The Bluestocking 211

Whisky or WKD

Happy Friday!

My route into being interested in Stephen Sondheim was—appropriately enough, as you’ll discover below—loving Hamilton. So this week’s newsletter is a short digression on paradigm shifts and the perfect balance between failure and success.

Helen

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Stephen Sondheim, 1930-2021

For all these reasons — the high-minded ambition, the seriousness of subject matter, the melodic experimentation, the emotional discord — Mr. Sondheim’s shows, though mostly received with critical accolades, were almost never popular hits. He suffered from a reputation that he didn’t write hummable tunes and that his outlook was austere, if not grim.

—Obituary in The New York Times (£)

Musical theater, midway through the 20th century, wasn’t a form characterized by innovation. Sondheim’s work often perplexed and even irritated audiences, not to mention critics, who maligned his lack of “hummable” songs and—in the case of John Lahr—accused him of killing the exuberant, old-fashioned musical. It’s not that Sondheim doesn’t offer, in moments, pure musical catharsis—the soaring, emphatic crescendo of “Aren’t they a gem?” or “the grass or the stick or the dog or the light.” It’s that, as Stephen Schiff wrote in a shrewd 1993 New Yorker profile, “Sondheim’s accompaniments are sumptuous, but they don’t allow a melody to plunk neatly into place; they don’t allow it to resolve; they don’t give it a home.” His composed works are reticent: They tantalize but hold back total gratification.

—Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic

Three years later, I saw a Sondheim musical onstage: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the first Broadway show (following West Side Story and Gypsy) for which he wrote the music as well as the lyrics. It was trying out for three weeks in my hometown of Washington, D.C., on its way to New York. Its reviews were dreadful: The critic at the Post compared it unfavorably to an “infinitely more zestful” varsity revue he’d just seen at Georgetown University. I went to the last Saturday matinée of the run at the National Theatre, where I was startled to discover a phenomenon I would later find at other Sondheim musicals now considered classics—an empty house. When I met Steve roughly a decade later, I recounted the experience to make sure it wasn’t an exaggeration of my 12-year-old imagination, and he verified my memory: In a theater that sat nearly 1,700, only some 50 people had turned up. Steve recalled that when he surveyed the scene at that final matinee, he joked to Prince, the producer, “Let’s invite them all back to the hotel.”

I found Forum hilarious and magical and wished it would never end. But I figured I was too naïve to know any better. Relatives who’d seen the show ahead of me disliked it as much as the critics did, and the tiny audience at the National was apathetic no matter what Zero Mostel and his fellow clowns did to make them laugh. When the show arrived on Broadway soon after, it got raves. Some months later, I bought standing room to see it again while visiting New York, convinced that it must have been completely overhauled since I saw it. But though Forum had gained a legendary new opening number (“Comedy Tonight”), it otherwise was the same show that my hometown had unfairly dismissed. That rank injustice stayed with me, filed away under “Sondheim.”

—Frank Rich in New York magazine (reprinted from 2013)

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I’ve been reading all the Sondheim obituaries, including the Guardian’s, which copped some flak for being too negative. That wasn’t my impression, which was more that it wrestled—as do all the pieces above—with the disconnect between Sondheim’s place in the theatre world (unmatched genius, venerable institution, beloved inspiration from everyone from Jonathan Larson to Lin Manuel Miranda) and the often patchy critical and commercial reception of his work. Appreciation for even his most popular musicals often took time to mature, and he deliberately chose unlikely subjects (presidential assassins) and technical challenges (A Little Night Music is written in waltz meter).

Of course, those two things are connected: you can give people what they want and expect, or you can try to show them something new and weird, in the expectation that only some will love it. Sondheim was, in the proper sense, avant garde. He pushed the limits of the form, and didn’t give audiences formulaic, comfortable work.

Sondheim was a single malt whisky, whereas someone like Andrew Lloyd Webber is . . . WKD. A happy ending and some tunes you can hum: it’s the alcopop version of a musical. Sondheim offered something more adult, more jagged, and ultimately more complex and interesting. His shows weren’t smoothed out to be palatable to the largest group possible—and this, of course, was what made some Sondheim snobs like it all the more. (What does it say about your exquisitely refined taste if the bridge-and-tunnel crowd are clapping beside you?)

