Where to Start with Sondheim

I don't want to scare anyone off before they even start, but the place to start with Sondheim is with the shows, not the songs. Sondheim shows are like living beings that breathe in and out, and cutting songs from their context is like amputating a limb - you lose every bit of context for what the song is there for. Without the shows surrounding them, the songs just sound like not particularly show-stopping Broadway numbers with lyrics that are over-clever. If you listen to a Sondheim song expecting a Lennon and McCartney like revelation, you're gonna be disappointed. Every Sondheim song was written for its show, to advance the story, to give flavor to the atmosphere, to elucidate features of the character.

So start with the shows, most of which you can find on youtube. You'll be stunned by how easy they are to get into.

You can, however, start just by reading quotes from the lyrics; deep and wise quotes that seem tapped from the wisdom of the ages like this one from Into the Woods:

“Oh if life were made of moments,

Even now and then a bad one.

But if life were only moments,

Then you'd never know you had one.”

That could be a Biblical Proverb or a passage straight out of Wittgenstein.

Or take this one from Sunday in the Park with George:

“Stop worrying where you're going

Move on

If you can know where you're going

You've gone

Just keep moving on

I chose, and my world was shaken

So what?

The choice may have been mistaken

The choosing was not

You have to move on”

The meanings inherent in that passage are as deep and infinite as anything in Shakespeare. It's practically the sung lyric version of Hamlet's realization of his imminent death: "If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all."

If you want to come to terms with just how valuable Sondheim shows are, you have to think in terms of Shakespeare and The Bible. This is the new world which electronic amplification and recording promised, where music and lyrics can fuse together in the most nuanced, meaningful ways.

We just lived through the century of movies and popular music, and even if many pop culture fanatics think I'm a snob about it I'll still go to bat against any classical snob who thinks there aren't hundreds of great achievements within it. But a hundred-twenty years of American and America-influenced popular culture has not produced an artist on the level of Steven Sondheim.

When you measure Sondheim against even the best of them: Bob Dylan... Orson Welles... Martin Scorsese... it's not even close. Dylan had written almost all his best songs by 1970, and his greatest songs are almost all abstract metaphors and not about human beings. Sondheim is eleven years older than Dylan, in 1970 he was just warming up, and his songs were mouthpieces for extremely specific characters and ideas. Welles has one gigantic masterpiece that towers over the rest of his output; Sondheim has a dozen masterpieces, none of which tower over each other, and that doesn't even count collaborations he was involved in like West Side Story and Gypsy. Scorsese has as many masterpieces as Sondheim, but they're mostly about the same subjects - violence and guilt and lust and male ego, he can't create believable woman characters, and most of his movies can't branch out into the larger world of ideas and fantasy. Sondheim, like Shakespeare and Mozart, has no limitations - every type of subject, every type of human, every type of idea.

To go into the world of Sondheim is to take a trip to the hopes and delusions of the 1950s. America had just come back from its second 'excursion' into Europe, where millions of soldiers saw squalor and tragedy inconceivable to their minds, but also how Europeans only kept up morale by their artistic traditions. When faced with their darkest moments, only Beethoven and Shakespeare and Dante could save them. And when they came back, they saw all those European immigrants fleeing war, mostly Jewish, who brought to this country all their cultural knowledge and riches. And therefore, for one brief twenty years in American life, there was a gigantic class of small town intellectuals who believed in Art, and from that class came the audience for everybody from Welles to Ellison to Copland to Salinger to Bernstein to Tennessee Williams to Nabokov to Pasternak to Baldwin to Frost to Bergman to Fellini to Bellow to Rogers & Hammerstein to Davis and Mingus to soooo many others.

And by 1965, it was all done, and all those great artists seemed to dry up at exactly the same moment. A good half of them developed creative blocks, and even the ones who kept going stopped believing that there was an audience for what they did, and the evidence showed they were probably right. Popular culture had taken over completely. Movies had completely replaced plays and musicals. Genre fiction replaced literary fiction. And rock replaced not only classical but jazz. People of my generation don't even believe this moment of popular interest in high culture ever happened, and if they do, they seem to believe everybody was faking their interest in it.

The only artist who was left of that moment, the only artist who kept going and growing, and summed up everything that went on before him, was Stephen Sondheim. And the reason he did it was that he understood two contradictory truths about 'Art' that no other artist of his time quite did. As Matt Zoller Seitz pointed out, so much of Sondheim is about holding two completely contradictory ideas in your head; and in every way, Sondheim embodied that principle as no artist of our time ever did.

At the same time, Sondheim understood that all the exquisite cultural education and artistic training which many of our grandparents acquired was, in some senses, a millstone around our necks that prevents us all from creating something new and unique and American. And simultaneously he realized, at least intuitively, that there was so much knowledge and wisdom in these traditions that to disregard its thousands of lessons would be a tragedy for human history, and would doom us to eventually create our version of all the same mistakes.

