Primer is The A.V. Club's ongoing
series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects: filmmakers,
music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and
hopefully you.
There's a
good chance that Tim Burton's movie version of Stephen Sondheim's Tony-winning
1979 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street will be the first prolonged
exposure to Sondheim for a lot of otherwise-knowledgeable pop fans. Although
Sondheim has been a—if not the—leading light in American musical theater for almost
four decades now, his work is so tied to the stage that audiences have had to
make a special effort to see and hear it. And people who make that effort often
find that the complex structures and broad theatricality of Sondheim's songs
take some getting used to. Even Burton's film streamlines Sondheim, making Sweeney more pop and less operatic, while
retaining the essence of the show's witty social studies.
Still,
those who like what they hear in Sweeney Todd shouldn't fret too much over
whether they're enjoying a bastardized version—especially since Sondheim
himself oversaw the cutting, and approved the thinner voices of Johnny Depp and
Helena Bonham Carter. Instead, fans of the movie should take advantage of that
access-way to step more fully into the deeply rewarding, amply supplied world
of Sondheim. The following Primer offers some suggestions for how to proceed,
from the easiest-to-grasp Sondheim scores to those that require a little more effort.
(A note on
the audio and video clips: Context is everything, and the samples below may
appear over-earnest or silly when divorced from the dialogue and music that
surrounds them. Consider them merely illustrative, and not fully representative
of the shows in question.)
Sondheim 101
Sondheim's
work isn't expressly autobiographical, but certain elements of his life story
and personal obsessions definitely inform his songs. For example, it may not be
important to know that Sondheim was born into a family of upper-class New York
City dressmakers, but the fact that his father left his mother when Sondheim
was 10, and that he was subsequently raised by his egocentric, domineering
mother, may help explain the tentative paternal figures and outsized, shrewish
maternal figures in Sondheim shows. Even more important to know: that
Sondheim's parents allowed him to spend his days at the movies and the theater,
where he soaked up the popular culture of the early 20th century.
Then at age
10, Sondheim met Jimmy Hammerstein, son of legendary Broadway lyricist Oscar
Hammerstein, which gave Sondheim an opportunity to pick the master's brain.
After graduating college in 1950, Sondheim dedicated himself to honing his
songwriting skills and pitching his work around Los Angeles and New York. His
gift for wordplay earned him some jobs penning TV scripts for the sitcom Topper, and it caught the attention of
Broadway producers on the lookout for good lyricists. Sondheim finally broke
through when he was asked to write the lyrics for 1957's West Side Story, and then for 1959's Gypsy—both of which were hailed by
critics for their slangy flavor.
While
Broadway's old guard would've been happy to keep Sondheim writing their
words—the charge "he can't write melodies" plagued Sondheim early and
often—he finally got a chance to add music with 1962's A Funny
Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, a gay romp through ancient Rome that matches a broad farce by
book-writers Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart with punny, bawdy
songs like "Comedy Tonight" and "Everybody Ought To Have A Maid." A staple of
student productions almost from the moment it opened on Broadway, Forum can either be a delightful night
out at the theater or an intolerably hammy mess, depending on the players and
the pace. But either way, it really has to be seen to be "gotten," because
while the songs are terrific, they're composed with a roaring audience in mind.
(Just listen to "That'll Show Him," from the original production's cast album;
without the context of the story or the reactions of the jilted lover that this
concubine is singing to, the humor comes out overly dry.)
Despite the
massive successes of Gypsy, West Side Story, and Forum—or perhaps because of the failure/obscurity of early-'60s productions like Anyone Can Whistle and Evening Primrose—Sondheim was still considered
something of a utility player by the time he, producer-director Harold Prince,
and playwright George Furth brought Company to Broadway in 1970. Early
reviewers were baffled by the musical's unusual subject matter and structure.