The corollary to this is that Lloyd Webber has not influenced the next generation of musical creators to the same extent—except perhaps in the sense of proving they can be profitable¹. Which kind of success is more durable? I would argue that influence always beats commercial rewards. The year 1922 saw the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, T S Eliot’s The Waste Land, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. But the bestselling novel of the year was ASM Hutchinson’s If Winter Comes².

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I’ve been thinking recently about whether there’s any way to write about geniuses who are too far ahead of their time. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace are possible examples; the mechanical progress of computing in the 19th century simply couldn’t keep up with their imaginations. (Lovelace appears to have inspired Thomasina in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, who conceptualises entropy before the scientific community does, but never gets to pass on her findings.)

Sondheim wasn’t a Lovelace; he lived at the right time to catch the demand for more adventurous and experimental musical theatre. Impressively, though, he stayed just ahead of the curve—sure, he might have written the lyrics to West Side Story in his mid-twenties, but his “hot streak” started in his 40s and last until nearly 60. He was 40 when Company premiered in 1970, and he followed that with Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and Into the Woods (1987).

Sondheim’s career is also a reminder that failure cannot be avoided, if you are being truly original. Merrily We Roll Along was regarded as a terrible flop; Sunday in the Park With George won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. You don’t get one without the other. If there’s no risk to what you’re doing, you’re just following a recipe. True success always contains the possibility of failure.

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PS. Before we all rue that we will never have a career hot streak that involves writing something as good as “Send in the Clowns”, let’s cheer ourselves up with the fact that even someone as perceptive about the possibilities of musical theatre as Stephen Sondheim called it wrong sometimes:

“At some point, Lin-Manuel started telling me about ‘‘Hamilton,’’ which, back then, was called ‘‘The Hamilton Mixtape.’’ He sent me lyrics printed out, and recordings of the songs. This raised obvious red flags: I worried that an evening of rap might get monotonous; I thought the rhythm might become relentless.” (New York Times, 2015)

Turns out, no. But then, that’s the sadness—and joy—of trailblazers. No matter how great you are, there will always come a time when the next generation takes over, because they can see, and do, things that you can’t. Sondheim’s greatest achievement is that (I would guess) every single one of the next generation’s trailblazers would cite him as an influence. A hell of a legacy.

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Quick Links

1. It still blows my mind that There’s Something About Miriam got made. A new podcast produced by friend of the Bluestocking Willard Foxton tells the story of a reality television horrorshow. (For background to the series—which apparently started out with good intentions to explore changing ideas of sexuality—here’s Sarah Ditum in the Telegraph: “While the men were shamed and the programme makers poleaxed, [Miriam] was the one who came out with her dignity mostly intact.”.)

2. “Covid is not, to these people, a simple public health emergency but some sort of divine test of our character, and what is weighed in that test is not our actions or their outcomes, but our neuroses, our noble anxiety, our sacred attachment to feeling bad and wanting to go on feeling bad.” The pandemic has been a good reminder of why pluralistic political culture is a good in itself. I want there to be some people who are overly cautious about precautions, and some people who are overly relaxed, and I want the dialogue between those two groups to help achieve a sensible middle position. (Freddie de Boer, Substack.)

3. The second episode of The Princes and the Press makes a convincing case that both Harry and William are savvy manipulators of the media.

4. I genuinely couldn’t guess where this was going, which made it all the funnier. (Twitter)

5. “It has been so hard to decide to say these things, but I have to stand up for my 19-year-old self. I didn’t abort the pregnancy I didn’t plan, but I did have to abort the life I imagined for myself.” (New York Times)

Thank you for the many nice books I received last week (and the even-nicer notes)! They really made my day.

1. The difference between opera and musicals is explained in Terry Pratchett’s Maskerade, a pastiche of Phantom of the Opera. With opera, you put money in and get music out. With musicals, you put music in and get money out.

2. I feel like Bluestockingers are nerdy enough that one of you might have read this. If so, please report back. Orwell picked it as one of his “good bad books.”