{"id":7936,"date":"2021-12-24T08:49:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-24T08:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=7936"},"modified":"2021-12-24T08:55:21","modified_gmt":"2021-12-24T08:55:21","slug":"night-music-for-stephen-sondheim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2021\/12\/24\/night-music-for-stephen-sondheim\/","title":{"rendered":"NIGHT MUSIC FOR STEPHEN SONDHEIM"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

NIGHT MUSIC FOR  STEPHEN SONDHEIM<\/strong>:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Norman Warwick<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cStephen Sondheim is possibly the best lyric writer this country has ever produced,\u201d Randy Newman (right)<\/em><\/strong> told journalist Geoffrey Himes in 1996. \u201cDylan at his best may be better, but Sondheim is at his best more often. Sondheim has always written for adults. He\u2019s a great lyricist, technically brilliant, who never condescends to his audience. A play like Passion<\/em>, which I saw, is an integrated work, like a sonata form, like a movement in a symphony. Things recur. It\u2019s like bumping into someone who has a great mind, but he can also do West Side Story<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sondheim (right)<\/em><\/strong>, who died Friday at the age of 91, was an anomaly: a giant of the musical theater in an era when the center of gravity in American music had shifted from the stage to the pop recording studio. But such was the scale of his achievement that he couldn\u2019t be ignored\u2014neither inside, nor outside<\/a> the insular world of Broadway. During a period when the biggest hits in musical theater came from bombastic, middlebrow merchants such as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alain Boublil, Sondheim proved that the genre was still capable of greatness, and served as a role model for younger writers such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Adam Guettel and Jonathan Larson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The delightful new Netflix movie, tick, tick \u2026 BOOM!<\/strong><\/em><\/a> captures this passing of the torch. The film is Miranda\u2019s debut as a director, and it tells Larson\u2019s story through a recreation of his one-person show of the same title. This focuses on the period long before Larson died on the eve of his triumphant show Rent<\/em>, on the years when the songwriter was working in a diner, struggling to pay his bills and writing musicals that few people cared about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One person who did care was Sondheim himself. In the new movie, the bearded, slouching mensch attends the workshop read-through of Larson\u2019s stillborn show Superbia<\/em>. As played by West Wing<\/em> star Bradley Whitford (left)<\/strong>, Sondheim tries to slip unobtrusively into the back row of seat, but such is his force field that everyone\u2014including Larson, played by Andrew Garfield\u2014falls silent in awe for a moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And later, after a string of bad news\u2014the producers pass on his show; his girlfriend splits\u2014the down-and-out songwriter hears a message of encouragement from Sondheim on his phone machine, and that\u2019s enough to make Larson light up. Miranda brings a vibrancy to these scenes, because he, too, went through such a phase. But during those lean years before In the Heights<\/em> and Hamilton<\/em>, Miranda kept at it, thanks in part to similar encouragement and mentoring from Sondheim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you know anything about musical theater at all, you understand why so many were in awe of Sondheim. It wasn\u2019t because he was a commercial behemoth. His shows did respectably enough that someone was always willing to mount the next one, but his shows seldom ran for more than a year. And yet they keep getting revived, long after the bigger hits have been forgotten, because they\u2019re miracles of weaving music and lyrics into a story so naturally that the songs never seem an interruption, only a shift in gears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sondheim got a lucky break early on. When he was 10, he met his mother\u2019s best friend and the friend\u2019s husband, Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist who collaborated with Richard Rodgers (right)<\/em><\/strong> on shows such as\u00a0South Pacific<\/em>,\u00a0Oklahoma<\/em>,\u00a0Carousel<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The King and I<\/em>. Hammerstein took the teenager under his wing and taught him, Sondheim later claimed, more about writing songs for the theatre than most people learn in a lifetime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It was out of gratitude for Hammerstein\u2019s help that Sondheim reached out to younger songwriters like Miranda (left) <\/strong>, Larson and Guettel. In fact, after seeing tick, tick \u2026 BOOM!<\/em> the week of his death, Sondheim messaged Miranda to say, \u201cThanks for the nice boost to my spirits, Lin. It\u2019s an aspect of my life that I\u2019m proud of. I feel as if I\u2019ve repaid (partially at least) what I owe Oscar.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sondheim got a further break when he was invited to write lyrics for a musical adaptation of Shakespeare\u2019s\u00a0Romeo and Juliet<\/em>, with music by Leonard Bernstein and dialogue by Arthur Laurents. That show, 1957\u2019s\u00a0West Side Story<\/em>, became a classic of American theater. Bernstein and Sondheim teamed up again on another triumph, 1959\u2019s\u00a0Gypsy<\/em>. Less successful was 1965\u2019s\u00a0Do I Hear a Waltz?<\/em>, Sondheim\u2019s collaboration with an aging, alcoholic Rodgers. At that point, Sondheim resolved to work only on shows where he could write both the words and the music, as he had always wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To make that happen, he hooked up with director Hal Prince. The partners created five shows (with three different book writers) that are still considered musical theatre masterworks: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Company<\/em> (1970), Follies<\/em> (1971), A Little Night Music<\/em> (1973), Pacific Overtures<\/em> (1976) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street<\/em> (1979).