The Daily - The Life and Legacy of Stephen Sondheim

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

Stephen Sondheim died last week at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 91.For six decades, Mr. Sondheim, a composer-lyricist whose works include “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods,” transformed musical theater into an art form as rich, complex and contradictory as life itself.“For me, the loss that we see pouring out of Twitter right now and everywhere you look as people write about their memories of Sondheim is for that person who says yes, devoting yourself to writing or to dancing or to singing or to composing — or whatever it is — is a worthwhile life,” Jesse Green, The Times’s chief theater critic, said in today’s episode. “And there really is no one who says that as strongly in his life and in his work as Sondheim does.”Today, we chart Mr. Sondheim’s career, influence and legacy. Guest: Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: With a childlike sense of discovery, Stephen Sondheim found the language to convey the beauty in harsh complexity.Mr. Sondheim was theater’s most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century, and he was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved and celebrated shows.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. One of the first things you have to decide on with a musical is, why should there be songs? Today. You can put songs in any story, but what you have to look for is, why are songs necessary to this story? For six decades, until his death last week, Stephen Sondheim transformed musical theater into an art form as rich, complex, and contradictory as life itself. If it's unnecessary, then the show generally turns out to be not very good. I spoke with my colleague, theater critic Jesse Green,

about Sondheim's career, influence, and legacy. It's Friday, December 3rd. Jesse, what are your earliest memories of Stephen Sondheim? What was your first real encounter with his work? I suppose it was when I was about 11, and my parents, who used to go from where I lived in the suburbs of Philadelphia to New York now and then to see shows, my mother had been really turned on by hair, as whose was not, really. Hair the mother had been really turned on by hair.

As whose was not, really. Hair the musical, not the thing on your head. Not my father's hair, no. And they came back one night late from seeing something, which they were still talking about, and this would have been after a two-hour drive home. And they were like, oh my God, this is incredible. I'd never heard them talk about a show

as if it were, say, a novel. And so which show had they just seen? The name of the show was Company, which I then learned was a new musical by Stephen Sondheim that had opened in 1970 on Broadway. And my parents had bought at the theater the cassette tape. You could drive a person crazy. You could drive a person mad. And I played it. And then I played it again.

I just needed to know how this was done, who these people were, who made it, and how they made it, how this show was having, the effects it was having on me, even though I was, whatever, 11 years old, and it was about sophisticated Manhattanites who were kind of nasty with each other. And I didn't know anything about that world, but I wanted to. And so what I did was I took out a legal pad and I listened and I copied every word of the entire show. copied every word of the entire show.

It took several listenings and finally got the entire thing down on paper. That's the only way I could... You transcribed the entire production in longhand. In longhand. It was the only way I could figure out to incorporate the feelings and ideas and the craft of what was going on. I don't know many 11-year-olds who sit down and transcribe longhand a Broadway musical. Well, I also used to be paid a quarter to organize the drawers at the synagogue.

So, you know, I was just a strange kid. the drawers at the synagogue. So, you know, I was just a strange kid. Well, let's just pause for a minute and help me understand this man, Stephen Sondheim, who was transfixing you at the age of 11 and how it was that he became such a legendary figure in musical theater. Well, in the simplest outline,

he was an incredibly smart New York kid from a troubled family. When I was 10 years old, my parents divorced. My mother got custody of me, and she bought a place in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Moved part-time out to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, near the home of Oscar Hammerstein, the great lyricist and book writer who, you know, wrote Showboat in Oklahoma and The Sound of Music and many other shows. And very quickly, maybe because of his own need for a father figure in his life, because he didn't ever really see his father, he glommed on with a special attachment to Hammerstein. And he became a surrogate father, and I just wanted to do what he did.

And therefore to whatever it was that Hammerstein could teach him. If he was a geologist I would have become a geologist, which is I'm sure an exaggeration but not much. And Hammerstein proceeded to do in a series of complicated exercises and assignments. The first one being an adaptation of a play that I thought was good. The second being an adaptation of a play that I liked but was flawed. Was to teach him what was then the state of the art of the American musical theater, but limited in some ways by what Hammerstein knew. And as great as he was, there was a lot, as Sondheim later came to realize, that he didn't know.

