spoke the words that describe the virtues of his women-for-hire. I had learned the song in a non-production version which was fully sung. Here instrumental music accompanied the dancing courtesans. The dancing was fine, but the music didn’t feel especially Sondheimian. Later, when we purchased the revival recording with Nathan Lane as Pseudolus, I was forced to get used to this version.

I saw the 1966 movie version in the middle (or end) of a Buster Keaton movie-viewing binge. The jowly sexagenarian cameoed as Erroneus. (Zero Mostel played Peusodolus as he had on stage.) The film was just OK. It could benefit from an updating, as West Side Story has had this year, but no one will touch it again in my lifetime. I’m not even sure it will make it to many stages in the 2020s, but I’ll keep my eye out.

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Sweeney Todd (1978): 2007, 2008, 2015

Favorite Song(s): “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” “Johanna” (Anthony), “A Little Priest,”

Hummable Song(s): “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” “Kiss Me,” “Pretty Women,”

Song(s) that Make Cry/Bring a Shiver to My Spine: “Not While I’m Around”

Song(s) that Stretch the Bounds of Broadway: “The Contest” (not much of a song, really), “Johanna” (Judge Turpin: Has there ever been a creepier, more unpleasant subject put to Broadway music?)

Memorable Lyrics:

“There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit/And it’s filled with people who are filled with shit!” (“No Place Like London”)

“Seems an awful waste…/I mean, with the price of meat/What it is/When you get it/If you get it…/HAH!/Good, you got it!”// “No, y’see, the trouble with poet is/’Ow do you know it’s deceased?/Try the priest!” (“A  Little Priest”)

I had lived with my wife’s two-disc CD for twenty years and never taken much of a shine to it. In fact, I had grown up hearing about Sweeney Todd, such was the splash it made when it came out. But I cared not a whit about Broadway and doubt I heard even a single number from the show.

But in 2007 a movie version came out, starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. In true (director) Tim Burton fashion, it is dark, bloody. Not my usual taste, but in dramatic context Sondheim’s music made more sense to me, grabbed me. Once again, I was entralled. In true Andrew Speno fashion, I played the CD repeatedly during the next months: my next go-to Sondheim soundtrack.

Just two months later we attended a stage production at the Aronoff Performing Arts Center downtown, a recreation of John Doyle’s original musicians-as-actors (or vice versa) production. It didn’t work for me. Doyle had made a virtue out of necessity when he minimized scenery and had his actors doing double duty. But I had just seen a full-budget movie version filmed in upwards of a dozen settings with richly designed sets. A single, multi-purpose set, leaving much to the audience’s imagination felt like a let-down. Besides, the rotation of acting and playing distracted from the dramatic pull of the action, in a way that it did not for the more spare Company.

Happily, my son was cast in the ensemble of his high school’s production a number of years later. The scenery, including barber chair and trap door, was more effective for this viewer, at least. The performers, too, were convincing, notwithstanding their amateur status. It was Sweeney Todd at its best, notwithstanding its high school provenance.

Sweeney Todd was a popular and critical success at its inception, and it has survived the test of time. That does not mean Sondheim became a Franklin Sheppard (See Merrily, above). Todd is typical of Sondheim’s oeuvre for stretching the bounds of the musical form, challenging audiences, and, even, conveying important ideas. (“Charley, we could change the world!”) In fact, Sondheim challenged no one more than himself in the projects he chose to take. Sure, audiences might thrill to a story about murdered Englishmen turned into meat pies. But set to music? Sondheim had to stretch his musical palette in extraordinary ways: sinister organ and blaring whistle; driving cello ostinato, murderous chanting, and screeching chorus. All this, just in the opening number. Later music includes the tender and naïve, the malevolent and venal, the jaunty and comic–but mostly the sinister and ominous, evident in the dissonant harmonies, inescapable in the explosive dynamics, and percussive instrumentation.

Sweeney Todd was hardly Sondheim’s first unconventional musical. (That honor might better go to Company or The Frogs, or even Pacific Overtures.) More trailblazing musicals would follow in the last two decades of his career. Every one would surprise, break new ground.

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Merrily We Roll Along (1981/1994): ca 2007, 2012

Favorite Song(s): “Our Time”

Hummable Song(s): “Merrily We Roll Along” (the very definition of hummable!), “That Frank,” “Franklin Sheppard Inc.,” “Old Friends,” Opening Doors”

Song(s) that Make Cry/Bring a Shiver to My Spine: “Not a Day Goes By,” “Our Time”

Song(s) that Stretch the Bounds of Broadway: “First Transition” through “Seventh Transition”: telling the story in reverse chronological order!

