One of the great ironies of musical theatre evolution was the strange sad saga of Oscar Hammerstein’s prodigious protege, Stephen Sondheim, who would spend a life virtually deconstructing the populist notions of dramatic craft for which his great mentor had stood. Sondheim staged his futile revolution in a succession of increasingly independent works of abstract texture and fringe appeal. Not without precedent, his act of mutiny paid homage to the emerging “concept musical,” a form favoring the exploration of ideas over character-driven narrative, which Hammerstein and Rodgers had pioneered in Allegro.
Sondheim’s misleading genius for lyric writing would dazzle a growing legion of fans for whom he became a refuge from everything that in their minds had gone wrong since the noisy invasion of rock musicals. “Sondheimaniacs,” as they would come to be known, coalesced around a shared conviction that Mr. Sondheim had singlehandedly kept alive the best—the only valid—musical theatre traditions dating back to Kern and Porter and Rodgers. They united in lockstep behind the work of a man who came into his own, ironically, during the heyday of the do-your-own-thing twanger in two acts. Sondheim’s best shows opened when stages were full of protest, drugs and nudity. It was a traumatic era for Ethel Merman and Mary Martin aficionados. Instead of getting Gershwin or Arlen or Harburg at the Orpheum or the Biltmore or the Mark Hellinger, they got Grant and Gore or MacDermot or the Apolinars, Ragni or Rado or Rice.
During the volatile ’70s, when street-wise punks took to the boards like a tidal wave of protestors; when out from behind ghetto shacks, detention halls and massage parlors came society’s underdogs to sing their songs of misfortune, a great American art form rooted in vaudeville and operetta stood at the precipice of collapse—and there are those who believe it did collapse, period. These in-your-face nouveau entertainers, blasting away on amplified instruments gave real meaning to the observation—musically captured in the opening lines for Pipe Dream—that it truly takes all kinds of people to make up the world.
And all kinds of musical theatre, too. While the microphone idols sang about person-to-person inhumanity, about unjust wars and group sleepovers and corporate greed, here came Stephen Sondheim, who ten years earlier had sympathized with dispossessed gangs in West Side Story, now spinning his own sorry-grateful lyrics about rich city dwellers panting in marital combat; about aging Broadway hoofers surveying stale dreams; about aristocratic Europeans gliding through romantic interludes; about American businessmen encroaching upon the outer limits of Japan in a distant century. During those turbulent ’70s, a time of selfish personal introspection and psychobabble gone amok, Broadway had the sound of flower power and the sound of Sondheim. And if that didn’t do, there was Tynan’s flesh revue across town, set to music of remarkable variety from Jerome Kern to Jim Morrison.
Some fifteen years before all of this, audiences had been left in awe by the pointedly spare, ingenious lyrics of a new show called West Side Story—lyrics by a person they’d never heard of named Stephen Sondheim. He seemed, without doubt, the lyricist of the future. Yet Sondheim’s first successful assignment had come to him simply by default, thanks to Comden and Green turning down the project when first approached to supply the lyrics. That project put the 27-year-old neophyte on the map. With music by Leonard Bernstein, some of whose original lyric ideas Sondheim reworked into his own finished verse, the numbers, like “Jet Song” and “Cool,” bristled with blunt clarity.1
Audiences knew nothing of the troubled man behind such brilliance. Stephen Sondheim, born the only child to prosperous parents in the garment and dress design business, grew up in a posh New York household full of servants, cared for by everyone but his parents. And when his father, who had taken Steve some Sundays to ball games, left his mother for another woman, the bitter and controlling Mrs. Sondheim tried seducing her own son more than once, and indoctrinating him against his philandering father. The embittered divorcee and her precocious son lived out a sadistically symbiotic relationship. For years Sondheim experienced fits of panic around women drawing too close. In time, he established a semi-permanent homosexual union with a younger fledgling composer, although it too languished in the end.