Well, explain that. What would Hammerstein have known? What would have been the hallmarks of his work and of musical theater in this moment, as a young Stephen Sondheim is starting this apprenticeship? In a typical Hammerstein show, not unlike a typical sitcom today, you have an A plot, you have a B plot that's contrasting, usually humorous. You may have a C plot and how these all are worked out and what songs have to exist in what places in a show. All of these kinds of things which have been codified more or less now are things that he invented and was able to teach Sondheim, he invented and was able to teach Sondheim, almost like teaching a painter, you know,

how to make your paint or how to prep a canvas. But Jesse, you said Sondheim understood, even as he was learning all of this from Hammerstein, that something was missing from this era of the musical. So what did he feel was missing? Complexity. Hammerstein, you know, famously rhymes a lot of very simple words. He was capable of trickier rhymes, but they're often about birds praying or something like that, you know, and storms and lifting your chin up high. But Sondheim, as a young man, was already like very deeply into wordplay and other kinds of complex ideas about language and sound. And I think he knew this about himself and understood that the forms that Hammerstein was teaching him about were just never going to give him the full opportunity to

express what he had in him. And when it came into his hands to possibly write the lyrics for West Side Story he did not want to do it I had no intention of just writing lyrics I want to write music and I called Oscar who's you know my advisor on everything and I said you know I don't want to do this but Oscar said look you have a chance to work with with very gifted professionals on a show that sounds interesting. He said, my advice would be to take the job. Hammerstein said, this is another lesson. You have to learn how to write for this kind of composer, Leonard Bernstein, and how to write for this kind of show and to set up dances and all the different things that this show would present. So he did take the job and he was, in fact, not satisfied with his work on it.

Lenny wanted the lyrics to be very poetic, but his idea of poetry and my idea of poetry are simply not the same. I mean, you know, I was 25 years old. Even though we recognize the greatness of the show, what he hears when he sees it, and he's often spoken about this in interviews, is the discontinuity between who the characters are and often the way they sing. So you have a character like Maria, who has recently come to New York from Puerto Rico and doesn't speak a great deal of English,

but when she sings, she sings like she's at a tea party at Noel Coward's house. I feel charming, oh so charming. It's alarming how charming I feel. It's alarming how charming I feel. Sondheim hated that line. It isn't that he thought the show was no good. It's that he felt that his lyrics were not what they could have been, and the show was not what he might have done if he were doing both music and lyrics. So when does he finally have a chance to do things the Sondheim way, on his own terms, with all the complexity that he wants musical theater to possess? Well, the 60s were a frustrating continuation of his apprenticeship, even if he was writing his own music and lyrics in a couple of shows. and lyrics in a couple of shows. It wasn't really until the other show we talked about already,

Company, in 1970, which he wrote the music and the lyrics for and was strongly involved in the conception of, that we finally begin to hear the mature sound of the Sondheim we now know. So tell us why Company feels like such a breakthrough. Well, for one thing, it barely has a plot. And that sounds like it might be a criticism, but from Sondheim's point of view, what that means is there's a lot of room for him and for the songs to take on structural weight, not just decorative weight. It's a story about a 35-year-old guy who's single and afraid of commitment and his five married couples who are his friends urging him to get married. So that's really the entire story of the musical. And the weight of what it's trying to say isn't on the plot. It's on the songs to excavate character and the layers of contrasting feelings within Bobby, the main

character, but also the people around him. So we are in a world of feelings that's expressly about feelings, not about events. You hear that, you know, in a lot of the songs in the show, but never so much as in the big finale number for Bobby called Being Alive. Bobby! Bobby! In which, you know, he's going to have to resolve what it is he wants. And the way he does it is quite brilliant. It's structural.

The song is divided into two halves. And in the first half, Bobby sings somewhat angrily about how bad marriage is. It's a litany of phrases like someone to hold you too close, someone to hurt you too deep. One of my favorite ones is someone you have to let in, someone whose feelings you spare. As if relationships were a zero-sum game. You know, if you get something, you're taking it away from someone. And if that someone gets something, they're taking it away from you.

Right, he's reciting all the ways in which love seems like kind of a nightmare. Right, and then, halfway through the song, he begins to turn. Instead of saying, someone to do all these terrible things, now he says, Somebody hold me too close Somebody hurt me too close. Somebody hurt me too deep.