Memorable Lyrics:

• “Yesterday is done/See the pretty countryside/Merrily we roll along, roll along/Bursting with dreams.” (“Merry We Roll Along”)
• “We’re not the three of us any more, Mary. Now we’re one and one and one.” (“Like It Was”)
• “No, I like money a lot/Hmmm-hmmm-hmmm…/I mean, it’s better than not” (“Franklin Sheppard, Inc.”)
• “Here’s to us/Who’s like us?/Damn few” (“Old Friends”)
• “…Of Bobbie and Jackie and Jack/And Ethel and Ted and Eunice and Pat and Joan and Steve and Peter and Jean and Sarge/And Joe and Rose and rows and rows/And rows and rows and rows and rows…” (“Bobbie and Jackie and Jack”)
• “Why can’t you throw ’em a crumb?/What’s wrong with letting ’em tap their toes a bit? I’ll let you know when Stravinsky has a hit–/Give me some melody!” (“Opening Doors”)
• “Our time, breathe it in/Worlds to change and worlds to win/Our turn, we’re what’s new/Me and you, pal, me and you!” (“Our Time”)

Playhouse in the Park was staging a second John Doyle Sondheim production. We purchased tickets.

I knew little or nothing about the show or its music. The program notes indicated that I would follow the development, told in reverse, of a three-way friendship, from 1980 back to 1957. The warning proved of limited value. I had trouble staying with the backwards narration. I enjoyed Sondheim’s music, and I enjoyed the allusions to history as time traveled backwards. But the show didn’t work particularly well for me. Nor, apparently, did it for  audiences in 1981, either. Its run lasted a mere two weeks. But the music is compelling enough that the show has been periodically revived and revised, most successfully in 1994.

I left the theater nonplussed, but the perplexity had its benefits. I was driven to learn more. We acquired a CD, and I listened to it repeatedly. Company was demoted to second place. In fact, the two shows are similar in their depiction of 1970s dysfunction, though Merrily is what twenty years earlier I would have scorned as Broadway contemplating its own navel: a play about putting on plays. By this time, my family and I were becoming dedicated theater-goers, theater supporters. I wasn’t put off by the alleged navel gazing.

Though I didn’t follow all the plot intricacies, the basic arc was clear enough, even if depicted in reverse. Charley Kringas and Mary Flynn have different ideas about how the trio should use their talents. They want to hold Frank to his original idea (not articulated until the final song!): “I think it could be important. Musicals are popular. They’re a great way to state important ideas. Ideas that could make a difference. Charley, we could change the world.” But Frank has come under the spell of the business-minded. Joe the producer and Gussie the agent. The former explains to the young wannabes: It’s “not a show about subtle and it’s not big on depth. It’s flash, bam, curtain. It’s fun, it’s opulent, it’s Broadway.”

The New York Times reviewer complained that in Merrily, “We keep waiting for some insight into these people–that might make us understand, if not care, about them–but all we get is fatuous attitudinizing about how ambition, success and money always lead to rack and ruin.” At the same time, he acknowledged the power of the music: “As we all should probably have learned by now, to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.” Merrily is not primarily a show about the conflict between money and art, or even about the disillusionment of dreams brutalized by reality. It is about the ineluctability of time and the change it wreaks on a friendship.

In a way, though, my first live encounter with this show was in a modest performance of “Our Time” by my daughter’s summer theater camp. The director had selected it, appropriately, as final number.  It was time, or nearly so, for these young, aspiring singers/dancers/actors to step forward and take their turn in the spotlight. I was moved. Only five years later, seeing the song performed in its dramatic context, did I learn of its cruel irony, an irony which only enriched its meaning for me and enhanced my appreciation of it.

I can’t hear “Our Time” now without feeling a drop through my diaphragm, a loss-induced breathlessness. My time has passed, that much is understood. As has my time with our kids. That time of innocence and  potential is irrecoverable. Is it in fact their time? Ostensibly so. They are the age of Frank, Charley, and Mary when they sang from their apartment building’s rooftop. But what Sputnik-like light in the sky do my children have to awe them, inspire them? For all the technological wonders of their era, they see, instead, dark signs all around, signs of political instability, social polarization, on-going pandemic, and climate catastrophe. In such a world, “Our Time” takes on a sinister meaning.

On the other hand, there’s more than a little of the sinister in Sondheim’s original setting of the song: the painful juxtaposition of youthful dreams and bitter disillusion.

[A framed color photograph of the 2012 production–Charley and Mary and Franklin, surrounded by costumed musicians–hangs to my left, as I type, a gift from lovely daughter, E.]