“What she did for five years,” Sondheim is quoted in the biography of him by Meryle Secrest, “was treat me like dirt, but come on to me at the same time.”2 When faced with pacemaker surgery, Mrs. Sondheim wrote to Steve, “The only regret I have in life is giving you birth.”3
The one thing this mother dearest did give her son—a gift of fate she later jealously regretted—was her society connections. In her work as an interior decorator, she had come to know Dorothy Hammerstein, wife of Oscar, and thus did the young Stephen get introduced on a friendly basis to one of the Hammerstein boys, James. From there, it was on to the education and inspiration Stephen enjoyed under the mentoring of Oscar Hammerstein II.
Sondheim acted in school plays and learned to play the piano, believing himself to be essentially a composer. The early lyrics he wrote were created only reluctantly to get his songs in working order. He composed his first score for a school musical, By George. Offered some caustic feedback by Hammerstein, the protege observed a real “ruthlessness”4 behind the mentor’s charm that few others ever got close enough to see.
Stephen Sondheim in 1963.
Young Steve was hired, for $25.00 a week, to work in the Rodgers and Hammerstein office as general errand boy. One of the fascinating first perks was to watch Allegro during preparations and rehearsals. So impressed was the student by this first “concept” musical in the making (evidently more so than Dick and Oscar, who did not pursue the form in future projects) that he would spend the rest of his life, he told his biographer, “trying to rewrite Allegro all the time.”5 At Williams College, Sondheim composed more shows. Foremost among his early and lasting influences, he listed the Russian romantics, headed by Tchaikovsky.
If Mr. Hammerstein expected his disciple to carry forth in the integrated book musical format, his influence fell woefully short. The boy wonder blossomed with a remarkable facility for verse, but with almost no regard for framing that verse in stories capable of engaging audience empathy. In one of Sondheim’s college shows which Hammerstein critiqued, the prickly protege was taken to task for giving voice to unlikable characters. According to biographer Secrest, Hammerstein “was trying to convey the fact if the sympathies of the audiences were not engaged, it did not matter how brilliant the work was. It was a point the pupil may have missed.”6
Thus would Sondheim have to rely on the variously talented book writers with whom he associated. Curiously, he never tired his own hand at libretto construction, although during his early years he earned some decent money in television writing Topper episodes, and he penned a number of teleplays, only one of which, Early Winter, got made. In his first Broadway break, he did fabulously well in collaboration with the accomplished Leonard Bernstein and playwright Arthur Laurents, who created West Side Story’s volatile libretto. Still, the show’s brutal realism initially met resistance from a large portion of the public. West Side Story was nowhere near in the beginning as successful as legend would have it. Hobe Morrison spotted “inescapable drawbacks”7 in the unpleasant subject matter and the commercially limited songs. None of them received significant airplay.
Sondheim did not consider it to be a very good show, faulting it for “serious flaws,” among them, “purpleness in the writing and in the songs because the characters are necessarily one-dimensional.”8 To his biographer Meryle Secrest, he recounted, “People left in droves, because people did not go to musicals expecting experimental work. They went for an evening’s diversion.” After he noticed the exit of businessmen following the first song, he may have wondered about the value of rave notices. “That’s when I knew my career was in trouble.”9
Sondheim’s next groundbreaking work, Gypsy, benefited from another first-rate libretto by Laurents. Jule Styne, signed to compose the music, delivered undoubtedly his finest score. The threesome fashioned a gritty biographical take on the lives of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and her overbearing stage mother, Rose (played to the hilt by Ethel Merman, landing the role of a lifetime). Sondheim’s lyrics bristled with the same economy of words and on-target vernacular seen in his work for West Side Story. Hardly romantic or even comedically reassuring, but terrifically faithful to its central premise, the musical charts Rose’s mounting jealousy over her daughter’s mounting success and Rose’s ultimate breakdown in one of the most harrowing soliloquies ever written for the stage, “Rose’s Turn.”
