Watch Pacific Overtures: THIS is a musical???
I've written about Sondheim so many times that I'm loathe to write about him again, but like Shakespeare and Mozart, he insists on himself, and the work is genuinely so great that he invites comparison. If such a comparison seems grandiose, it is.
What artist in American history can compare to the most titanic giants of the arts? Is there a single novelist who can? Is there a single novelist who gives us the full gamut of the American character in all its hundreds of manifestations? Just one? You can't just do it in one book, it can only be done over an entire career. Our greatest novelists, the Faulkners, the Henry James's, the Cathers and Bellows and McCarthys and Morrisons, they all return time after time to the same few themes and character types. Perhaps only Mark Twain can be said to reach that kind of diversity, and while I don't have reading that wide, I don't think anyone is making claims that grandiose for any novel of his but Huck Finn. As for film directors, we have more greats than any other country. But who has Sondheim's diversity? Whether from personal or business limitations, is there any golden age studio great who was allowed to stretch to that kind of infinite diversity of utterance which one would think a great American artist should particularly reach in this melting pot of a country? Certainly no studio director I can think of could do it. The three real candidates? Spielberg, Scorsese, and Altman. Spielberg is so much better than his critics condescend to rate him as, but no, he's not an artist of infinite reach any more than Verdi or Victor Hugo. He has such a diverse output full of completely different sorts of characters and situations, but it's true, he nonetheless does go all too often for the easy sentiments, the simplistic message, the escapist thrills. Scorsese alike is far more diverse than his New York machismo reputation, but he has a few modes and obsessions to which he always returns: New York machismo, sexual inadequacy in the face of beauty, Catholic suffering and God's silence. I want to see a parallel universe Scorsese where made as many historical pictures as Spielberg - but where Spielberg made so many movies about 20th century history, Scorsese's are about the longer history of religion: Scorsese on the crusades, Scorsese on the Protestant-Catholic wars, Scorsese about early Christians trying to convert pagans and Jews. Those were the movies from him we needed most. Altman, frankly the truest artist of the three, was a commendably risky artist, infinite in his aspirations, baroque in his complexity, who risked everything on every movie and could be as risible as he was great. His greatest movie: Nashville, might be the greatest movie ever made in this country. Others like Short Cuts and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, MASH, Thieves Like Us, California Split, might add up to the truest exploration this country ever got in fiction. But I think everybody agrees that Altman could also be as bad as he was good. Such are the risks you take when you're a real artist feeling your way against a system that routes for your failure.
Sondheim was not that. He was an artist who got every major break and was taught how to create great musical theater by the father of adolescent best friend from the earliest age: Oscar Hammerstein himself. He knew just about everything there was to know about making theater by the time he was in his early thirties, and simply had to put pen to paper thereafter.
So I went last Sunday to see a very good - nevertheless inadequate - production of Sweeney Todd - Stephen Sondheim's most overrated musical.
Even Sondheim at his most overrated is still just that extraordinary. Even Sweeney Todd is, ultimately, a better work of theater than it can ever be performed. You need a Sweeney who can inspire the terror of an uncaged lion and simultaneously be vulnerable enough to inspire our pity. It is a literally impossible part. The actor was in no danger of capturing any facet of Sweeney's character to the point of obscuring other facets, that is perhaps a strength.
Just as it might be better to read Shakespeare among friends to avoid the disappointment of an inadequate staging, perhaps it's best to hear Sondheim's musicals in concert or played through a score at home, where you can think of his musicals as cantatas, or 'passion' plays. So unreachable are the heights of Assassins or Pacific Overtures that perhaps they're simply impossible to mount on stage.
Two of the greatest productions I ever saw of Sondheim didn't even try. When a director named John Doyle mounted Sweeney Todd (which I saw live) and Company (which I saw on youtube), the concept was as small as possible. No real staging, no orchestra, just the actors singing, and when they weren't singing, they simply played the instruments to accompany the other actors. Only in Shakespeare and Mozart have I ever seen theater so raw and intense and moving. Not even the Greeks got here, and yet these productions felt profoundly Greek - more a sacred rite than a theater production, and yet they too were utterly contemporary - funny, street wise, erudite and warmly friendly.
As I said, I've written about Sondheim far too much in relation to so many other deserving creators. But Sondheim is one of the very few artists who cannot possibly be overrated. Even in his non-American musicals, every single American type can be found within its pages from the highest to the lowest, the smartest and most sublime to the stupidest. Like Shakespeare with England, or Verdi with Italy, even when the setting isn't America, he's talking about America. Sweeney Todd was really about New York, and Sweeney was created and produced in the wake of the Summer of Sam.
He is the one creator in America who truly bridges that divide between the classical and the popular - never throwing out the lessons of old Europe even as he sees the incontrovertible need to move on to a new world, a demotic world, in which the concerns of the low matter just as much as the high.
Movies may be the American artform, but if Sondheim is not our answer to Shakespeare, then movies are still waiting for the American Shakespeare. No American has ever presented America the way Sondheim has, and no creator has ever, perhaps can ever, presented to us the United States of America as it truly is.
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