The Mozart of Musicals
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mtvesselDec 2012
Look, I made a Hat - Stephen Sondheim - Virgin Books, 2011
* * * *
The problem with artists - good ones anyway - is that they never do precisely what you would like them to. At the end of my review of Finishing the Hat, I expressed the hope that the second volume would have something to say about how Sondheim's words and music fit together. No such luck. He says that he can't write about the musical side without "jargon". But at least he could have explained whether the music or the words come first. I think it's like a crossword, where the music forms the grid and the words must be fitted in, but it's odd that the facsimiles of his lyric development notes never seem to have musical ideas associated with them. Despite this lack, it's good to have a book that covers the latter part of Sondheim's career, for it features what I consider to be his best work and has an interesting example of the evolutions that a musical can go through to reach its final form.
It starts with Sunday in the Park with George, a quite brilliant deconstruction of the life of Georges Seurat that uses pixillated music to match the pointilliste style of its protagonist and equally sharp lyrics to elaborate the theme of the personal sacrifices and professional compromises that anyone trying to create something worthwhile has to make. It shows the effect of his new collaborator James Lapine, who had the enormously beneficial effect of bringing out the yearning humanity that Sondheim's irony and dissonant harmonisations tend to hide.
Lapine's influence is also apparent in Into the Woods, in which traditional and not-so-traditional fairy tales collide with comic and tragic results while making serious points about the morality of getting what you want. A theme that is also explored in Assassins, Sondheim's vaudeville about would-be and actual killers of American presidents. This is the show that he says comes closest to perfection, and with lines like this, which illuminate the character of the man singing them, the person sung about and theme of the show in just a few cleverly rhyming words, I have to agree:
If there's a better inditement of the dangerous and tragic nonsense that is the idea of the American Dream, I don't know it.
Sondheim doesn't like opera for good technical reasons - he complains that the vibrato of opera singer's voices makes it difficult to hear the words - which makes the quasi-operatic pastiche of his next venture, Passion, a little odd. I haven't seen a performance of this one but the music doesn't really work for me, the lack of wit is a disappointment, and the story line (about an army officer who is bludgeoned into loving a woman by her relentless passion for him) seems far more unrealistic than even the most far-fetched operatic plot. Sondheim's response - he acknowledges that it is a common reaction from audiences - is to suggest that the "lady doth protest too much" and that we don't want to face the uncomfortable fact that we are all capable of the extremes to which the characters go. Well maybe you mate, but not me.
Sondheim's love of pastiche was also a problem in his latest, and I fear last, musical, known variously as Wise Guys, Bounce and Road Show. It is the Abbott and Costello-inspired tale of the (real-life) Mizner brothers, Wilson and Addison, as they seek their fortunes in early twentieth-century America. This show notoriously took three re-writes and fourteen years to get right, and Sondheim gives us all four versions. Which sounds tedious but is actually fascinating, because it illustrates the process of relentless refinement that good art goes through to reach its final form. It also shows how even very experienced artists can make rookie mistakes. In the musical, Wilson is a charming but manic risk-taker who wrecks every project he gets involved in through over-reaching, including his architect brother's attempt to build a perfect city at Boca Raton. Addison is portrayed as a perennial loser, well-meaning but unlucky and foolish, and frustrated by his mother's preference for his more flamboyant sibling whom he nonetheless loves. Now which of those characters is the one that audiences will care about? The answer is obvious, but it is really interesting to see Sondheim and Weidmann have three goes at trying to make the show work with the wrong main protagonist. It's possible that Addison's homosexuality was an impeding factor in making the penny drop - Sondheim doesn't discuss this in detail, though I can imagine cold calculations being made about how much a gay romance would reduce takings - but far more likely the inhibiting factor was the attempt to emulate the chancer/loser relationship in the Abbott and Costello movies that were the initial inspiration. Once they stopped using pastiche and gave us "something new to see" (to quote Sunday in the Park with George), the show came good.
The remaining chapters consist of various lyrics for television and special occasions which also illustrate Sondheim's development as a lyricist. There are far fewer of the opinionated side bars that enlivened the first volume, which is a pity. This is still, however, a remarkable book. Imagine if Mozart had lived to a ripe old age and had written a commentary on his great operas. I think it would have been much like this - sharp, witty. annoying in places, and not telling you the things that you really want to know, but full of insights nonetheless.
