Ninety-one, and a little slowed but not visibly ailing, Sondheim was greeted by the Broadway audience, as he took his seat, in the left orchestra, with an emotional intensity that was tidal in its ferocity and duration.
It was a truth of which he was ruefully aware, writing, in a song called, caustically, “God,” “Still you have to have something to believe in / Some things you appropriate / Emulate / Overrate / Might as well be Stephen.” A generation of musical-theatre artists were defined by their relationship to him—some to a point almost self-destructive, measuring themselves against the Druid of Turtle Bay in ways that he didn’t exactly welcome but couldn’t exactly prevent.
Yet his was a late-arriving legend, hard won from a resistant Broadway commercial culture; unlike Balanchine’s art form, Sondheim’s counted box-office, and labelled hits and flops irrevocably.
The lineaments of Sondheim’s ascent are part of musical-theatre legend: how he was rescued from a troubled childhood—his mother once wrote him a cheerily confidential letter saying that she regretted ever having given birth to him—by the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, a near neighbor in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who taught him the professional rudiments of musical-theatre construction and the human possibilities of a warmer heart.
Yet the revue was one of the great revelations of a lifetime—and not for the “sophistication” alone, the dazzling casual linguistic virtuosity, exemplified by throwaways, such as the bridge of “Uptown Downtown,” about a woman divided between her two identities: “She sits at the Ritz with her splits of Mumm’s / And starts to pine for a stein with her village chums, / But with a Schlitz in her mitts down at Fitzroy’s Bar, / She thinks of the Ritz, oh it’s so schizo.” No, even that virtuosity could not obscure the more important side of Sondheim, the depth and wonder and empathy of his articulate passions.
Actually I’m being kind.” He noted in an e-mail that another singer “was so off-pitch that in order to keep my cool in public I had to pretend to myself that I was at some peaceful blue Fiji lagoon, the sun setting and squads of flamingos gracefully flapping around.” In a world gone vanilla-bland, there was something bracing about his orneriness, and it was meaningfully varied by the care and attentiveness—hundreds of e-mails, countless notes, hard and soft—to performers he thought worthy of his work, or just worthy in their own.
John Lahr, for years the theatre critic of this magazine, was one of the few to offer heresy about the Church of Sondheim: “Sondheim spoke to the disenchantment of the times,” he wrote, “and his approach turned him not so much into a celebrity as a theology.” It is possible to worship Sondheim just shy of idolatry and not tip over.
If Sondheim was, perhaps, a throwback, or the last in the line of the Rodgerses and Frank Loessers, those songwriters who crossed all lines to make both art and entertainment into a kind of commanding middlebrow form, in other ways he was very much an artist of his own time.
And yet a kind of Devil’s Theory case may be made, that it was Sondheim who was the most personal, the most truly confessional, of all the great American songwriters.
Sometimes that song is called “Being Alive” or “Finishing the Hat,” sometimes “Anyone Can Whistle” or, even, his one hit—“Send in the Clowns.” All are songs of isolated artists of unlimited sensitivity and ambivalent purpose reaching out—too late, too often—for company, for connection, for love outside the window, while ruefully knowing that only the work of hats matters.
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