The show takes place at the birthday party for the unattached friend of a group
of New York couples, and flashes back to his problematic
relationships—both with women and with his pals—while the songs
describe the characters' inner lives more than they propel the plot. Where critics
were cautious, audiences responded deeply to Furth's comic portrayal of
restless Manhattanites, and especially to Sondheim's songs, which ranged from
vaudeville romps to modern pop, all laced with direct, sometimes painfully open
sentiment. Whether he's describing the necessary pains of romance in "Being
Alive" or mocking the quirks of modern marriage in "The Little Things You Do
Together" (as seen below during the recording of the original cast album),
Sondheim channeled a lot of the angst in the air at the dawn of the '70s into a
set of songs at once broadly theatrical and true.
Following
the ambitious, near-glorious failure of 1971's Follies—more on that
later—Sondheim and Prince rebounded with 1973's A Little Night
Music, a loose
adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's Smiles Of A Summer Night that follows the romantic travails
of three couples during a weekend in the country. Lightly lyrical and set
almost entirely in waltz-time, A Little Night Music picks up on Company's sometimes cruelly frank
exploration of adult relationships and ties it more specifically to sex: who's
avoiding it, who's overindulging in it, and who's waiting impatiently. Sondheim
enjoyed the closest thing he's ever had to a pop hit with the show's "Send In
The Clowns"—recorded by folksinger Judy Collins in a version somewhat
divested of the song's original meaning—and A Little Night Music has been a staple of regional
theater ever since. But while it's smart and funny and abundantly tuneful, the
show also has an acid tinge that gives nearly every production a bitter
aftertaste, reflected in the premonition of disappointment in its rousing
anthem, "The Miller's Son" (seen below from a 1990 production that aired on PBS
but has not been made available on DVD; this song is among many missing from
the turgid 1978 film adaptation, which sacrifices roughly half the score and
nearly all the wit.)
Following A
Little Night Music,
Sondheim spent the better part of a decade indulging his more experimental
side, sometimes with great success (Sweeney Todd, Sunday In The Park With George) and sometimes less so (Pacific
Overtures, Merrily
We Roll Along). But
he struck gold in 1987 when he and Sunday book-writer James Lapine re-teamed for Into
The Woods, an
alternately farcical and penetrating examination of the psychological
underpinnings of classic fairy tales. The show's first act may be the most
purely fun hour of theater Sondheim has ever been involved with, as it sends
Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and a childless couple on a set of
intertwined quests that end ridiculously but happily. Then the second act
starts, and the characters still feel faintly dissatisfied—at first in
amusing ways, and later not so much. In some ways, Into The Woods treads into territory Sondheim
hadn't covered since Forum, with its recontextualizing of well-known archetypes and
its broadly comic lyrics. But from the domineering maternal witch that drives
the action to the climactic sense of isolation and fear, the show is
quintessentially Sondheim. It may be the best place for novices to start, in
that it's readily accessible yet also smart and moving.
(In the
clip below, approximating the original Broadway production, Little Red Riding
Hood grows up a little, and not without a bit of pain.)
Intermediate Work
Around the
time that Sondheim was prepping Company, he began contributing a regular word-puzzle feature
to New York
magazine, which is a biographical tidbit as important in its way as the
anecdotes about him hanging around the Hammerstein family. Sondheim is a
notorious puzzle-freak who loves word games and murder mysteries, and while
that playful side is obviously evident in his lyrics, it also informs his music
in ways not so obvious. Sondheim's dominant compositional mode is one of
pastiche, wherein he sets out to write a show's key songs in a rigid or
imitative style: like the waltzes in A Little Night Music, or the music-hall ribaldry of Forum. As his career has gone on, though,
Sondheim has increasingly broken those songs into pieces, before stringing the
fragments throughout the rest of the score. As he writes in Sunday In The
Park With George,
"The art of making art is putting it together," and Sondheim prefers to make
the puzzle as tough as he can for himself.