Look, I made a Hat - Stephen Sondheim - Virgin Books, 2011
* * * *
The problem with artists - good ones anyway - is that they never do precisely what you would like them to. At the end of my review of Finishing the Hat, I expressed the hope that the second volume would have something to say about how Sondheim's words and music fit together. No such luck. He says that he can't write about the musical side without "jargon". But at least he could have explained whether the music or the words come first. I think it's like a crossword, where the music forms the grid and the words must be fitted in, but it's odd that the facsimiles of his lyric development notes never seem to have musical ideas associated with them. Despite this lack, it's good to have a book that covers the latter part of Sondheim's career, for it features what I consider to be his best work and has an interesting example of the evolutions that a musical can go through to reach its final form.
It starts with Sunday in the Park with George, a quite brilliant deconstruction of the life of Georges Seurat that uses pixillated music to match the pointilliste style of its protagonist and equally sharp lyrics to elaborate the theme of the personal sacrifices and professional compromises that anyone trying to create something worthwhile has to make. It shows the effect of his new collaborator James Lapine, who had the enormously beneficial effect of bringing out the yearning humanity that Sondheim's irony and dissonant harmonisations tend to hide.
Lapine's influence is also apparent in Into the Woods, in which traditional and not-so-traditional fairy tales collide with comic and tragic results while making serious points about the morality of getting what you want. A theme that is also explored in Assassins, Sondheim's vaudeville about would-be and actual killers of American presidents. This is the show that he says comes closest to perfection, and with lines like this, which illuminate the character of the man singing them, the person sung about and theme of the show in just a few cleverly rhyming words, I have to agree:
Hey, fella,
Feel like you're a failure?
Bailiff on your tail, your
Wife run off for good?
Hey, fella,
Feel misunderstood?
C'mere and kill a president...
If there's a better inditement of the dangerous and tragic nonsense that is the idea of the American Dream, I don't know it.
Sondheim doesn't like opera for good technical reasons - he complains that the vibrato of opera singer's voices makes it difficult to hear the words - which makes the quasi-operatic pastiche of his next venture, Passion, a little odd. I haven't seen a performance of this one but the music doesn't really work for me, the lack of wit is a disappointment, and the story line (about an army officer who is bludgeoned into loving a woman by her relentless passion for him) seems far more unrealistic than even the most far-fetched operatic plot. Sondheim's response - he acknowledges that it is a common reaction from audiences - is to suggest that the "lady doth protest too much" and that we don't want to face the uncomfortable fact that we are all capable of the extremes to which the characters go. Well maybe you mate, but not me.
Sondheim's love of pastiche was also a problem in his latest, and I fear last, musical, known variously as Wise Guys, Bounce and Road Show. It is the Abbott and Costello-inspired tale of the (real-life) Mizner brothers, Wilson and Addison, as they seek their fortunes in early twentieth-century America. This show notoriously took three re-writes and fourteen years to get right, and Sondheim gives us all four versions. Which sounds tedious but is actually fascinating, because it illustrates the process of relentless refinement that good art goes through to reach its final form. It also shows how even very experienced artists can make rookie mistakes. In the musical, Wilson is a charming but manic risk-taker who wrecks every project he gets involved in through over-reaching, including his architect brother's attempt to build a perfect city at Boca Raton. Addison is portrayed as a perennial loser, well-meaning but unlucky and foolish, and frustrated by his mother's preference for his more flamboyant sibling whom he nonetheless loves. Now which of those characters is the one that audiences will care about? The answer is obvious, but it is really interesting to see Sondheim and Weidmann have three goes at trying to make the show work with the wrong main protagonist. It's possible that Addison's homosexuality was an impeding factor in making the penny drop - Sondheim doesn't discuss this in detail, though I can imagine cold calculations being made about how much a gay romance would reduce takings - but far more likely the inhibiting factor was the attempt to emulate the chancer/loser relationship in the Abbott and Costello movies that were the initial inspiration. Once they stopped using pastiche and gave us "something new to see" (to quote Sunday in the Park with George), the show came good.
The remaining chapters consist of various lyrics for television and special occasions which also illustrate Sondheim's development as a lyricist. There are far fewer of the opinionated side bars that enlivened the first volume, which is a pity. This is still, however, a remarkable book. Imagine if Mozart had lived to a ripe old age and had written a commentary on his great operas. I think it would have been much like this - sharp, witty. annoying in places, and not telling you the things that you really want to know, but full of insights nonetheless.