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stephen Sondheim<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In contrast to his mentor Hammerstein, whose wholesome optimism was a trademark of those hit shows with Rodgers, Sondheim wrote lyrics with an undercurrent of bitter irony, more like Rodgers\u2019 earlier lyricist, Lorenz Hart. Like his words, Sondheim\u2019s music also hinted that life didn\u2019t always reward good intentions and fair play; the dark harmonies and twisting melodies reinforced the verbal hints that hopes are as likely to be frustrated as not. This was a very different approach to musical theatre than the standard operating procedure, and made him both a heroic iconoclast and commercial risk on Broadway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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No show made these tendencies more explicit than Sweeney Todd<\/em>. The story is based on the 19th-century legend about Todd, a London barber who pulls his razor too deeply across his customers\u2019 throats and who then donates their remains to Mrs. Lovett, who owns the downstairs meat-pie shop. Her strangely delicious pies are suddenly selling as fast as she can bake them. In this era, at the infancy of capitalism, no one suspects these successful shop owners of anything nefarious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, the bubbly, cheerful Mrs. Lovett is willing to overlook any problems\u2014dead people who should be alive and living people who should be dead\u2014that might derail her booming business or her romantic designs on Todd. The barber\u2019s tortured conscience, however, is outweighed only by his vengeful anger toward a society that sent him to prison and took away his wife. This contrast allows Sondheim to follow a brooding song like \u201cEpiphany\u201d with the black humor of a song like \u201cA Little Priest,\u201d which assesses the difference that a clergyman makes when added to the pie recipe. Every time the audience is on the verge of rebelling against the gruesome subject matter, Sondheim\u2019s wit and seductive melodies pull us back in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wishing to push this approach even further, Sondheim teamed up with director\/book writer James Lapine for a trilogy of shows that rank with Sweeney Todd<\/em> as his best. Sunday in the Park with George<\/em> was based not on a play or a novel, but on a painting: Georges Seurat\u2019s 1886 pointillist masterpiece, \u201cA Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.\u201d This 1984 show invented a story for each person in the painting in a terrific first act and then tried to do the same for Seurat\u2019s great-grandson in the 1980s art world in a less successful second act. Nonetheless, the musical play won Sondheim and Lapine the Pulitzer Prize for drama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This method of mirroring and contrasting a show\u2019s two acts was employed more successfully in 1987\u2019s Into the Woods<\/em>. Based on the Brothers Grimm\u2019s fairy tales, the first act delivers those stories with all the wish-fulfillment happy endings that Broadway had reliably supplied to its audiences over the decades. In the second act, however, those same stories are allowed to unspool past the \u201chappily ever after\u201d punctuation into the misunderstandings, betrayals and losses of real life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus the show critiques not only the fairy-tale fantasies that popular entertainment provides us, but also the delusions we cling to in our own lives. The show contains some of Sondheim\u2019s best songs\u2014especially \u201cGiants in the Sky\u201d and the much-covered \u201cNo One Is Alone\u201d\u2014and the 2014 movie version with Meryl Streep, James Corden and Emily Blunt is the best film version of a Sondheim show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Closing out the Lapine trilogy was 1994\u2019s Passion<\/em>, which tells the story of Fosca, a sickly, unattractive woman who pursues Giorgio, a handsome, popular captain in the Italian army during the mid-19th century. Against all odds, he falls in love with Fosca and leaves Clara, his beautiful mistress, much to the bewilderment of his fellow soldiers. Thus the show raises the question we so often ask ourselves in real life: How did those two people ever get together? And it asks a question that we often ask in the theater: How have we been convinced that such an unlikely thing really happened?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re convinced by the patient, subtle, step-by-step changes in the music. As the show begins, Clara the mistress has the buoyant, major-key tunes, while Fosca has the brooding, minor-key numbers. But the latter songs are strangely seductive, and as Giorgio\u2019s affection gradually shifts from one woman to the other, the music changes, as well. Fosca takes over the hopeful, bright passages, and Clara is left with the despairing, dark parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sondheim finished three more shows after Passion<\/em>: 1990\u2019s Assassins<\/em>, 1997\u2019s Saturday Night<\/em> and 2003\u2019s Bounce<\/em>. All of them had both sparkling moments and deep flaws. In an interview just before his death, Sondheim claimed to be working on another show based on Luis Bunuel\u2019s films.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Unlike an earlier generation of Broadway songwriters such as Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, Sondheim didn\u2019t write songs that were frequently covered by jazz and pop singers. The most notable exception was \u201cSend in the Clowns\u201d from A Little Night Music<\/em>, which boasted an undeniable chorus hook. Frank Sinatra recorded it in 1973 for his top-15 pop album, Ol\u2019 Blue Eyes Is Back<\/em>. Judy Collins released it as a single in 1975 and it eventually became a top-20 pop hit. Barbra Streisand released it as a single in 1986 and had a top-25 adult-contemporary hit. My late dad\u00b4s favourite singer, Harry Secombe (right)<\/em><\/strong> , also recorded the song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Judy Collins and Streisand regularly recorded Sondheim\u2019s songs, but few other pop singers did. Madonna did invite Sondheim to write three songs for her 1990 album, I\u2019m Breathless: Music from and Inspired by the Film Dick Tracy<\/em>. They were good songs and she did a creditable job with them, but they were overshadowed by the album\u2019s non-Sondheim hit single, \u201cVogue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet Sondheim had a tell-tale influence on a certain kind of modern songwriter, the piano-playing, storytelling singer\/songwriter. Most notable of these was Newman, who has to be in the conversation about America\u2019s greatest lyricists. He wrote the songs for three narrative projects: the pilot TV episode of Cop Rock<\/em> in 1990; his own stage musical, Faust<\/em>, in 1995; and the Disney animated musical The Princess and the Frog<\/em> in 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI talked to Sondheim at a workshop for Faust<\/em>,\u201d Newman told me. \u201cHe scolded me for rhyming words like \u2018girl\u2019 and \u2018world,\u2019 or \u2018band\u2019 and \u2018can.