Those early manifestations of genius stand as a hallmark to the mentor. Naturally, Sondheim strove to distance himself from Hammerstein with a body of work all his own, though he seems to have resorted to extreme measures bordering on artistic suicide. “He taught me not everything I know,” he carefully explained, “but everything I needed to know in order to write for myself and not for him.”10
All along, Sondheim harbored the self-image of composer rather than lyricist. It was a desire that, once vented, proved a mixed blessing, for when he worked with other tunesmiths his work was more accessible and dramatically focused. Of the three musicals for which he supplied only the words, two were huge hits. Of all the shows bearing both lyrics and music by Stephen Sondheim only two, Company and A Little Night Music, are classified as commercial successes.
Did he have true compositional talent? Of course he did. Sondheim’s first complete solo score was for the George Abbott directed crowd pleaser A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum. Believing the celebrated director to be basically untalented, Sondheim appears never to have learned from him the importance of theatricality. In fact, Abbott’s direct opposition to the opening number, “Invocation” (which had replaced “Love Is in the Air”), on the grounds that it was not hummable, indirectly led to a third new song, “Comedy Tonight,” being written.
Sondheim’s second solo, Anyone Can Whistle—also his third collaboration with Arthur Laurents on libretto—required thirty-three auditions to raise the money and only nine performances in which to lose it all. It produced some fascinating songs if nothing else, and it drew sharply uneven notices. Among them, there was a prophetic assessment by John Chapman noting a “briskly syncopated score” while bemoaning the absence of “a melody I could whistle.” Walter Kerr, who wasn’t left whistling, either, called the enterprise “exasperating.” Why? Because “it isn’t very musical.” While in Norman Nadel, Sondheim enjoyed early acclaim: “Sondheim’s music and lyrics deserve an entire review in themselves … and maybe when the season lets up they’ll get it in this corner.”11
Not yet anywhere near the sainted status he would soon enough enjoy, Sondheim turned one final time to a lyric-only collaboration with another composer. He chose reluctantly to work with Richard Rodgers, a partnership many deemed would prove classic. It didn’t. The downbeat story they agreed to bring to the stage, which Rodgers later described “a sad little comedy with songs” that “simply didn’t work,”12 was based on the 1952 play The Time of the Cuckoo, by Arthur Laurents, who also adapted it. Acrimonious disputes soon bedeviled the trio during out of town tryouts, where audiences and industry bystanders noticed a lack of the expected Richard Rodgers magic. Additional tension was caused by the fact that Rodgers was also the producer. When he tried suggesting ways to make the heroine more sympathetic—an idea that, who knows, might have made her more sympathetic, and audience empathy is something the show desperately needed—Rodgers met icy resistance from Laurents and Sondheim.
The real-life drama came to an ugly head when Rodgers first heard lyric lines alluding to homosexuality in “A Perfectly Lovely Couple” and blew up in public, screaming, “This is shit!”13 Rodgers ended up feeling isolated and rejected on his own project, all of his ideas for needed improvement “promptly rejected, as if by prearrangement.”14 He was driven into sporadic alcoholic binges in men’s rooms. To a friend of Sondheim’s, British actor Keith Baxter, Rodgers is said to have remarked that he founded the lyricist “a cold man with a deep sense of cynicism.”15
Do I Hear A Waltz, the result, proved to be a cold, unfriendly work. Nonetheless, it contains a superb Richard Rodgers score, written when he was 62 years old. And the polished lyrics by Stephen Sondheim rank among his best work in the earlier, more listener-friendly years, before he became an idiom unto himself. The songs, however, could not overcome the listless tale of an American secretary, Leona, finding temporary love in the arms of a charming Italian antique dealer, Renato, who turns out to be a married man and who, to Leona’s dismay, profits from a commission on a necklace he buys her. Nothing much seemed to have happened on the stage. Walter Kerr dubbed it “an emotional drought in Venice.”16
That was 1964. When Sondheim resumed serving as his own composer five years later and joined forces with book writer George Furth to create Company, his credentials as composer-lyricist skyrocketed. Sondheim’s sensibilities were well suited to the approaching “do your own thing” ’70s, a decade fraught with group therapy and increasing public acceptance of open relationships. And that is when the Sondheim fans turned to Sondheimaniacs, when they became a serious force, swearing eternal allegiance to their hero and in effect standing constant vigil over his protected status and hallowed image.
