In praise of Stephen Sondheim
Another Twitter thread (original here) transposed to Substack for posterity, and perhaps a slightly different audience. I wrote this when Stephen Sondheim died in November 2021: I was genuinely saddened by his death at the age of 91. I’m not generally a big fan of musicals, but many of his are at a different level from the norm. So I picked out some personal favourites from among his songs, which range across the messiness, sadness and joy of humanity (links are to Spotify; other streaming services are available).
I could have chosen almost anything from A Little Night Music, which I saw at the Leicester Haymarket theatre many years ago. ‘Now/Later/Soon’ is the opening song, and introduces three of the key characters and their situations - they each sing to themselves, referring to a different timescale; the juxtaposition is clever without being show-offy. ‘Every Day a Little Death’ is achingly beautiful and achingly sad: those little interventions from Anne - ‘So Do I’, ‘Oh How True’ - are simple yet devastating. Men, obviously, don’t come out of it well.
‘A Little Priest’, from Sweeney Todd, is outrageous and outrageously funny: if you want silly puns about what people in different occupations might taste like if you were to, ahem, eat them, you’ve come to the right place. In ‘Johanna’, Todd sings sweetly about his daughter to the gruesome accompaniment of his victims’ bodies being despatched, ready to be made into pies; it’s an extraordinary juxtaposition, and the song’s hooks creates an irresistible momentum.
Less gruesome is Into The Woods, which creates a wonderful richness of metaphor by cleverly combining plotlines from different fairy tales (I enjoyed the 2014 film with James Corden, though it didn’t get great reviews). In ‘Agony’, the two princes compete for who has the more difficult love situation; it’s at once ridiculous, funny and sad. ‘It Takes Two’ is a song about love and change, the Baker and his wife rediscovering each other. The orchestration is irresistible - it could be from a much older musical, but in context it’s more complex and ambiguous than a traditional love song.
Sondheim famously wrote the lyrics to West Side Story, for which Leonard Bernstein wrote the music (apparently Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book, liked Sondheim’s lyrics but did not think much of his music). The Spielberg movie had its premiere three days after Sondheim died. I think the lyrics are a key part of the success of what is probably my favourite musical, even though Sondheim himself sometimes criticised them. ‘Something’s Coming’ is all about possibility and hope, before things start going wrong. By the time we get to ‘Somewhere’, it has all gone wrong, and it’s devastatingly sad: ‘There’s a place for us’ the lovers sing, but there isn’t.
Finally, Merrily We Roll Along, which doesn’t have a great reputation but I really enjoyed the Donmar Warehouse production I saw over 20 years ago. ‘Old Friends’ is about friendship changing, and like many of the best Sondheim songs it combines good tunes and complex, relatable emotions. The conceit is that the action in MWRA goes backwards, so ‘Our Time’, a young song of hope and optimism, is at the end of the musical when we in the audience know how it would all go wrong. Complex, funny, sad, witty, ambiguous, beautifully crafted, irresistible, human: Sondheim. RIP.