After the
success of Company,
Sondheim re-teamed with Harold Prince on the 1971 musical Follies, which follows a similarly loose
structure but is far more ambitious. Set during a reunion of a group of old
vaudeville performers, the musical considers their decades of disappointment,
both in show business and in their personal lives. It's a downer show, steeped
in the ironic contrast between its peppy old-timey music and the often
scaldingly sarcastic lyrics. Follies can be a hard piece to enter, in large part because its
emotions are more abstract and conceptualized than the direct appeal of Company. Its original staging was also
incredibly expensive, with multiple costume and set changes, such that even
though the show was reasonably well-received by critics and audiences—and
Tony voters, who made it Sondheim's second consecutive Best
Original Score-winner—it closed early, doomed by cost overruns. Follies rarely gets mounted in full today,
and instead thrives in "concert" versions, where performers simply sing the
songs and skip the story. The show contains some of Sondheim's most enduring
songs, too, and none better than "I'm Still Here," a pithy, subtly desperate
testament to showbiz endurance that many a grand dame of American and British
theater has belted out, both in and out of the context of the show. (Below,
Shirley MacLaine simultaneously impresses and embarrasses daughter Meryl Streep
with an "impromptu" rendition at a dinner party in Postcards From The Edge.)
Shortly
after Follies,
Sondheim rebounded commercially with A Little Night Music, then had another costly flop with
the conceptually bold Pacific Overtures. (More on the latter below.) When he got back
together with Night Music's book-writer Hugh Wheeler for a musical adaptation of
Christopher Bond's 1973 play about murderous barber Sweeney Todd—a
popular figure in 19th-century "penny dreadful" pamphlets—the
idea looked like another disaster-in-the-making. Instead, when Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street opened in 1979, it captured the public imagination
and became one of the rare Sondheim hits. Never underestimate the masses' taste
for viscera, which Sweeney Todd provides via a story that has a vengeance-minded ex-con
slitting the throats of upper-class Brits and then giving their corpses over to
his landlady to be baked into meat pies. But while Sweeney Todd contains some of Sondheim's
loveliest songs ("By The Sea," "Pretty Women," "Johanna") and some of his
funniest ("A Little Priest," "The Worst Pies In London"), it's also a
challenging work. Musically, it approaches operetta, with many of the exchanges
between characters sung instead of said, and the show's various musical themes
weave in and out of the score so freely that a lot of the songs have no clear
beginning or end. And in spite of moving numbers like "Not While
I'm Around" (sung by the pie-maker before she attempts to murder the child she
loves), Sweeney Todd engages the intellect more than the emotions, as it comments on the
varying modes of exploitation in a class-based society. (The clip below is from
a concert performance of Sweeney, and features the quartet "Kiss Me"/"Ladies In Their
Sensitivities," which didn't fully survive in Burton's movie.)
After Sweeney, Sondheim suffered the failure of Merrily
We Roll Along—the
first of his productions in more than a decade that was as much a creative misstep
as a commercial one—and thus decided to pursue alternative methods of
developing shows, outside the Broadway system. Working for the first time with
book-writer James Lapine, Sondheim built Sunday In The Park With George, a musical about pointillist
painter Georges Seurat, in public workshops that allowed the collaborators to
hone the piece performance by performance. The finished musical is as complex
and intellectually engaging as Sweeney Todd, but it's also a deeply personal
show, expressing Sondheim's doubts and worries about the process of creation,
as well as how it feels to stand in the shadow of masters. Musically, Sunday follows the lead of its subject,
poking short melodic passages into groups, so that the cumulative effect of the
score becomes greater than its individual pieces. In the era of blockbuster
musicals like Cats
and Les Miz, Sunday
In The Park With George didn't connect with a huge audience (or even with Tony voters), but it
won a Pulitzer prize, and a devoted cult who responded deeply to Sondheim's
sincerity. During productions of Sunday, it's not unusual to see audience members sob their
way through the final half-hour or so, right up to the transcendent moment at
the end when the artist faces another blank page and whispers, "So many
possibilities." (In the clip below, Broadway's original "George," Mandy
Patinkin, sings "Finishing The Hat," a song that articulates the awkward
feeling of trying to preserve moments in time in art, while even more moments
are passing by. The end result of all the fuss and sacrifice? "Look, I made a
hat, where there never was a hat.")
