A New Way of Thinking About Stephen Sondheim
· The Atlantic
Stephen Sondheim was so firmly established as a divine eminence in the theater world that, in his 80th year, he wrote a song of self-parody called “God.” Unlike his celestial counterpart, however, Sondheim never sought to make creations in his own image. The songs he wrote—words and music (sometimes, just words) for 20-odd shows and films, including West Side Story, Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, and other works of mordant virtuosity that lifted the American musical to new creative heights—had nothing to with him as a person, or so he would always insist. With the exceptions of “God” and a single song from Merrily We Roll Along, “Opening Doors,” about youthful aspiration, he claimed that he wrote solely in the voices of characters to suit the particulars of the drama.
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Since the rise of the rock era, when singing songwriters established self-expression, self-reflection, and self-celebration as the lingua franca of popular music, it’s been hard to think of musical artists and their art as separate entities. Sondheim came up in an earlier tradition, during which the self and the work were thought to be demarcated by a thick, unyielding line. Under the rigorous tutelage of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, he learned to work as “a playwright who writes with song.” That is how he described himself in an interview quoted by Daniel Okrent in Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy, a new entry in the Jewish Lives series of slim biographies. Okrent states emphatically, “Sondheim wrote—always wrote—for specific characters in specific situations.”
The songs accommodated a wild variety of needs, conjuring teenage longing in the tenements of postwar New York (West Side Story), bloodlust in Georgian England (Sweeney Todd), artistic obsession in the era of French Postimpressionism (Sunday in the Park With George), and tradition and cultural conquest in 19th-century Japan (Pacific Overtures), among other themes that are unique in the canon of musical theater.
If a song ended up not serving the show in one way or another—disrupting the tone or design of the drama, misrepresenting a character—it would call for cutting. By the same token, if characters weren’t sufficiently developed internally, Sondheim would add a new, soul-baring song, no matter how far along the show was in production. Thanks to his ability to deliver stunningly under extraordinary pressure, a skill so consistently fruitful that it seems almost like a need, we have “Send in the Clowns” (A Little Night Music), “Being Alive” (Company), and “Children and Art” (Sunday in the Park), all written in the 59th minute of the eleventh hour to bring full theatrical life to characters who had been missing something essential.
As Hammerstein had taught him, Sondheim made the play the main thing as a songwriting dramatist. Yet the demands of the songs he wrote were not the only needs in his life, as Okrent shows us in his terse but illuminating consideration of Sondheim’s long career. Without grandstanding in a game of biographical gotcha, Okrent takes up key themes of Sondheim’s life and links them persuasively to songs in his shows. Much more of Sondheim’s music for fictional characters was connected to his own experience than he would ever admit. As Okrent demonstrates, a good number of Sondheim’s songs were made for his shows but from his life. More of his art than we knew was created in his own image.
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Along with his happy student-teacher alliance with Hammerstein, the defining association of Sondheim’s life was his tortured relationship with the mother he described as a “monster,” among harsher words. He despised her for a lifetime of behavior that he saw as vainly destructive, and he seemed to channel his anguish into the character Mama Rose, whom he helped construct, in Gypsy. Although Arthur Laurents wrote the book, Sondheim’s lyrics and creative input were integral in “creating the monster that was Rose, a mother whose manipulations of her child Louise were unthinking, instinctual,” Okrent writes. He goes on to quote Jack Viertel, who produced the show’s revival with Patti Lupone, on the real theme of the musical: “the crushing damage that a parent can inflict on her children.”
Sondheim, a loner who functioned socially with an air of mysterious detachment that burnished his allure, was the unspoken model for Bobby, the enigma at the center of Company, Okrent suggests. Drawing on the recollections of Mary Rodgers, the late daughter of Hammerstein’s longtime collaborator Richard Rodgers and one of Sondheim’s closest friends, Okrent notes that “in their social circle, the unattached, unemotional, sexually unresolved Sondheim was the magnetic core.”
With Sunday in the Park, a musical drama in which pointillism serves as psychic cosmology, Sondheim seemed to have found an ideal vehicle to give dramatic form to his obsessions with structure, detail, and exactitude. The ur-text of the show, “Finishing the Hat,” captures the protagonist, Georges Seurat, by way of Sondheim (or Sondheim by way of Seurat) losing himself in the act of creation—slowly, methodically, almost maniacally making art as a way not merely to capture real life but to escape it. As Okrent quotes the librettist John Weidman, who collaborated with Sondheim on three other shows (but not on Sunday in the Park), “Finishing the Hat” “always felt to me as close to Steve looking in a mirror and writing down what he saw as anything he ever wrote.”
Okrent offers a pair of theses about Sondheim. One is that he struggled to connect with other people, a challenge that also plagued his twin stand-ins, Georges and George, in Sunday in the Park. (“Connect, George. Connect,” the latter tells himself.) The other thesis is darker: that Sondheim was driven by revenge. Revenge against not only his mother, Okrent explains, but also “the critics who he believed had it in for him; the theater people who may have recognized his skill as a lyricist but dismissed him as a composer; the directors who’d distorted his work in regional revivals; the producers and corporations who had corrupted Broadway.” These two impulses are perversely symbiotic, because a thirst for vengeance makes human connection difficult. In the inner competition between these needs, revenge seems to have won.
A discomforting aspect of revenge that Okrent opts not to investigate is its necessity to inflict hurt as compensation for the avenger’s pain. Enacting revenge is not the same as gaining validation or earning exoneration. It’s payback, and the target has to suffer in some way. Without explaining how Sondheim might have hurt his victims, Okrent makes a point to note, in the context of the composer being “driven by revenge,” that “it’s impossible not to recall the two papers written by Sondheim’s psychiatrist, Milton Horowitz, ‘On Revenge’ and ‘Revenge and Masochism.’” And Okrent leaves that at that—he does not connect masochism or sadomasochism to their presence in Sweeney Todd (most vividly in a scene, cut from the original production, in which the judge sings as he whips himself). Nor, wisely, does he relate those themes to unknowables about his subject’s private life. (Sondheim was gay and married to a man at the time of his death.)
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Upon scrutiny, Sondheim appears to have revealed a great deal about himself in his songs about characters from all over the dramatic map, as Okrent shows—yet he refused to acknowledge this and, in fact, vehemently argued that it just was not true. What are we to make of this? Okrent does not hazard a guess, and a guess would be all we’re left to try. Sondheim is no longer here to address this puzzle; he loved puzzles, as all of his fans know—just not this one.
Perhaps he valued the power of creative imagination so highly that thinking of his art as self-expression would have diminished it. Probably, he thought of songs that are bluntly, unapologetically about the songwriter as acts of vanity. Okrent tells us that Sondheim found Bob Dylan boring and disliked Joni Mitchell, a singer-songwriter who probed deeply into her own heart and mind through songs drawn from personal experience. If he thought of this approach to art as an act of vainglory, it would likely have reminded him of his mother—and surely have made him recoil.
Or could it be that he preferred not to accept songwriting as a form of self-exposure, to avoid the temptation—or the responsibility—of exposing himself more fully? Could there have been things he felt or loved or hated or ached for that he just did not want the public to know very much about? If so, that would be natural, only human. No wonder the songwriter who parodized himself as God couldn’t do it.