Somebody do all these terrible things to me. Right, it's no longer someone recoiling from something, it's someone kind of begging for it. And that Sondheim solution to, how do you bring a character like that to a satisfying conclusion? You couldn't really have him turn in the course of one song into somebody who's at the altar getting married. All you can do is bring him from a feeling of disdain for the institution into someone who,

whether he likes it or not, needs it and prays for it. And that's what we get in that song. And it's also what makes this show and this song radically different from anything we've likely ever heard before in American musical theater. The ask is psychological. It's not for a wedding necessarily. It's not for the right picnic basket at the ball

or whatever. You know, it's to be changed as a human being. So to go back to the objections Sondheim had to musical theater up to this point, a song like Being Alive and a musical like Company, A song like Being Alive and a musical like Company, it sounds like, brings the kind of complexity that he felt had been missing in musical theater. Absolutely, but there's more than one kind of complexity. Over the decade of the 70s, he produced five masterpieces, each one having at its core internal conflict of some kind or another, sometimes comic or tragic, and leading up to what many people consider his masterwork, which in its own way is about some of the same issues, but in a very twisted mirror, a musical called Sweeney Todd. Mm-hmm. And tell me about Sweeney Todd. It's not a show I know all that well. Well, Sweeney Todd is a musical thriller.

That's what he called it. And that is not a genre usually heard from on Broadway. I would have trouble thinking of any others. And he's not kidding. This is a show about a vengeful barber who's been done wrong, and he returns to London after many years in exile, seeking to kill the people who did him wrong. But he has this

accomplice, a kind of amoral musical dame named Mrs. Lovett, who has the bright idea that, well, why waste all those bodies? I mean, let's monetize them. So he's a barber. He slices their throats open. They go through a chute into her pie shop, and she bakes them into pies. So that is not the plot of Oklahoma. No. And as he was writing it, people thought, what are you doing? But what they didn't count on was, you know, all the gifts and one can also say peculiar interests that Sondheim brought to bear on material like that, including his incredible wit. And the song that does all of those things and more in Sweeney Todd is the act one closer, one of the greatest, maybe the greatest in American musical theater called A Little Priest. Well, you know me, bright ideas just pop into my head and I keep thinking.

Sweeney Todd, you know, is piling up all these dead bodies and his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, comes up with a brilliant idea and then tries to sell him on it, where at first she is offering him these pretend pies made from different kinds of people that he has sliced the throats of that she has ground up and turned into meat pies. And of course, the first one she offers him is... It's priest. A little priest. Have a little priest. Have a little priest.

Is it really good? That is too good, at least. Then again, they don't commit sins of the flesh. So it's pretty fresh. And it just starts there and becomes a contest and a game for who can come up with the most outrageous examples. My favorite moment in a song that has hundreds of brilliant moments is the one in which Mrs. Lovett is trying to get Sweeney Todd to come up with more and more complicated rhymes for the kinds of people

she's going to bake into meat pie. So first she looks around and she pretend offers. Now let me see. We've got Tinker. No, no. Something Pinker. Taylor. Paler. Butler. Suttler. Potter. Locksmith. And there's a very long pause. And then the song goes on. Because there's no rhyme. There is no rhyme. Even Sondheim could not come up with a rhyme for Locksmith.

We're in a layer of wit that has never been experienced in a Broadway show. And Jesse, why is this rollicking song in Sweeney Todd important to understanding Sondheim? Because the nature of his understanding of ambivalence isn't one-dimensional. It's not just on the top, I'm angry, and on the bottom, I'm really in love. It's like it applies to everything in life, including what a song is doing, using songs in a way that had never been dreamed of before. So this is a song about hatred of humankind and of the amoral people who profit from it. This is an incredibly dark thing. And what Sondheim is able to see is that nothing is only one color. So you look at that same slab of unpleasantness and you flip it over and it's a frosted cake of pleasure and i think that's

what he's trying to do in this whole show is give you a great deal of pleasure while also giving you the shiv right and somehow the utterly macabre is quite hysterical right and if it weren't it would also not sell many drinks at intermission. So, I mean, everyone came back for the second act of Sweeney Todd. We'll be right back after a brief intermission. So, Jesse, what is the next chapter of Sondheim's career as he seeks to remake musical theater? After this string of five incredible masterpieces of the 70s,

he has a huge flop, a show that he adored called Merrily We Roll Along. And this changes him in some way. He threatens to leave musical theater. He says he's going to make video games. Video games? Yes. But, you know, instead he digs deeper. He meets new collaborators. And he winds up sort of moving the musical now even further in the direction of abstraction and a basis in ideas rather than in character and plot. And eventually, through a series of shows, we wind up with a show called Sunday in the Park with George, which is about as meta as a show can get. What do you mean?

