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

In “Theater Lyrics” Sondheim encapsulates the craft of lyric writing from two seemingly straightforward but potentially profound central principles: (1) “Lyrics exist in time” and (2) “Lyrics go with music.” Both principles possess far-reaching artistic consequences for Sondheim’s future in musical theater and both take as a given the wedding of music and lyrics that Hammerstein emphasized in his essay a quarter of a century earlier. The lyric writer must take into account not only the fact that “music is a relentless engine and keeps lyrics going,” but that lyrics need to be “underwritten” and “simple in essence.” In addition, a lyric writer must learn the difficult lesson of the fundamental difference between serious poetry and lyric writing. Sondheim begins with his “favorite example,” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’ / Oh, what a beautiful day” from Oklahoma! (a lyric that seemed simplistic on paper but came to life when sung) to demonstrate this last point: “I would be ashamed to put it down on paper, it would look silly. What Hammerstein knew was that set to music it was going to have an enormous richness. It did, it’s a beautiful lyric—but not on paper.”21

Another great Hammerstein lesson was a variation on the theme of sincerity Hammerstein espoused in his published essay on lyrics: the importance of expressing your own lyric voice (to “Say what you feel, not what other song writers feel”). Sondheim’s view of the world was by no means the same as his mentor’s. Nevertheless, for the rest of his career Sondheim would live by Hammerstein’s example, which is eloquently captured in the advice Dot gives to her great-grandson in the song “Move On”: “Anything you do, / Let it come from you.” In addition to what he was able to impart about lyric writing and dramatic construction, Hammerstein played a major advisory role when he encouraged the aspiring composer-lyricist to accept seemingly less ambitious opportunities and agree to work exclusively as a lyricist with such talented and experienced composers as Bernstein, Styne, and Rodgers, a major star such as Merman, and a director-choreographer of Robbins’s talent and stature.

Other Lessons Learned

Burt Shevelove, who co-authored the book for Forum, and Arthur Laurents, the librettist for the other four Sondheim shows staged between 1957 and 1965, also gave Sondheim lessons that would last long after he moved on to other creative partnerships. From Shevelove, Sondheim learned “that clarity of language was as important as well as clarity of thought” and to “never sacrifice smoothness for cleverness.”22 In a remark that might be considered dismissive of such musicals as Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I Sondheim credits Laurents as someone who taught “playwriting principles about lyrics, much deeper and subtler than Oscar because Arthur writes deeper and subtler plays than Oscar.”23 This brings Sondheim to the major lesson he learned from Laurents, “the notion of sub-text”:

Now this is a word I had heard tossed around by Actors Studio types for a long time and really rather sneered at: but what it means simply is, give the actor something to act. I think this is a real secret; if I had to sell secrets about lyric writing I would sell this secret about sub-text. Watch how even some Broadway lyrics that you admire just sit there, with nothing for the actor to play. They just play the next logical step. A playwright when he writes a scene always gives some sub-text, or it’s a very shallow scene. Well, that happens with lyrics. They may be very good, but if they’re just on the surface, if there’s not pull, there’s a kind of deadness on the stage.24

Sondheim’s unstated parallel between subtext in a play and subtext in a song is a telling one. A few years before Sondheim’s tutorial as an adolescent, Hammerstein wrote that songs “must help tell our story and delineate characters, supplementing the dialogue and seeming to be, as much as possible, a continuation of dialogue”—in short, to exhibit the characteristics of a well-made play.25 Through a conscious use of subtext, Sondheim goes further when he takes the strengths of a well-made play and applies them to a well-made song. The result is a song that expands into its own miniature play.

Among the examples that Sondheim uses to illustrate subtext is “In Buddy’s Eyes” from Follies. In this poignant and touching song, Sally Plummer tells her former and inextinguishable flame, the seemingly self-confident but ultimately pathetic Benjamin Stone (described by Sondheim as “ripped to shreds internally”), about how her husband, the devoted but philandering Buddy, sees what Sally herself cannot see:

In Buddy’s eyes,

I’m young, I’m beautiful.

In Buddy’s arms,

On Buddy’s shoulder,

I won’t get older.

Nothing dies.

In contrast to a sophisticated and pyrotechnically verbal character such as the lawyer Fredrik Egerman in A Little Night Music, the emotionally transparent Sally sings deliberately, repeats words, and utters mostly simple one-syllable rhymes. Like her husband, Buddy, who is fated to love a woman who cannot return his love, Sally continues to carry the torch—and sing torch songs—for the unhappily married and emotionally unattainable Ben, who discarded her thirty years ago and will take advantage of her vulnerabilities at their reunion. Sondheim’s words have often been celebrated for intellect and intricacy. Here is a clear example of his own early preference for simplicity and emotional directness in lyrics and, as we will soon see, music as well.

In the central chorus of her song, Sondheim gives Sally an identical four-note melodic figure each of the six times she sings “in Buddy’s eyes” (the last up an octave) and the one time she sings “in Buddy’s arms.” The music sets the lyrics simply and syllabically (rather than melismatically, with more than one note per syllable). The figure turns on itself, down from and back to F via D and E, above a static harmony that reflects Sally’s sincere simplicity, Buddy’s stoic solidity, and perhaps also