After
re-teaming with Lapine for Into The Woods, Sondheim worked on easily his most controversial
show, Assassins, a sour study of the American dream, as represented by all the men and
women who've plotted to kill American presidents. Dismissed as shrill and in
poor taste during its 1990 off-Broadway run, Assassins has proved popular in regional
theater—especially at colleges—and had a triumphant 2004 Broadway
revival. Both Sondheim's score and John Weidman's book are fairly blunt in
their explication of how the can-do American spirit leads to lone gunmen
feeling that "everybody's got the right" to do what they want, up to and
including murdering their leaders. And for everyone who complained that
Sondheim stopped writing memorable melodies in 1973, Sondheim responded with
arguably his catchiest and most eclectic set of songs, concocting a study of
American pop spanning two centuries. The music weaves into the theme, most
notably in "The Ballad Of Czolgosz," a rousing anthem of optimism that features
the lyric, "You've been given the freedom to work your way to the head of the
line." (In this case, to shoot William McKinley.)
Advanced Studies
One knock
against Sondheim's career is that his influence on musical theater has been
either non-existent or pernicious. (Oddly enough, the best example of Sondheim
influence on popular culture may be Alan Menken and Howard Ashman's score for
Disney's Beauty And The Beast.) Performers love to sing his songs—"So-and-so sings
Sondheim" remains a popular cabaret attraction—but the composers who've
emerged in his wake have lacked his skill at deconstruction and reconstruction.
The decades since Company have seen a lot of overtly complicated shows in which the
songs are either straight, shallow pop (without Sondheim's wit or
transcendence), or just tuneless prattle. And frankly, Sondheim at his most
"difficult" can himself sound a lot like the latter.
Because
Sondheim likes to approach some shows like puzzles to be solved, he's been known
to construct music that satisfies the parameters he sets out for himself,
without necessarily satisfying audiences. Such was the case with Pacific
Overtures, the
brilliant but initially off-putting musical Sondheim wrote with his future Assassins librettist John
Weidman in 1976. Tracing the mid-19th-century policy shifts in Japan
from isolationism to westernization to empire-building, Pacific Overtures utilizes Japanese scales and
tonalities in combination with Western theatricality, in a fusion that to many
ears sounds dissonant and amelodic. But Pacific Overtures rewards return visits, and has been
revived over the years to a warmer reception that it originally received.
(Those revivals include a mounting in Japan in which the locals were quite
taken with Sondheim and Weidman's distinctly Western interpretation of their
national psychology.) The show is frequently puckish in its imagining of how
the Japanese received and interpreted their first western visitors, but it
retains the poignancy that attends the loss of a culture—particularly in
the achingly beautiful song "A Bowler Hat," in which a former samurai moves
over the years from cautious admiration of European ways to thorough
dissatisfaction with his life, in the face of Western possibility. (In the clip
below, the song "Someone In A Tree" relates the first meeting between
emissaries from the west and Japanese diplomats, as told from the memories of
an old man, the perspective of his younger self, and the ears of a samurai
hiding beneath the treaty house. Sondheim has at various times called this his
favorite song, and it certainly fits alongside the whole of Sunday In The
Park With George as
a moving meditation on how history doesn't happen unless someone records it.
It's also one of many Sondheim songs in which the pieces come together at the
end to form a greater whole.)
After
triumphing with Sunday and Into The Woods, Sondheim took a few lumps on their third collaboration,
the delirious 1994 romantic tragedy Passion. Working harder than ever defy
musical theater convention, Sondheim composed a score with very few
"buttons"—summary moments where the audience is expected to
applaud—and indeed dispensed with verses, choruses and hooks altogether,
in favor of songs that range freely. Based on an Italian film (and novel) about
a sickly woman who attaches herself to a visiting soldier, Passion questions whether love is an
emotional response or an intellectual one—or even something purely chemical.