"Art" is not a crop native to America. It depends on an aristocratic definition of class and education and can lead to the kind of classism and racism that blows up whole continents. But America's version of art that sees no difference between art and commercial 'entertainment is just the populist version of that same sentiment, and it leads to paranoia about elitism that can kill as many people as any Wagner lover ever did.

Sondheim is neither art or entertainment, he's neither opera nor musical, he's Sondheim - his own special category, and like Shakespeare and Mozart, he's neither high nor low nor middlebrow, he's 'everybrow.' He's as much entertainment as art and as much fun as wisdom.

Art is a seismograph of society. The art we produce, the art we consume, the art we love, is an indicator of a society's state of being. If we best love art that's fundamentally cheerful, that probably means that we're fundamentally a society in a cheerful and peaceful state. If we love art that's optimistic, that means we have hope for the future. But we respond to art in a way that gives an indication of our minds' state, and if, as a society, we're responding best to art that is pessimistic, dark, insane with passion and violence, that's an indicator that we are feeling pessimistic, dark and violent. So what can you say about a society whose greatest passions are Game of Thrones and Kanye?

But like Shakespeare and Mozart, Sondheim contains every sentiment within him from light to dark, and always leads us back to the beginning of the cycle. His every sentiment is balanced by its opposite. He presents us with the biggest, most insurmountable problems, but the darker the problem, the lighter the comedy - even Sweeney Todd and Assassins wink at us. On the one hand, he never lies to us about our problems - he never tells us that we will solve problems life does not mean for us to overcome; on the other hand, he does show us that we can live with our problems and muddle through, living our darkest days amid some consolation and good cheer.

And so the place to start with Sondheim is Company. Company is by no means his greatest musical, that's probably Into the Woods, which I would take with me to a desert island, and I'm hardly the only one. But Company is his best musical. It's a perfect show. It's his smallest musical - the most intimate, the most humane, the most rewarding.

The subject of Company is ostensibly marriage, but like Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, the real subject is us. The subject is ordinary people in ordinary situations. We see its characters every single day of our lives, and five-hundred years from now, people would still recognize these characters in people they know. The subject is the search for love: what is love - both erotic and platonic? Is love worth it? Is love an illusion? Do we love the people we love when we often hate them? What does it mean to treat the people you love well? What does it mean to be in love when you can't help mistreating the person you love? What does it mean to live a life alone, and what does it mean to live a life with other people?

It is a perfect show. It takes the most complex theatrical techniques and boils them down to the most essential human situations... not to mention... it's funny as fuck... It's most extraordinary quality is how ordinary it is, and anyone who's lived a life will recognize themselves in these characters.

There are all sorts of interpretations of Company's subtext. From the moment it opened, it's long been interpolated by some that Bobby is a closeted gay man. That in itself is a very 20th century interpretation of a work well ahead of its time. Sondheim, gay himself, used his lawyers to shut down any production down that would question that nature immediately: to Sondheim, Bobby is straight, and that's the end of the story. And he has a point - making Bobby date women he's unattracted to would ruin the dramatic tension of many devastating scenes. But one of Sondheim's final decisions was to allow a new version on the West End and Broadway in which Bobby is played by a woman. I don't doubt that before long we will have interpretations in which Bobby's orientation is every variation within the LGBTQ community, including asexual, and then still more in which Bobby is naturally polyamorous, hides abuse in his past, at heart a misogynist, a religious Christian who only encounters Jews, addicted to pornography, a racist who will only marry a white woman, or is secretly struggling with mental illness and is terrified of subjecting his worst moments upon others. "Being Alive", the climactic number of the whole show, would particularly take on enormous new meanings if Bobby is transgender. I've read Bobby called a boring, hollow shell of a character, but the truth is he is one of the greatest characters in American fiction. Bobby is all those aforementioned things, and then an infinity more. He is the mystery at the heart of American love in which every viewer can see their own projections: why hasn't Bobby gotten married? There are as many answers to that question as there are to the question: 'Why does Don Quixote go on a quest?' or 'Why can't Hamlet decide whether to kill Claudius?', and half of them don't even have anything to do with Bobby's own desires. The answer is, and should be, different for each of us, and different every time we encounter the work; because that's what great art does. It lets us find our own meanings that change at every moment, shifting perspectives with the wind.

America, democracy, freedom, equality, all those noble sentiments which this country is supposed to represent, were instituted here so that we all could have the freedom to choose, and there is no freedom more important than the freedom to love. But with that freedom comes an onerous series of burdens. Love is a terrifying responsibility, and some of us find ourselves, for whatever reason, unable to fulfill them. I am Bobby, and so are literally hundreds of single people I know, who cannot find love in spite of their best efforts, and who are eternally stepping out into that penultimate unknown: why has life loved some people back and not others?

I've already forgotten my idea for how to conclude this essay, so I will let the Sondheim show that means the most to me do the talking and watch it again as it reduces me yet again to a puddle of joyful tears:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fhW00fU1uQ