 Stephen Sondheim
A Biography
Stephen Sondheim was born on 22 March 1930, the son of a
wealthy New York dress manufacturer. But, when his parents divorced, his
mother moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania and young Stephen found himself
in the right place at the right time. A neighbour of his mother's, Oscar
Hammerstein II, was working on a new musical called Oklahoma!
and it didn't take long for the adolescent boy to realise that he, too,
was intrigued by musical theatre. Although he subsequently studied composition
with Milton Babbitt, he chose to apply what he learned in the all-or-nothing
commercial hothouse of Broadway. Like Hammerstein, he has written the
occasional pop song (with Jule Styne for Tony Bennett) and dabbled in
films (Stavisky, Reds, Dick Tracy), but, like Hammerstein, he has always
come back to the theatre.
His initial success came as a somewhat reluctant lyricist to Leonard
Bernstein on West Side Story
(1957) and Jule Styne on Gypsy
(1959). Exciting and adventurous as those shows were in their day, and
for all their enduring popularity, Sondheim's philosophy since is encapsulated
in one of his song titles: "I Never Do Anything Twice". His first score
as composer-lyricist was A Funny Thing
Happened On The Way To The Forum (1962) - a show so funny few
people spotted how experimental it was: it's still the only successful
musical farce. In the following three decades, critics detected a Sondheim
style - a fondness for the harmonic language of Ravel and Debussy; a reliance
on vamps and skewed harmonies to destabilise the melody; a tendency to
densely literate lyrics. But, all that said, it's the versatility that
still impresses: you couldn't swap a song from the exuberantly explosive
pit-band score of Anyone Can Whistle
(1964) with one of the Orientally influenced musical scenes in Pacific
Overtures (1976); you couldn't mistake the neurotic pop score of Company
(1970) for the elegantly ever-waltzing A
Little Night Music (1973). Sondheim hit his stride in the Seventies, forming a unique partnership
of hyphenates with Hal Prince: a composer-lyricist and a producer-director
working together to re-invent the musical. Some were plotless (Company),
some characterless (Pacific
Overtures), one went backwards (Merrily We Roll Along). But, as his
onetime choreographer Michael Bennett put it, before you can break the
rules, you have to know what they are - and Sondheim knows America's cultural
heritage better then anybody. Follies
(1971) is an affectionate and precise pastiche of Berlin, Kern, Gershwin,
Dorothy Fields, Yip Harburg ... Even as he seemed to be turning his back
on that great tradition, he was also a glorious summation of it.
With Sweeney Todd (1979), the
Prince/Sondheim collaboration reached its apogee, blurring the distinctions
between lyrics and dialogue, songs and underscoring, and combining a complex
plot with operatic emotions to create a unique musical thriller. But their
next show, Merrily We Roll
Along (1981), flopped, and the two men went their separate ways. Sondheim
turned to the author and director James Lapine for Sunday
In The Park With George (1984), a work that seemed at times an autobiographical
reflection on the problems of making art in a commercial environment.
His most recent shows illustrate one of his greatest strengths, his ability
to write against audience expectations of the subject: for
Into The Woods (1987), he gave such familiar nursery figures as Cinderella
and Red Riding Hood complex extended numbers; for the eponymous anti-heroes
of Assassins (1990), he wrote some
of his most affecting, straightforward music, reaching back beyond Berlin
to barbershop and Stephen Foster, and almost to our own time with an ironic
parody of the Carpenters. Not everyone feels comfortable watching Lee
Harvey Oswald singing along with John Wilkes Booth, but, in stretching
the possibilities of the musical, Sondheim is seeking to prove that the
form has just as wide a range as the straight play. And for that we should
all be grateful. |