But while the show plays beautifully in the imagination, on stage in its
original run, it was a little too on-the-nose for some audiences. In
particular, Donna Murphy's performance—as a gawky woman who reads too
much into a kindly man's attempts to comfort her—treads a line between
powerfully tragic and laughably monstrous. On an off night, she could come off
like a mopey mole, popping up at the most inopportune times. But Passion has its fervent supporters, and the
version of the show with Murphy that's been preserved on DVD makes the
strongest case for Passion as an underappreciated gem. The disc even contains a
commentary track in which Sondheim, Lapine and Murphy go over what went wrong
and what went right with Passion—a hidden master class, available for 20 bucks. (The
clip below isn't from the DVD, but is a medley of songs from Passion performed at The Tonys by the
original cast.)
Miscellany
Throughout
his career, Sondheim has embraced theater for its ephemerality and its spirit
of collaboration, which means it's impossible to call any one of his shows
"locked down." A different cast or a different director has been known to
inspire new songs (or the return of old ones that were cut from the show
because the original cast couldn't do them justice). Sondheim works closely
with his producers, directors, stars and writers, and puts himself in their
service as much as they to him. So if someone calls up and wants to do a
one-off concert performance of Follies, or to make a movie of Sweeney Todd, or to stage Company with the cast playing all the
instruments on stage, Sondheim offers his services to supervise and retool,
while remaining open to what the instigator wants to do. Not for nothing is the
most devastatingly emotional part of Sunday In The Park With George the concluding bars of the final
song, when everyone on stage lets the last note of "Sundaaaaaay" drag on, so
that they can spend as long as they can together. Sharing time with others is
one of the sublime pleasures of life celebrated by Sondheim's work.
That said, there are some Sondheim-related shows and collaborations that work
better than others. The revue Putting It Together, for example, pilfers songs from
various Sondheim projects and puts them in service of a light comedy set at a
dinner party. It's hard not to consider the original context of songs like
"Pretty Women" (a costly pre-murder hesitation in Sweeney Todd) or "Unworthy Of Your Love" (a duet
between Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley in Assassins) as they're repurposed to become
banter between sophisticated couples. Although Sondheim helped put together Putting
It Together, the
show skims lightly across the surface of his oeuvre, picking up only its most
unctuous qualities. (The earlier revues Side By Side By Sondheim and Marry Me A Little do better, by presenting the songs
with minimal set-up.)
Sondheim
hasn't done much straight pop songwriting, but he did provide five songs for
Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, and two of them in particular—"Back In Business" and
"Sooner Or Later"—have become standards. The latter won an Academy Award
for Best Original Song, and briefly furthered the notion that Madonna could
become a movie star.
Sondheim
also provided music for Beatty's Reds, a score for Alain Resnais' Stavisky, and songs for The Birdcage and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. But perhaps his most unusual and
personal dalliance with cinema came when he co-wrote the script for the 1973
murder mystery The Last Of Sheila with his buddy Anthony Perkins. The movie tries to
marry Sondheim's bleak vision of human interaction with his love of puzzles,
and thus becomes too much of an intellectual game to really engage as a film.
But it's funny and surprising, and definitely fits into the bigger Sondheim
picture.
Incomplete
Not every
Sondheim flop has been rediscovered and retroactively praised. A few of his
shows languish in limbo, performed very rarely; although in each case, rumors
persist that Sondheim will someday return to them and fix their lingering
problems.
After the
rapturous reception of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Sondheim collaborated with
book-writer Arthur Laurents on Anyone Can Whistle, a labored satire on small-town
conformity, set in a community that concocts a miracle in order to draw
tourists, then is undone by the release of a batch of lunatics from a local
asylum. The show is very much in the early '60s "sick" comedy vein of Jules
Feiffer and Nichols & May, and may in fact be a little late to the party.
