{"id":46840,"date":"2021-04-10T14:54:27","date_gmt":"2021-04-10T19:54:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=46840"},"modified":"2021-04-18T20:30:32","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T01:30:32","slug":"merrily-he-rolls-along-a-belated-birthday-tribute-to-stephen-sondheim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2021\/04\/10\/merrily-he-rolls-along-a-belated-birthday-tribute-to-stephen-sondheim\/","title":{"rendered":"Merrily he rolls along: A belated birthday tribute to Stephen Sondheim"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street<\/strong> (Tim Burton, 2007).<\/em><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

Last month Stephen Sondheim celebrated his ninety-first birthday. By coincidence, I just finished a section on him in my current book on popular storytelling.<\/p>\n

The argument there is that art at all levels, high and low, mass and elite, depends on novelty. That demanded accelerated in the twentieth century, with the explosion of book publishing, magazines, film, radio, theatre, and television. I see this process as a vast energy of crossover. Popular and “middlebrow” storytelling picked up on avant-garde innovations. But it seems to me that modernism, even the High Modernism of Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner borrow more than is usually noted from conventions of popular storytelling. I hazard the view that it’s enlightening to look at how experimentation, innovations that open new avenues of artistic expression, emerge in mass-audience art.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, most intellectuals have found something to love in mass culture. (“We are all nerds now.”<\/a>) It wasn’t always so. In England and America, the “battle of the brows” had as one consequence the idea that true art, usually typified by High Modernism or the more radical avant-garde, was being squeezed. On one side was mass culture, manufactured as a commodity designed to sooth the masses. On the other was “middlebrow” art, which mimicked the techniques of modernism but made them simple enough for suburbanites to follow. By the 1960s, the people who believed in this trinity were in the minority, partly because they began to realize that centering on the most difficult side of modernism created too austere a prototype of all ambitious art. Irving Howe called this “The Decline of the New.”<\/p>\n

Not that everything is a mashup. But I think now we all realize that crossover is a valid expressive option, probably the most pervasive one. The mass media make room for a huge amount of creativity that can’t simply be dismissed as lowbrow or middlebrow. And one reason it can’t is because we can still be excited by unexpected innovations.<\/p>\n

Hence the importance of the nearly seventy-year career of a man who confessed a “taste for experiment in the commercial theatre.”<\/p>\n

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Experiments that are fun<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein.<\/em><\/p>\n

You couldn’t, I think, find a better case for the prospects for experiment in popular culture than his work. His fondness for stage games is part of a theatre tradition we might call \u201clight modernism,” a merging of avant-garde strategies with traditions of popular entertainment. It stretches back to Cocteau’s Parade<\/em> (1917) and includes the work of Pirandello. Similarly, a trend in British theatre fused aspects of modern theatre (Pinter, Beckett, Ionesco) with the comedy of P. G. Wodehouse and The Goon Show<\/em>. Tom Stoppard\u2019s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead <\/em>(1966) showed that what was \u201coffstage\u201d in one story could constitute the amusingly doom-laden plot of another.<\/p>\n

Alan Ayckbourn dedicated his career to formal experimentation with space (three bedrooms as one in Bedroom Farce<\/em>, 1975) and time (simultaneous action in How the Other Half Loves<\/em>, 1969). Intimate Exchanges<\/em> (1983) spreads forking-path plots across eight separate plays and sixteen possible endings. (Two of the variants are on display in Resnais’ films Smoking\/ No Smoking<\/em>\u00a0of 1993.)\u00a0House and Garden<\/em> (1999) consists of two plays performed simultaneously in two auditoriums, with actors dashing between them. Ayckbourn\u2019s most famous cycle, The Norman Conquests<\/em> <\/a>(1973) displays a “stacked” structure; each play gathers all the action taking place in one location and skips over scenes elsewhere, which are assembled in the other plays. The audience must construct the overall story, remembering what has happened just before the scene we see now.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Michael Frayn\u2019s virtuoso Noises Off<\/em> (1982) probably owes something to Stoppard and Ayckbourn, but it offers its own switcheroo. The opening scene of a sex farce is rehearsed in our first act, is performed skillfully in our second, and collapses in our third view. Crucially, the smooth show of the second act is presented to us in a backstage view displaying the intricate timing involved. Again, an abstract formal concept is mapped onto a conventional scenario, the comedy of a bungled stage production.<\/p>\n

Mystery plots make useful targets for this sort of popular experiment. Ayckbourn plotted some plays as quasi-thrillers, and Stoppard\u2019s The Real Inspector Hound<\/em> (1968) is a parody of the country-house murder. Stoppard undercuts the mystery \u00a0by a Pirandellian device: two critics down in front are commenting as the performance unfolds. This gives Stoppard a chance to mock pretentious reviewing language. The standard whodunit device of reenacting the murder transforms into a replay of the opening act, but now with the critics taking the roles of detective and victim.<\/p>\n

Also not surprisingly, both Ayckbourn and Stoppard declared themselves influenced by cinema, a reliable marker of crossover in modern media. Ayckbourn plays were adapted, with ingratiating wit, to film, while Stoppard wrote several scripts, most famously Shakespeare in Love<\/em> (1998), which if the term means anything must count as defiantly middlebrow entertainment.<\/p>\n

