November 29, 2021 Update
Stephen Sondheim, A Life Well Well Lived
Unlike the many theater notables who knew him personally,
I never knew Stephen Sondheim. But I knew and loved
his groundbreaking contributions to the musical theater.
Thanks to his masterful Sweeney Todd and under-appreciated Passion
I became attuned to his brilliant mix of tonal and d
atonal chords. As a writer i was in awe of his
character-building, emoton-triggering, witty lyrics.
Since founding CurtainUp I've been fortunate
enough to see most of his shows, often freshly staged
and cast as proof of his being as timeless and
adaptable as Shakespeare's plays. To read them, just go
to the "Enhanced by Google" box and type in "Sondheim" and
you'll be able to read them.
For now, I'm re-posting my review of Meryle Secrest's excellent biography, Stephen Sondheim, a Life — but began it wit her refrain from Sunday In the Park With George which sums up Stephen Sondheim's wonderfully well lived life.
I want to move on.
I want to explore the light.
I want to know how to get through
One of the routines of my Berkshire summer is a Thursday drive to Williamstown,
alternating between openings at the Williamstown Theatre Festival's two stages in
the Adams Memorial Theatre building. The Adams Memorial Main Stage was the magnet
drawing sixteen-year-old Stephen Sondheim to enroll at Williams College. It was also the
venue for, Phinney's Rainbow, a collegiate spoof on the hit musical Finian's Rainbow, which
was given four performances in 1948.
A motto adorning the steps of one of the dorms inspired his first original musical Climb
High. Anyone reading Meryle Secrest's richly detailed biography will also find that, while
there were plenty of stops and starts along the way, these words could also serve as a motto of
Sondheim's career:
Climb high
Climb far
Your goal the sky
Your aim the star
Secrest while not a musical expert, is an expert biographer. Since a biographer is very
much a puzzle solver, it's easy to understand her interest in a man with a well-known
fascination for puzzles. Her previous subjects include people of diverse artistic
background, only one of whom, Leonard Bernstein, was a musician. It was in fact while
trying to get a handle on Bernstein's creative lapse, that she first sought out Sondheim.
(He told her Bernstein had a bad case of "Important-itis").
As she did in the Bernstein book, Secrest again skillfully traces the
evolution of
Sondheim's work by carefully chronicling the personal influences that
shaped his artistic
development. Her interviews with the composer-lyricist are woven
through with comments culled
from interviews with friends, relatives and colleagues as well as
secondary sources. In addition, there are a fair amount of
biographer-as-analyst observations.
It
would have been nice to have more details about her methodology, especially about the
dates and circumstances pertaining to her meetings with Sondheim. Instead, she guards
the steps taken to piece together the puzzle of what makes her subject tick, as much as
Sondheim for all his cooperation seems to have controlled what he wanted in print. In
spite of this, Stephen Sondheim: A Life succeeds admirably
in drawing a well-rounded and richly embroidered psychological and
professional portrait. The emotional
deprived silver-spoon childhood -- a mother aptly called Foxy and a
father who
abandoned the family for another woman -- are not just thrown in for
the sake of a tell-all
expose flavor, but to show how artists generally and this artist in
particular reprocess such
painful experiences. This savvy integration of the personal
story , Broadway
insider anecdotes and the process of writing lyrics and composing
makes for a
book that should please musical theater buffs as well as the
general readers who make
biographies one of the best-selling categories of the book business.
The personal history isn't all Mommy Dearest and Daddy-Out-to-Lunch. Sondheim
was lucky in many of his friendships and family connections --
knight in shining armor in the latter department being Oscar Hammerstein 2nd whose Bucks
County retreat provided the young Sondheim with a nurturing home away from his mother's
unnourishing nest nearby. This surrogate father also became Sondheim's musical mentor and
the four-part program he prescribed for his protege as lessons in the art of writing musicals is
one any young aspirant might do well to follow:
First take a play that you like and musicalize it. Then take a play that you like but that you feel
has flaws and try to improve them, and musicalize it. Then take something that is not a
play but that somebody else has written, a novel or a short story, so that you don't have to invent
the characters or plot, and musicalize that and make it into a play. And then finally, write an
original, your own story, and dramatize that.
Sondheim began on Hammerstein's lesson plan during his junior year at Williams, starting with Beggar on
Horseback. Part four was the already mentioned Climbing High. Hammerstein saw much to like in this but was
disturbed that Sondheim took so much trouble with a character he didn't like. One of his written
notes in the margin of the script was "Don't bristle."
Ms. Secrest does not dwell unnecessarily on the darkness of her subject's childhood.. Instead she
moves through the stages of his life and work at a crisp enough pace to take us through his
stints as actor and TV scriptwriter and the genesis of his whole oeuvre of successful and not so
successful musicals. (An appendix with a chronological list, main original cast members and
performance dates would have enhanced the book's reference value).
Having reviewed a
revival of A Little Night Music
just a few weeks before starting this book, the
chapter on this collaboration with Harold Prince and Arthur Laurents
(one of several) was particularly
enlightening and enjoyable: The way Hermione Gingold fought for the
role of Madame
Armfeldt, Prince's stated vision for an effect that would be "whipped
cream with
knives", the reason for the lyrical construction of the big
hit song "Send In the Clowns" and the stage disaster that sent all
the china crashing and destroyed two costly antique candelabras.
While perhaps not as explicit as some tell-all biographies, Ms.
Secrest does not skim over
Sondheim's homosexuality. In fact, with many memorable
photographs generously
sprinkled throughout the text, the only thing missing in these 466
pages (including a 15-page index) is a CD with a little Sondheim
music --
especially the refrain from Sunday In the Park With George which she uses to sum up
her story and Stephen Sondheim's continuing saga:
I want to move on.
I want to explore the light.
I want to know how to get through
Through to something new . . .
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