But Sondheim's music is often amazing, kicking off his career-long mission to
make complex ideas—and complex musical arrangements—seem simple and
relatable. Anyone Can Whistle sports a pair of bravura 10-minute set pieces, but its
enduring numbers are the straightforward paeans to uniqueness: "There Won't Be
Trumpets," "Anyone Can Whistle," and "Everybody Says Don't" (the latter heard
below from the 1965 cast album).
On the heels of Sweeney Todd, Sondheim re-teamed with Company's George Furth and Harold Prince
for a musical adaptation of George Kaufman and Moss Hart's 1934 comedy Merrily
We Roll Along,
about the rise of a stuck-up show business bigwig. Like the play, the musical
starts in the present and moves backwards scene by scene, to show how a
powerful man alienated his friends and lost his ideals. Even though it ends on
a hopeful note, with the future bright and the possibilities limitless, the
characters are a little more removed and a little less likable than in the
Sondheim shows before or since. (They're like the self-absorbed sophisticates
in Company, but
without the cuddly side.) The show washed out on Broadway in 1981 after only 16
performances, and has been tinkered with extensively in subsequent re-stagings.
But even though Merrily We Roll Along contains some snappy, sharply observed songs (like
"Franklin Shepherd Inc.," seen below from the recent D.C. Sondheim festival,
with the magnificent Raúl Esparza taking the lead), this is one case where
Sondheim's fragmented melodies don't do the show any favors. If we can't get
close to the characters through the book, we need to know them better through
the songs, and Sondheim's disjunctions keep the audience at bay.
Most
recently Sondheim has re-teamed with his Assassins/Pacific Overtures book-writer John Weidman (and, for
the first time since Merrily, with producer Harold Prince) for Bounce, a light-spirited gambol through
early 20th century America, as seen through the eyes of two
opportunistic brothers who take a crack at gold-prospecting, fight-management
and creating an artists' colony in Florida. The story had been a Sondheim pet
project for over a decade by the time it was first workshopped in 1999, and
though it has yet to be mounted in New York—in large part because of
several less-than-spectacular out-of-town tryouts—Sondheim hasn't give up
on the show yet, and is reportedly planning to present a retooled version next
year. The bones of a good musical are evident in the small handful of strong,
romantic retro-pop songs on the 2003 cast album, though during its last
go-round, Bounce
was still coming off as too shallow, and too much of a rehash of earlier Sondheim
ideas (both musical and thematic). Still, if Sondheim and Weidman can give the
show a little more kick, it could have a long life in repertory, if only
because of catchy numbers like "Talent" (as seen below).
The Essentials
1. Sunday In The Park With George
In the
first act, Sondheim and book-writer James Lapine imagine the painstaking
process that Georges Seurat might have gone through to create "A Sunday
Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte," risking personal relationships,
his professional reputation, and the chance to engage naturally with all those
still figures on his canvas. The oft-criticized second act broadens the scope
of the piece, moving to the modern day and a fictional Seurat descendent,
struggling with his own art, and with the legacy of his great-grandfather.
Because the second act begins with "Putting It Together," Sondheim's ruthless
description of the business hustle required to build a career as an artist, some
people have read Sunday In The Park as a shallow study of the contrasts between the purity of
19th century painting and the commercialization of modern art. But
it's really a much more personal show. In Act II's melancholy "Lesson #8," the
younger George reflects on "A Sunday Afternoon" and wonders not just whether
he'll ever create anything as good, but whether he'll ever get to experience
such a glorious day. "George would have liked to see people out strolling on
Sunday," he sings. Wouldn't we all.
(Where to
see/hear Sunday:
The 2006 London revival is the best audio representation of the show, and the
original Broadway production is available on an excellent DVD, featuring a
commentary track by Sondheim, Lapine, and stars Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette
Peters. A Broadway revival is due next year.)