Sondheim is on the same frequency as these masters, but has, I think, greater bandwidth. He plunged into cinephilia more deeply. His early musical influences were Hollywood scores, notably that for Hangover Square<\/em> (1945); Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street<\/em> (1979) was his tribute to Bernard Herrmann.\u00a0A Little Night Music\u00a0<\/em>(1973) and Passion<\/em> (1994) were adapted from films. Many of his songs refer to movies, and he composed music for Stavisky<\/em> (1974), Dick Tracy<\/em> (1990), and other projects. He was even a clapper boy for John Huston on Beat the Devil\u00a0<\/em>(1953).<\/p>\n

Instead of parodying mysteries, he has been deeply committed to them. Detective fiction is his favorite reading, and as a puzzle addict he has spent hours devising murder games. \u201cI have always taken murder mysteries rather seriously.\u201d Both Compan<\/em>y (1970) and Follies <\/em>(1971) were initially planned as mysteries, with the latter concerned not with \u201cwhodunit?\u201d but \u201cwho\u2019ll do it?”\u00a0Sweeney Todd<\/em> is a paradigmatic revenge thriller. Asked by Herbert Ross to write a film, Sondheim and Anthony Perkins (another admirer of \u201cthe trick kind\u201d of mystery practiced by John Dickson Carr) came up with The Last of Sheila<\/em> (1973).With George Furth, Sondheim wrote a play, Getting Away with Murder<\/em> (1996), and with Perkins he planned the unproduced Chorus Girl Murder Case<\/em>, an homage to 1940s Bob Hope movies. The clues would be hidden in the songs.<\/p>\n

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Fiddling with formula<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Sondheim and producer\/director Hal Prince (left) during rehearsals for Merrily We Roll Along<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sondheim\u2019s zest for film and mystery fiction reflects a deep admiration for popular culture. It\u2019s one thing to enjoy it, as Ayckbourn and Stoppard clearly do, while also poking fun at its silly side. It\u2019s something else to appreciate its artistry in depth and try to master the conventions yourself. Despite learning \u201ctautness\u201d from the austere avant-gardist Milton Babbitt, Sondheim took as his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II.\u00a0Tin Pan Alley, with its finger-snap rhythms and suave wordplay, pushed him toward a brisk cleverness. The virtuoso rhymes in his bouncy \u201cComedy Tonight\u201d (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum<\/em>, 1962) inevitably bring a grin: Panderers! Philanderers! Cupidity! Timidity! . . . Tumblers, grumblers, bumblers, fumblers! <\/em><\/p>\n

While executing these pirouettes, the song provides <\/em>a Cliffs Notes guide to Roman New Comedy by contrasting it with tragedy. Tonight, weighty affairs will just have to wait. Sondheim similarly lays bare a convention in his script for the unproduced movie Singing Out Loud<\/em>, where the couple gradually learn that it\u2019s okay to express emotion in song. \u201cThey have to learn to overcome the unreality of it and break into song in the conventional manner of all musicals.\u201d<\/p>\n

By taking fun seriously, Sondheim ransacks culture high and low for occasions for experimentation. He was crucially influenced by Allegro<\/em> (1947), an ambitious Rodgers and Hammerstein musical he considered \u201cstartlingly experimental in form and style.” Its use of sliding screens to create “cinematic staging” would become standard in later musicals. He calls Hammerstein \u201cthe great experimenter\u201d who used the verse sections of songs to explore possibilities of structure, melody, and harmony.<\/p>\n

Sondhim’s breakthrough experiment was Company<\/em> (1970). It consists of flashbacks framed by the protagonist Robert\u2019s thirty-fifth birthday party. Sondheim claimed it offered \u201ca story without a plot.\u201d\u00a0The flashbacks don\u2019t supply a goal-directed character arc and instead sample Robert\u2019s bachelor lifestyle and its effects on his three girlfriends and the five married couples in his circle. The result is a compare-and-contrast pattern of parallels.\u00a0\u00a0Complicating things further, bits of action are accompanied by a chorus-like commentary from characters not in the scene. Still, there is a certain progression to the whole, indicated by Robert\u2019s disillusioned but faintly hopeful final song, \u201cBeing Alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

The nonlinearity of Company<\/em> poimts up Sondheim\u2019s impulse to play with time, viewpoint, and other techniques. Assassins<\/em> (1990) moves freely back and forth across a hundred years.\u00a0In Follies<\/em> characters argue with their former selves. Sunday in the Park with George<\/em> (1984), built on parallels between two painters, assigns inner monologues to artist and model; characteristically, Sondheim expresses jumbled thoughts by avoiding rhymes. Another duplex structure (Before\/ After) shapes Into the Woods<\/em> (1987),\u00a0s a virtuoso braiding of classic folktales into a single plot.<\/p>\n

Several plays utilize a narrator, who may take a role or converse with the characters. The Narrator of\u00a0Into the Woods<\/em>\u00a0is killed fairly early in the action. Alternatively, Sondheim conceived\u00a0Passion\u00a0<\/em>as an epistolary musical. Characters writing or reading letters operate \u201csomewhere between aria and recitative,\u201d rendering the emotional climaxes as \u201cread rather than acted.\u201d In this excerpt, Giorgio goes to bed with Clara while Fosca is reading his letter breaking up with her. This is a concert performance; in a full production the couple undress on one side of the stage, while Fosca reads the letter. Time floats uncertainly<\/p>\n