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Assassins (1990): 2018

Favorite Song: “The Ballad of Czolgosz”

Hummable Song(s) (parts of songs): “The Ballad of Booth,” “The Ballad of Czolgosz,” “The Ballad of Guiteau,” “Another National Anthem”

Song(s) that Stretch the Bounds of Broadway: “Unworthy of Your Love” (a song about the misguided love of Hinkley for Jodie Foster and Squeaky Fromme for Charles Manson?)

Memorable Lyrics:

• “No job? Cupboard bare?/One room, no one there?/Hey, pal, don’t despair–/You wanna shoot a president/C’mon and shoot a president” (“Everybody’s Got a Right”)
• “Some say it was your voice had gone/Some say it was booze/Some say you killed a country, John/Because of bad reviews” (“The Ballad of Booth”)
• “And all you have to do is move you little finger/Move your little finger and–/You can change the world”// “What a wonder is a gun!/What a versatile invention!/First of all, when you’ve a gun–/Everybody pays attention.” (“Gun Song”)
• “In the USA/You can make your way/To the head of the line” (“The Ballad of Czolgosz”)
• “But God was acquitted/And Charlie committed” (The Ballad of Charles Guiteau”)

Assassins is one of Sondheim’s several concept shows: Merrily, reverse narrative; Sweeney dark/comic thriller; Into the Woods, fairy tale mash-up in the happily-ever-after. I imagine Sondheim and the book writers of Broadway sitting over drinks, challenging each other to come up with ever more outlandish ideas for a musical. What if we wrote a show about presidential assassinations? And they did it!

I got to know the music in the 2010s from the CD. It is Sondheim in his Americana mode. He first evidenced it in Pacific Overtures  when Commodore Perry enters the story. (The blaring brass, playful piccolo, and jaunty march announce the arrival of the brash, overbearing Americans.) He goes back to it in force in his final musical production, Road Show. Here he employs it for all the songs about events in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is mort of them. Though musically in an unusual register for me, by 2016 I was eager to see it performed. Imagine my delight when I learned a local high school was producing it. Imagine my disappointment when I learned I was a week too late. Amazingly, a local professional company scheduled the show for its very next season. Again, disappointment. I was c to be committed to a conference out of town. (I’m never out of town.) Fate, it seemed, was against me.

Three times was a charm, though, and a year later yet another production came to town (or one town to the north). A friend of ours was even cast as Charles Guiteau. We snatched up tickets.

The heart of the show are the three “Ballads”: of John Wilkes Booth, Leon Czolgosz, and, of course demented, grandiose Guiteau, whom B played superbly–“I am going to the Lordy!”–all the way to the drop of the trapdoor and the tightening of the rope around his neck (which took some special effects finesse on the part of the tech director).

But the show comes together in the events of late autumn 1963 in Dallas.  In this telling, Lee Harvey Oswald hasn’t yet thought of killing the president. John Wilkes Booth and the other assassins we have met earlier plead with the drifter to give “our lives, our acts,…meaning.” Without him, they will be “just footnotes in a history book…a bunch of freaks.” With him, “we are a force of history. We are immortal.” In a protracted back-and-forth, Oswald finally and convincingly agrees. Notably, unusually, the entire 11-minute scene is spoken, no music.

This is a concept show that examines an ugly side of American history, gives voice to some of our most unseemly characters, yet it succeeds in giving it and them a certain (American) universality: “Everybody’s got a right to their dreams….”

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OTHER SHOWS

Pacific Overtures (1976)

• Favorite Song(s): “Someone in a Tree” (also Sondheim’s), “Four Black Dragons” (also my son’s)
• I’ve not seen the show, but S did in 2003 when I was out of town. (Again!)
• Show requires an all-male Japanese cast. Hard to do. I hope I get a chance to see it someday.

The Frogs (1974)

• My son likes this show, the humor. I haven’t warmed to it yet. Maybe I never will.

Passion (1994)

• The music (and the words) suggest the dark side of love
• Intriguing but not especially enticing

Road Show (2003)

Follies (1971)

• Having read a lot about Ziegfeld’s Follies, I should get to know this show better.
• Notable songs: “Broadway Baby,” “Buddy’s Blues”

Anyone Can Whistle (1964)

• Notable Songs: “There Won’t Be Trumpets”

Gypsy (1959)

• Familiar Songs: “Let Me Entertain You,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses”
• I actually saw this show at the Hangar Theater. I liked it well enough, but have never encountered it again except for the big numbers, above.

Saturday Night (1954)

• Familiar Songs: “Saturday Night,” “What More Do I Need?”