Left to right: Susan Browning, Donna McKechnie, and Pamela Myers deliver “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” in Company.
They had plenty to cheer about in Company, one of the finest stage musical scores of all time, period. Brilliant in its invention and completeness, it is nearly as riveting as Cole Porter’s songs for Anything Goes. Orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick in the style of Promises, Promises (the Hal David and Burt Bacharach 1968 hit which Tunick also arranged), the songs of Company sizzle and explode with the teeth-gnashing ambivalence of the times. Why do couples marry? How do they survive the petty annoyances and larger traumatic betrayals they inflict on each other? Maybe they survive in the negative, on “The Little Things We Do Together”—an acerbic little ditty about irritating neighbors and driving children crazy.
Sondheim had the critics clearly on his side with Company, although Brooks Atkinson perhaps best understood the musical’s fundamental problem when he described the central character as being more observer than actual part of the action. Walter Kerr, after detailing numerous triumphal aspects to the work, confessed, “Now ask me if I liked the show. I didn’t like the show. I admired it, or admired vast portions of it…. I left Company feeling rather cool and queasy…. Personally, I’m sorry grateful.”17
Among its rapturous defenders, The New Yorker’s Brendan Gill predicted that by the year 2000, “the pressure for tickets will have begun to abate a little.”18 In earth time, the pressure for tickets abated in a couple of seasons. It has since been produced on a number of occasions in regional theatres, more to please artistic directors wishing to flash their Sondheim credentials than to thrill impatient sorry-grateful season ticket holders.
Drawn to the provocative misfortunes of life, Sondheim composed like an existential poet riding the Titanic for sheer mental stimulation. By now he had begun turning his back on the principles of musical theatre championed by his late mentor. He returned one year later, following thirteen drafts, with Follies, the lavishly staged tribute to an old theatre about to be torn down. Co-directed by Harold Prince and Michael Bennett and choreographed by the latter, the show sparkled with another set of excellent songs that musical theatre lovers would savor over and over again—linked to a libretto that many found irritatingly undramatic, even a bit mushy. Sondheim and librettist James Goldman, working from an original idea, paid affectionate tribute to a reunion of ex-chorus members returning to the theatre where they had once performed. Some of them hope to find members of the cast over whom they had once pined. Some come seeking a rebirth of youthful dreams. Some yearn to savor the present tense. Three of the firstnight reviewers fell ravingly in love with the musical’s surreal non-linear charms. “Nostalgia is not simply the undercurrent of the evening,” reported Douglas Watt, Jr. “It is the very subject of it … a pastiche so brilliant as to be breathtaking at times.”19
Follies is an utterly enthralling examination of the lingering dreams that intersect in the shadows of shared memories. Characters, double cast, confront each other in the illusory terrain of Follies, both as they were and as they are, and the juxtapositions are full of joy and pain, of a kind of higher mental reality. Yesterday’s wishes collide with today’s residual letdowns. Not everyone gets out intact. Some prefer to stay safely imprisoned within the hall of mirrors of their protective imaginations.
The average theatergoer was not a candidate for this inventive concept musical. English impresario Cameron Mackintosh, who loved the show and staged it unsuccessfully on the West End with some changes, was forced to concede that it failed on the most basic level with the public. The characters, he said, remained static throughout. “I feel you’ve got to take the audience on a journey.”20 On its own journey across America, Follies failed with the common ticket buyer, and the tour was aborted. The show lost a heap of money on both sides of the Atlantic.