Well, this is a show about the 19th century French painter Georges Seurat, famous for inventing the technique of pointillism. So already, like, we're in the what are you writing about area of musical theater. We're very far away from, you know, don't throw bouquets at me. But it's about what it means to live in art and what you sacrifice for living in art. We get that most pungently in a song called Finishing the Hat. Which clearly was important to Sondheim personally. He has said it is the most autobiographical of his songs, and he named the first volume of his collected lyrics, Finishing the Hat.

Bonnet flapping, yapping roof. So tell us about this semi-autobiographical song. Well, it's a song that begins when Surratt's lover has left him because she needs more from a man than an artist is ever going to give her. Let her look for me to tell me why she left me. So he begins in anger saying, I had thought she understood. Meaning that this lover, Dot, who has left him, was the closest he ever got to someone accepting that as an artist,

he needed to be allowed to leave the world, in essence, and travel into the world of the painting and to spend 14 hours or 14 days or 14 weeks finishing painting an actual hat. Finishing the hat How you have to finish the hat How you watch the rest of the world from all window But he comes to understand two things in this song. One is that no one can enter that world with you.

And that's a deeply lonely experience, but not just that. The other thing he realizes is that when he comes back from that world, who's going to be there for him? And how you're always turning back too late from the grass or the stick or the dog or the light. How the kind of woman willing to wait's not the kind that you want to find waiting. The kind of person who would wait while he goes away on his artistic interior travels is not the kind of person he's necessarily going to want. And the kind of person he's going to want is not going to wait. Hmm.

But the other thing that the song is doing is, and it's a little shocking, actually, and it doesn't necessarily make you love the character, but it makes you understand the character. When he emerges from this world triumphant, when he basically tells you that creating that hat is worth more than whatever you may lose because you had to make it. He sings at the end of the song, Look, I made a hat. Look, I made a hat. Well, there never was a hat. This is the description of creation of something from nothing.

It's godlike. Hmm. When we think of the song as autobiographical, Jesse, does that mean we should think of Sondheim as somebody who sacrificed love and, like Seurat in this musical, becomes kind of inaccessible as a result of the art he has to make and what it requires? Sondheim's life, but it's autobiographical about the conflict and the feelings of loss, but also the feelings of joy. And it teaches us about Sondheim and perhaps about ourselves that there are many ways to connect to other people. And it may not be through love, a sexual love of one person. It may be through art. I think he's arguing that you can be in intimacy with the world, even without being in intimacy with an individual other person, by creating something that many people will love and that many people will be inspired by to find love for themselves. And certainly this song, as many of Sondheim's songs, have inspired people to connections that they may otherwise have abandoned or never sought.

It's fascinating to me that the same man who wrote Being Alive, this song about a man who ultimately decides that being alone is not alive, is the same man who writes this song, whose ultimate message is that you can be happy being alone when you're creating art that makes you feel alive. Talk about complicated and contradictory. Yeah, I don't know if he's saying you can be happy, but he's saying you can be meaningful.

And I think one of the incredible things about Sondheim overall is how he sought to be meaningful in the world in every way that was available to him, both as the creator of works that changed the American theater, but also as a teacher in the way he was taught. Hmm. Explain that. Well, I'll give you an example. In high school, I directed shows, and one of the shows I directed was a musical called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which was a Sondheim show from the 60s. Soon after the show finished, I came home from school.

I went to pick up the mail and I found in the mailbox this envelope engraved with an address from the Upper East Side of Manhattan. And I was kind of confused. I opened it up and inside was a copy of the program of my production of the show and written on it. It said, Happy 16th birthday, Jesse Stephen Sondheim. Wow. 16th birthday jesse stephen sondheim wow yeah so after the paramedics revived me and i went into the house i was like what the hell is going on here what has happened and my father explained that he had written to sondheim sent him a copy of the program and said it would mean so much to my son if you would sign it for him that's all asked for. But Sondheim did more than just send me the

program. He wrote to my father separately and said, if your son is seriously interested in a career in theater or even thinking about it, here's my phone number. Have him give me a call. I'd be glad to talk to him. Wow. Oh, my God. I mean, at the time, I thought, what is going on here? Later, I discovered that he was indeed writing to anybody who asked anything and helping young people who wanted to be in the theater by meeting with them, talking to them. He established the Young Playwrights Competition that got a lot of people started in the theater, including the Pulitzer Prize winner, Lynn Nottage. I know so many people who were helped literally by him or through his encouragement.

