Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

Night Music (1973). From this trilogy Company has been most frequently singled out for its historic and artistic significance as a pioneering exponent of the so-called concept musical. Not atypical is the assessment by Thomas P. Adler in the Journal of Popular Culture that Company was “every bit as much a landmark musical as Oklahoma!”3 Eugene K. Bristow and J. Kevin Butler conclude their essay on Company in American Music with a similar epiphany: “As Oklahoma! was the landmark, model, and inspiration for almost all musicals during the three decades that followed its opening, Company became the vantage point, prototype, and stimulus for new directions in musical theater of the seventies and eighties.”4

By 1973 Sondheim, now forty-three, had composed the lyrics to two of the most critically acclaimed shows of Broadway’s Golden Age and music and lyrics for another five shows, including a trilogy that inaugurated a new age. Over the next twenty years Sondheim’s next seven shows (three with director Prince, three with librettist-director James Lapine, and one with director Jerry Zaks) would provide Broadway with some of the most compelling, innovative, thought-provoking, and often emotionally affecting musicals of their, or any, time. Sondheim, although arguably a central figure in these collaborations, was not entirely responsible for all the remarkable qualities audiences and critics appreciate in these shows. In fact, the only show he initiated himself was Sweeney Todd.

Sondheim’s shows have lacked in immediately popular appeal, but they are everywhere lavished with deep and lasting critical praise. In the long run, most of his works have acquired a consequential audience of lovers and aesthetes, year after year. The relatively short initial runs of even his most successful shows as composer-lyricist or their revivals therefore do not accurately reflect the influence and popularity of his work within the musical theater community. Here are the first performance runs of the twelve shows between 1962 and 1994 for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics, in numerical rather than chronological order:

Forum (1962)

964

Into the Woods (1987)

764

Company (1970)

706

Sunday in the Park with George (1984)

604

A Little Night Music (1973)

601

Sweeney Todd (1979)

558

Follies (1971)

522

Passion (1994)

280

Pacific Overtures (1976)

193

Assassins (Off-Off Broadway) (1991)

72

Merrily We Roll Along (1981)

16

Anyone Can Whistle (1964)

9

Obviously, Sondheim’s towering reputation must be based on other factors, including critical esteem and widely available excellent audio and video recordings. Despite these relatively modest, and sometimes even less than modest runs, with the exception of Passion and the two-month workshop of Bounce (formerly Gold and Wise Guys) in 1999 and its brief return for a two-month New York Off-Broadway engagement in 2008 as Road Show, every Sondheim show has also received a major New York revival of some sort—Broadway, Off-Broadway, Staged Reading, New York City Opera—and innumerable productions in regional and community theaters, colleges, and high schools throughout the United States, and in opera houses throughout the world. After a popular Forum revival in 1996 (715 performances) starring Nathan Lane, then Whoopi Goldberg as the slave Pseudolus, the short twenty-first century has already witnessed a Sondheim Broadway revival nearly every year: Follies (2001), Into the Woods (2002), Assassins (2004), Sweeney Todd (2005), Company (2006), and Sunday in the Park with George (2008), and as a lyricist Gypsy (2003 and 2008) and West Side Story (2009). Sondheim’s work, while lacking in initial popularity, appears to be gaining longevity and ubiquity.

What Sondheim Learned from Hammerstein

Sondheim, a native New Yorker whose father could play harmonized show tunes by ear after hearing them once or twice, was the beneficiary of a precocious, suitably specialized musical education. While still a teenager and shortly after the premiere of Carousel, Sondheim had the opportunity to be critiqued at length by the legendary Hammerstein, who, by a fortuitous coincidence that would be the envy of Show Boat’s second act, happened to be a neighbor and the father of Sondheim’s friend and contemporary, James Hammerstein. Sondheim’s unique apprenticeship with the first of his three great mentors, Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, one of the giants of the Broadway musical from the 1920s until long after his death in 1960 (see the chapters on Show Boat and Carousel), might serve as a Hegelian metaphor for Sondheim’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of modernism and traditionalism, high-brow and low-brow. His great aesthetic achievements have been as a loyal revolutionary (not unlike Beethoven) who thoroughly engaged with—rather than rejected—Broadway’s richest traditions. Before his collaborations with three major composers in this tradition as well as Robbins and Laurents and Merman, Sondheim was able to learn invaluable lessons about the craft of Broadway from one of its greatest pioneers. Sondheim never forgot Hammerstein’s priceless lessons in how to write and how not to write a musical. To help his student develop his craft and discover his own voice, Hammerstein suggested that Sondheim write four kinds of musicals to develop his craft.5 For the next six years Sondheim would attempt to follow this advice.

Some of what Sondheim learned about lyric writing and dramatic structure from the master soon became available to musical theater aficionados when Hammerstein published a seminal essay on the subject in 1949.6 One central premise stated early in the essay is Hammerstein’s conviction that “a song is a wedding of two crafts.”7 Later, Hammerstein articulates the importance of “very close collaboration during the planning of a song and the story that contains the song” and espouses the view that “the musician is just as much an author as the man who writes the words.”8 The resulting marriage of music and words, the welding of two crafts and talents “into a single expression” is for Hammerstein “the great secret of the well-integrated musical play.”9 Unlike Hammerstein, Sondheim would assume two mantles, author and musician—although, unlike his mentor, Sondheim did not write the librettos for any of his Broadway shows.

Throughout the course of his essay Hammerstein explores a number of issues and ideas about theatrical songwriting that did not go unnoticed by his student and neighbor. For example, Hammerstein advocates what we might call a non-operatic approach to the musical that maintains clear and