Falling deeper into the thrall of ideas, Sondheim became a powerful force in his own right, his every capricious move codified in the minds of his admirers. He did relent on one traditional occasion, in service to a solid libretto written by Hugh Wheeler, loosely adapting Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night. Sondheim composed a lush, wondrously integrated set of songs exclusively in three-quarter time, and the enchanting result, A Little Night Music, marked a momentary throwback to operetta days. It also gave the world the only Sondheim song that would achieve lasting recognition with the public at large, “Send In the Clowns.” The principal character, newly married Fredrik, lies there next to his not-yet-ready bride, Ann, fretfully waiting for consummation with an 18-year-old woman, while gradually coming to the realization that his enduring love for an aging mistress, Desiree, means more to him. Night Music moved audiences, turned a profit and was added, in 1990, to the Repertory of the New York City Opera.
Ever the restless innovator, Sondheim continued to prefer risks over royalties. Pacific Overtures, which came next, brought with it another masterful score of bold invention, about as good as anything he would create. Too bad it arrived in the company of such a deadly dull book devoid of flesh-and-blood characters caught up in real-life struggles. Another sung essay, Overtures was little more than a flat, lifeless pageant of costumed oriental characters coming and going, each presumably standing as a symbol for some trenchant aspect of the unfolding East-West let’s-do-business saga. Through his music and lyrics, Sondheim assumed the role of impartial witness singing intelligently to himself about all the intriguing ramifications of a plotless play. His razor-sharp songs were great work on an otherwise static affair.
Sondheim’s willingness to collaborate on Overtures with neophyte librettist John Weidman, whose one previous credit was co-author of the book for the roundly roasted 1966 Duke Ellington 3-performance flop, Pousse-Cafe, made no more sense than Weidman’s bloodless script. And another tedious “concept musical” by the prince of singing essays hit the rocks, dividing the critics evenly across the spectrum. Walter Kerr complained of a dullness and immobility to the show, “because we are never properly placed in it.”21 Clive Barnes so enraged overly sensitive director Hal Prince with a thoughtfully mixed review full of modified praise, that Prince shot back in letter form, “You’ve just closed the show and you will regret it someday.”22 The two rave notices it earned (“A remarkable work of art,”23 sang Martin Gottfried) could hardly offset the show’s austere self-indulgent intellectuality. It hung on for about half a year at the Winter Garden Theatre.
Librettos without engaging stories and characters are a problem without end in musical theatre. By now, the integrated book show was under direct attack by a new generation of practitioners seeking a fresh language. None, of course, wanted to come off looking predictable or old fashioned; so they went to extremes, following Mr. Sondheim up and down the dead end streets. Though concept musicals presented more problems than they solved, this fact of life would not deter Mr. Sondheim from his penchant for defiant innovation. Another of his alienating attributes was a growing fetish for lyrics as intricate and dense as the crossword puzzles he reveled in creating.