It's a side of him that isn't often covered. You know, he did not have children. And he once told me that it was a regret of his that he didn't have children. But he did make himself a father, nevertheless, in the lives of so many people. So, Jesse, when did you learn that Stephen Sondheim had died? And I'm curious what your reaction was. Well, it was very complicated, appropriately enough. My father died just a few weeks before Sondheim. And the last time I saw my father, we were talking, and he said, oh, I want to show you something. And he took out his wallet. He had one of those George Costanza wallets from Seinfeld. You know, it was like four inches thick. He was 95. And he takes

something out of it that's all kind of folded up and shows it to me. And I was completely baffled at first, but then I realized it was a printout of an email that I had gotten from Sondheim many years ago, in which he congratulated me for a piece I had written. And I guess I had forwarded it to my father. I never thought about it again. And my father had printed it out and folded it up and put it in his wallet. And I said to him, oh my God, I can't believe you've kept this all this time. It means so much to me that, you know, that it meant so much to you, something like that. And he said, well, here, I want you to have it. I said, no, I don't want to take it from you. And he said, no, I've got another one. And he pulled another one out of his wallet. He had the same one. So when Sondheim died, I thought of how, in my own small way and in the small way for thousands of people, I think,

in the theater and millions of people who have loved his work, he was, like Hammerstein was for him, another father. Always encouraging. Well, not always encouraging, sometimes a little catty, but mostly encouraging and completely convinced of the meaningfulness of a life in art, which is something that most of us, even with beautiful parents, didn't really get a lot of. And for me, the loss that we see pouring out of Twitter right now, and everywhere you look as people write about their memories of Sondheim, is for that person who says, yes, devoting yourself to writing or to dancing or to singing or to composing or whatever it is, is a worthwhile life. And there really is no one who says that as strongly in his life and in his work

as Sondheim does. Well, Jesse, this has been a wonderful conversation, and we really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Well, thank you, Michael. It's been a pleasure. Someday, by the blue, purple, yellow, red water On the green, purple, yellow, red ground A few days after Sondheim's death on November 26th, dozens of Broadway performers gathered in Times Square to honor him and celebrate his music with a song from Sunday in the Park with George. On an ordinary Sunday.

Someday. Someday. Someday. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. My plan I'm announcing today pulls no punches in the fight against COVID-19. It's a plan that I think should unite us. In a speech on Thursday, President Biden laid out a new strategy for fighting the pandemic that will involve opening hundreds of new vaccination sites aimed at families, delivering booster shots to all adults, making at-home COVID tests reimbursable,

and requiring foreign travelers to show proof of a negative test taken within a day of leaving for the U.S. We'll fight this variant with science and speed, not chaos and confusion. The plan arrived as the U.S. reported its second known case of the Omicron variant, a resident of Minnesota who had traveled to New York City for a conference. Meanwhile, German officials announced their own new COVID-19 strategy, a series of tough restrictions that would exclude unvaccinated people from many aspects of public life. Under the plan, restaurants, bars, museums, theaters, and most stores would bar entry to those who are

not vaccinated or not recovered from COVID-19. Germany is experiencing a major spike in infections. On Thursday, the country reported more than 73,000 new cases and nearly 400 deaths. Today's episode was produced by Luke Vanderplug, Eric Krupke, Chelsea Daniel, Austin Mitchell, and Alexandra Lee Young, with help from Diana Nguyen. It was edited by Liz O'Balen and Larissa Anderson, and engineered by Marion Lozano.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lindsay Garrison, Claire Tennisgetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon-Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Chris Wood, Jessica Chung,

Stella Tan, Alexandra Lee Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Thank you. Special thanks to Sam Dolmec, Paula Schumann, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Sophia Milan, Des Ibequa, Erica Futterman, Wendy Doerr, Elizabeth Davis-Moore, Jeffrey Miranda, and Maddie Maciello. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.