2.
Company
Though
Sondheim and George Furth's seriocomic look at messy modern relationships is in
some ways just a window into one specific place and time—Manhattan in the
swingin' early '70s—the overarching theme of the show is more timeless. Company's restless single guy hero, Bobby,
craves the stability and companionship that his married friends enjoy, even as
he's terrified by the way they all seem shackled to a life of petty squabbles
and sexual starvation. In the show's climactic song, "Being Alive" (seen below
at the 2007 Tony Awards), Bobby seems ready to grow up and commit to a
long-term relationship, although his enthusiasm is tempered by his
understanding of what he's looking for: "Someone to hold you too close. Someone
to hurt you too deep."
(Where
to see/hear Company: The cast album for the 2006 Broadway revival gives a
fuller representation of the show than the original cast album, but the 1970
cast album features more era-evoking orchestration. The recording sessions for
the 1970 album were also filmed by D.A. Pennebaker for the documentary by Original
Cast Album: Company, which is available on an essential DVD.)
3. Into
The Woods
How does
Sondheim's funniest and most approachable show also become his most emotionally
overpowering? Two simple words: "I wish." That sentiment sets the story in
motion, and sends all the classic fairy tale characters into the woods to get
what they want. But even after everything ends happily, they're not satisfied.
Act II deals with how the characters mature and learn to cope—as
beautifully expressed in the ballad "No One Is Alone"—yet even after
everyone moves once again to a more contented place, the final line of the show
is one more chirpy "I wish." Some may find it funny and even comforting to
think that Cinderella, Red Riding Hood and everyone else will set out on
another journey after the curtain falls, but the final "I wish" is also a heartbreaking
comment on how life is. Everything's in its proper place. And yet…
(Where
to see/hear Into The Woods: The original production, as seen above, is
still the best, and is available on DVD. The cast album too was recently
remastered, and sounds terrific.)
4. Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street
For all the
experimentation of Anyone Can Whistle, Follies and Pacific Overtures, it was in Sweeney Todd that Sondheim first reached the
higher level of sophistication he'd been striving for. Combining the suspense
movie signatures of Bernard Hermann with the jaunty operetta of Gilbert &
Sullivan, Sondheim creates something complex yet populist, to match a story in
which a working-class bloke savages the rich for pleasure and profit. It's a
measure of Sweeney's
greatness that it's been performed wonderfully in countless eclectic stagings,
from the industrial nightmare of the original to the most recent John
Doyle-conceived Broadway production, in which the actors are also the
orchestra, providing the music on stage. (The medley below, from the 2006
Tonys, features "The Ballad Of Sweeney Todd," which is unfortunately missing
from Tim Burton's otherwise fine film.)
(Where
to see/hear Sweeney: There's scarcely been a cast album or DVD of this show
that's not worth hearing or seeing, but the DVD of the Angela
Lansbury/George Hearn version is especially worth getting, if only to see how
the original staging looked. On CD, the Doyle production is peerless, primarily
because of the presence of Patti LuPone, the best Mrs. Lovett. Oh, and there's
also a certain movie version that may be in a theater near you right now.)
5. Assassins
As with a
lot of Sondheim shows, Assassins is enjoyable on several levels. On the surface it's a
breezily ironic glance back at American history, turning our most notorious
murderers into lovable cartoons. But just below the surface, Sondheim and John
Weidman rage against the thick streak of American narcissism that gives birth
to these madmen. Just listen to the litany of complaints that the killers spit
out in "Another National Anthem," or the explication/perversion of our national
principles in "Everybody's Got The Right" (seen below at The Tonys). Maybe
telling our children that they're special people who should follow their dreams
isn't always the best idea. After all, some kids never hear an encouraging
word, and still turn out to be Sondheim.
(Where to see/hear Assassins: No production is available on DVD, but the cast
album for the 2004 revival contains a lot of the dialogue from the show, and
gives a good sense of what an evening with Assassins is like.)