At the dawn of his career, you will remember, Hammerstein’s protege displayed a bent for saying a lot in very few words. (Think West Side Story.) As time progressed, clearly he employed more words while saying less, like a sleight-of-hand magician dazzling with a stream of distracting movements just to turn a red ball into a blue ball. Sondheim’s fawning fans drove him to ever more complex displays of dexterity—past the sorry-grateful multitudes who like words that relate to their own lives and tunes they can hum after leaving the show. As Variety once commented, summing up its critical doubts over the prospects for Sondheim’s musical about painter Georges Seurat, “Sunday in the Park is another concept musical in which an abstract subject—the creation of art—takes precedence over story and character…. Audiences like shows about people. They’re funny that way.”24
Sondheim is famously rumored to have boasted of a conscious refusal to compose hummable, public-pleasing tunes. Not rumored at all are the in-print remarks of his friend Keith Baxter on the subject. “It seems to me,” Baxter once half-jokingly put it, “that when Steve composes a song, whenever he hears a melody creeping in, he slams his foot down and stomps on it.”25 Music industry pros were struck by the composer’s indifference to popular tastes. Remarked Frank Sinatra, “Stephen Sondheim … a classy composer and lyricist, could make me a lot happier if he’d write more songs for a salon singer like me.”26 Jule Styne once came to the point: “Steve needs to write some hits. If he doesn’t, these shows of his are not going to make it.”27
At the summit of his artistic reign on Broadway during the ’70s, Sondheim seemed to shun not just popular music, but musical theatre itself. On the eve of the opening of Pacific Overtures, he granted a New York Times published interview to Clive Herschorn, theatre critic of the Sunday Express in London, headlined “Will Sondheim Succeed in Being Genuinely Japanese?” Sondheim snidely dismissed virtually all musicals, deriding them for having recycled old forms year after year. He argued that My Fair Lady was essentially a wasted venture. “Unless you can add something that will improve the original, what’s the point?” He uttered disdain for anything remotely resembling a mainstream enterprise. Comparing his new show to The King and I, he found the latter lacking. “Let’s face it, The King and I might just as well be about a teacher coming to teach in Brooklyn, except that she comes to Siam.”28 Sondheim displayed not only arrogance, but a strange and surprising ignorance as well, bringing seriously into question the man’s working knowledge of dramatic art. Had he taken the time to think through his bizarre analogy about The King and I and Brooklyn, Sondheim might have realized how unique imperial oriental culture was to the musical’s central conflict.
Feeling infallibly bright, Hammerstein’s protege now described his late mentor as a man of “infinite soul” and “limited talent,” the very opposite for Richard Rodgers.29 And his every new work received the same rapt attention once lavished upon Dick and Oscar. Yet Side by Side by Sondheim, a 1977 revue of his songs, garnered the usual mixed reviews, and turned a modest profit on a modest run. What next? Although opera was not exactly a calling Mr. Sondheim aspired to, according to his public statements, he reached brilliantly in that direction with his most powerfully chilling work, the darkly alienated songfest of cannibalism in London, Sweeney Todd.
His smartest move had been to link up once more with librettist Hugh Wheeler. They derived ample inspiration from Christopher Bond’s diabolical tale about the barber of Fleet Street who is unjustly imprisoned and who escapes, 15 years later, to take vengeance upon his accuser, a lecherous judge who took Todd’s wife and now plans to marry his daughter. The lengthy score, laced with second-rate refrains and recitative, does offer a handful of true Sondheim classics, among them “Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” “Pretty Women,” “Epiphany,” “My Friends,” “A Little Priest.” Most of all, the songs have a strong reason to be heard, effectively moving the tale along. And still the venture recouped only 59 percent of its investment.
Broadway ticket windows are rarely hospitable to dark, destructive works, no matter how smartly conceived. Any wretched little yarn can be turned into a work of art—at least in the eyes of dramaturgs and drama professors. Art, in fact, can be anything it plumb well wants to be, as Mr. Sondheim would try over and over again to demonstrate. Audiences can also do whatever they plumb well wish, filling up theatre seats in droves or staying home in droves. And audiences were growing tired of Mr. Sondheim’s increasingly unfriendly overtures. “We are plainly in the hands of intelligent and talented people, possessed of a complex, malleable, assiduously offbeat vision,” reflected Walter Kerr. “Unhappily that vision remains a private and personal one. We haven’t been lured into sharing it.”