\u2019 \u201cThat\u2019s rock \u2019n\u2019 roll writing,\u2019 he said; \u2018You don\u2019t come from that tradition.\u2019 But I do. I come from that tradition of Fats Domino rhyme schemes. Maybe \u2018band\u2019 and \u2018can\u2019 doesn\u2019t work, but somehow it\u2019s alright with me. I admire Sondheim, but I don\u2019t come from the same tradition at all. Sondheim is the product of the pre-1954 pop song repertoire, along with Puccini. I am post-that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cPaul Simon, Prince, Sting, The Beatles weren\u2019t drawn to write for the theater; they were drawn to write for themselves. As a result, the best music for years hasn\u2019t been written for the theater, it\u2019s been written for pop music. There have only been a few exceptions, like Bernstein or Sondheim.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reviews of the new re-make of West Side Story are all positive and we will take a look early in January 2022  at what is bound to be a very poignant reminder of the great Stephen Sondheim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Meanwhile, <\/strong>don\u00b4t forget that for the next two weekends only we shall make special Saturday and Sunday posts to Sidetracks And Detours, in case anyone is looking for interesting reading for the quiet times of the festive season. This weekend we shall deliver the thoughts of Michael Higgins of a dialect Christmas, and look at the mid term report by Graham Marshall on the current Rochdale Music Society season. We will also look at the timple players of today and tomorrow, listen to an interesting new rock and the ancient and timeless music of Los Sabandenos. And we\u00b4ll be back on Monday with our more usual fare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The primary source for this article was\u00a0 written by Geoffrey Himes and published at the excellernt Paste on-line, where great writers gather.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our occasional re-postings Sidetracks And Detours are confident that we are not only sharing with our readers excellent articles written by experts but are also pointing to informed and informative sites readers will re-visit time and again. Of course, we feel sure our readers will also return to our daily not-for-profit blog knowing that we seek to provide core original material whilst sometimes spotlighting the best pieces from elsewhere, as we engage with genres and practitioners along all the sidetracks & detours we take.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article was collated by Norman Warwick, a weekly columnist with Lanzarote Information and owner and editor of this daily blog at Sidetracks And Detours.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norman has also been a long serving broadcaster, co-presenting the weekly all across the arts programme on Crescent Community Radio for many years with Steve, and his own show on Sherwood Community Radio. He has been a regular guest on BBC Radio Manchester, BBC Radio Lancashire, BBC Radio Merseyside and BBC Radio 4.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a published author and poet he was a founder member of Lendanear Music, with Colin Lever and Just Poets with Pam McKee, Touchstones Creative Writing Group (where he was creative writing facilitator for a number of years) with Val Chadwick and all across the arts with Robin Parker.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Monday to Friday,<\/strong> you will find a daily post here at Sidetracks And Detours and, should you be looking for good reading, over the weekend you can visit our massive but easy to navigate archives of over 500 articles.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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e mail logo The purpose of this daily not-for-profit blog is to deliver news, previews, interviews and reviews from all across the arts to die-hard fans and non- traditional audiences around the world. We are therefore always delighted to receive your own articles here at Sidetracks And Detours. So if you have a favourite artist, event, or venue that you would like to tell us more about just drop a Word document attachment to me at <\/strong>normanwarwick55@gmail.com<\/strong><\/a> with a couple of appropriate photographs in a zip folder if you wish. Beiung a not-for-profit organisation we unfortunately cannot pay you but we will always fully attribute any pieces we publish. You therefore might also. like to include a brief autobiography and photograph of yourself<\/strong> in your submission. We look forward to hearing from you.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sidetracks And Detours is seeking to join the synergy of organisations that support the arts of whatever genre. We are therefore grateful to all those share information to reach as wide and diverse an audience as possible.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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songfacts                                           en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/SongFacts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sondheim had a tell-tale influence on a certain kind of modern songwriter, the piano-playing, storytelling singer\/songwriter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7950,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","category-performing-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7936"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7953,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7936\/revisions\/7953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}