Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021)

As part of his 80th birthday celebrations in 2010, Broadway
legend Stephen Sondheim looked back over his life and work, with
Donald Macleod. The result is a fascinating retrospective of half
a century of creativity, with the artist himself as tour guide.
Along the way, he explodes a few myths about the inner workings
of musical theatre.


Sondheim starts by talking about his childhood, his parents'
divorce, his near-adoption by the Hammerstein family and his
apprenticeship with Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist of Oklahoma!
Then there's the rollercoaster ride of his early career: his
first, abortive Broadway show; two amazing breaks, when he was
commissioned to write the lyrics for first West Side Story, then
Gypsy; his unhappy collaboration with Richard Rogers; and his
major creative breakthrough with Company, a musical with
situations and characters but no conventional plot, and the first
appearance of characteristic Sondheim subject-matter - the
virtual impossibility of forming good relationships. As one
British critic observed, "It is extraordinary that a musical,
that most trivial of forms, should be able to plunge as Company
does, with perfect congruity, into the profound depths of human
perplexity and misery.".


Next, and in typical Sondheim fashion, Stephen expands the notion
of what the musical could be, with razor-sharp language and
cracking tunes to boot: Follies, in which a reunion of
Ziegfield-style Follies stars in a derelict theatre becomes a
metaphor for the death of the American dream; A Little Night
Music, a musical about relationships written almost entirely in
waltz-time, that spawned Sondheim's most famous song, 'Send in
the Clowns'; and Pacific Overtures, a 'kabuki musical' with an
all-Japanese cast - an exploration of the 19th-century
westernization of Japan, seen from the Japanese perspective.


Sweeney Todd is widely regarded as Sondheim's masterpiece, an
extraordinarily powerful work which he has modestly described as
"a small and scary evening about the need for revenge.". Sweeney
Todd was a huge success and is widely performed today, from
schools (in a special educational edition) to opera houses.
Whereas Merrily We Roll Along, failed to catch the public mood.
It is a tale of disintegrating friendships and compromised
idealism, narrated, in a characteristic structural twist,
backwards. Despite a marvellous score, it remains Sondheim's
biggest flop to date. Among other topics, Sondheim also discusses
his long-time collaboration with director Hal Prince, the
logistics of working with an orchestrator, and the heart attack
he suffered in 1979, just three weeks after the opening of
Sweeney.


Next, the musical that grew out of a painting; a tangled web of
fairytales; and a positively murderous show about the assassins,
and would-be-assassins, of US presidents. The painting in
question is Seurat's hugely famous A Sunday Afternoon on the
Island of La Grande Jatte, and the work it inspired was the
Pulitzer-prize-winning Sunday in the Park with George, a deeply
personal show about the joys and the costs of creation. The
fairytales are the ones familiar to every child, but in Into the
Woods they are woven together in an extraordinarily intricate
way, before completely unravelling in the second act. Assassins
caused a huge furore when it was unveiled in 1990, not least
because it happened to coincide with the opening salvo of the
first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm - under such
circumstances, a show that climaxed with the assassination of JFK
was bound to be interpreted as deeply unpatriotic. Sondheim also
talks about the logistics of mounting a Broadway production, and
the pleasures of "trancing out" during the creative process.


Finally, Passion, a kind of reversal of the Beauty and the Beast
myth, which Sondheim has described as "one long rhapsody, a
straightforward, non-ironic love story"; The Frogs, a
contemporary take on Aristophanes originally staged in the
swimming pool at Yale University (with Meryl Streep and Sigourney
Weaver in the chorus line); and Road Show, a musical about the
Mizner brothers which proves the old adage that "musicals aren't
written, they're re-written" - it's currently in its fourth
incarnation.