Richard Eder, impressed by the profusion of “artistic energy, creative personality and plain excitement … a display of extraordinary talent,” brooded over the absence of focus and empathy. “What keeps all its brilliance from coming together as a major work of art is a kind of confusion of purpose…. The music, beautiful as it is, succeeds, in a sense, in making an intensity that is unacceptable…. There is, in fact, no serious social message in Sweeney; and at the end, when the cast lines up on the stage and points to us, singing that there are Sweeneys all about, the point is unproven.”30
During and after Sweeney Todd, which many consider to be his finest work, Sondheim matured from spare to verbose—from the simple streetwise slang of gang warfare on the streets of New York city to the rhyme-infested wordiness of a lyric writer straining in overkill to sustain a reputation. His intricate rhymes and clever phrases come whizzing by so fast—like rattling freight trains crisscrossing each other in the night—that we are left in a daze to wonder in just what direction they are supposed to be taking us. At least in Sweeney Todd, thanks to the more controlled Mr. Wheeler, Sondheim had a strong narrative to hold on to, and that gives audiences a clear sense of dramatic purpose. The work was added to the New York City Opera repertoire in 1984.
In his next project, working not with the helpful Hugh Wheeler, but again with the unhelpful George Furth, Sondheim knew exactly where he wanted to take us—not in any straight ahead direction, of course. Merrily We Roll Along is painfully remembered by those who tried putting it over for the mass walkouts long before the final curtain fell. It left everyone irritatingly unengaged. After sixteen torturous attempts to connect with the Big Black Giant, nobody came around anymore for the backward ride.
In an act of reckless ego, Sondheim and Furth had based their testy musical on a flop Kaufman and Hart play of the same name. With Hal Prince at the directing helm—as he had been with nearly all the previous Sondheim shows—Merrily told the story of disillusioned composer Franklin Shepard, haunted by all the moral compromises he had made on his way up the ladder. He relives scenes from his life in reverse order, surveying friendships betrayed and values discarded. The surprisingly bright, thoughtful score is even warmly sentimental now and then. “Old Friends” is one of its star numbers. A slew of engaging others, too, shine hopelessly against a lifeless landscape.
The critics were driven to exasperation, making this the first Sondheim show to be unanimously roasted. As Walter Kerr saw it, Merrily We Roll Along offered the writers “the one thing they seemed determined to sell: disenchantment…. There is nothing wrong with the choice. It’s not our business to tell creative men what to create so long as it’s got a whiff of life deep inside it. But the insistence on a single theme, a single attitude, is becoming monotonous…. They are much too innovative to allow themselves to become so predictable.”
Frank Rich nearly spilled his heart out in anguish over another fractured gem: “Sondheim has given this evening a half dozen songs that are crushing and beautiful—that soar and linger and hurt. But the show that contains them is a shambles. We keep waiting for some insight into these people, but all we get is fatuous attitudinizing about how ambition, success and money always leads to rack and ruin…. What’s really wasted here is Sondheim’s talent. And that’s why we watch Merrily We Roll Along with an ever mounting—and finally upsetting—sense of regret.”31
At the midpoint in his dissident drive to reinvent musical theatre, Steven Sondheim considered giving up the profession. He felt like an outcast in his own town. “I am serious,” he told his biographer, “but I’m serious in an art that is hardly worth being called one.” He blamed the critics. “They would all knock every show I ever did and stamp on it and sneer at it. Then, the next time around, they would refer to me as somebody who only had flops, which they caused.”32
Just having begun a long slow descent down the other side of a mountain precariously scaled, Sondheim stubbornly refused to retreat into sense or sanity, refused safer, more fruitful associations with veteran hands. Remarked his first and most valuable collaborator, Arthur Laurents, “The shows that Hal and Steve have done together are cold…. I’ve never liked the theory of alienation. I think it’s an intellectual conceit…. In a show you have to care even if you hate the characters, you must have some strong reaction wanting them to succeed, or wanting them to be done in, but something.”33
Considering how revolutionary he had been, and how many diverse projects he had helped bring to the stage, yet for all his derring-do Sondheim seemed determined still to explore only more ways to restate the same pessimistic view of the human condition. When you end up whistling only unhappy tunes, you are no more original than the next guy. People lose heart and go elsewhere. How ironic: most everything for which his great mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, stood—likable empathetic characters, realistic librettos, hummable songs and life-affirming themes—lay along the roads that Steven Sondheim didn’t take.