Biography Of Stephen Sondheim Essay, Research Paper
Stephen Sondheim – Biography
Stephen Sondheim was born on 22 March 1930, the son of a wealthy New
York dress manufacturer. But, when his parents divorced, his mother
moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania and young Stephen found himself
in the right place at the right time. A neighbour of his mother’s,
Oscar Hammerstein II, was working on a new musical called Oklahoma!
and it didn’t take long for the adolescent boy to realise that he,
too, was intrigued by musical theatre. Although he subsequently
studied composition with Milton Babbitt, he chose to apply what he
learned in the all-or-nothing commercial hothouse of Broadway. Like
Hammerstein, he has written the occasional pop song (with Jule Styne
for Tony Bennett) and dabbled in films (Stavisky, Reds, Dick Tracy),
but, like Hammerstein, he has always come back to the theatre.
His initial success came as a somewhat reluctant lyricist to
Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story (1957) and Jule Styne on Gypsy
(1959). Exciting and adventurous as those shows were in their day,
and for all their enduring popularity, Sondheim’s philosophy since
is encapsulated in one of his song titles: “I Never Do Anything
Twice”. His first score as composer-lyricist was A Funny Thing
Happened On The Way To The Forum (1962) – a show so funny few people
spotted how experimental it was: it’s still the only successful
musical farce. In the following three decades, critics detected a
Sondheim style – a fondness for the harmonic language of Ravel and
Debussy; a reliance on vamps and skewed harmonies to destabilise the
melody; a tendency to densely literate lyrics. But, all that said,
it’s the versatility that still impresses: you couldn’t swap a song
from the exuberantly explosive pit-band score of Anyone Can Whistle
(1964) with one of the Orientally influenced musical scenes in
Pacific Overtures (1976); you couldn’t mistake the neurotic pop
score of Company (1970) for the elegantly ever-waltzing A Little
Night Music (1973).
Sondheim hit his stride in the Seventies, forming a unique
partnership of hyphenates with Hal Prince: a composer-lyricist and a
producer-director working together to re-invent the musical. Some
were plotless (Company), some characterless (Pacific Overtures), one
went backwards (Merrily We Roll Along). But, as his onetime
choreographer Michael Bennett put it, before you can break the
rules, you have to know what they are – and Sondheim knows America’s
cultural heritage better then anybody. Follies (1971) is an
affectionate and precise pastiche of Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, Dorothy
Fields, Yip Harburg … Even as he seemed to be turning his back on
that great tradition, he was also a glorious summation of it.
With Sweeney Todd (1979), the Prince/Sondheim collaboration reached
its apogee, blurring the distinctions between lyrics and dialogue,
songs and underscoring, and combining a complex plot with operatic
emotions to create a unique musical thriller. But their next show,
Merrily We Roll Along (1981), flopped, and the two men went their
separate ways. Sondheim turned to the author and director James
Lapine for Sunday In The Park With George (1984), a work that seemed
at times an autobiographical reflection on the problems of making
art in a commercial environment. His most recent shows illustrate
one of his greatest strengths, his ability to write against audience
expectations of the subject: for Into The Woods (1987), he gave such
familiar nursery figures as Cinderella and Red Riding Hood complex
extended numbers; for the eponymous anti-heroes of Assassins (1990),
he wrote some of his most affecting, straightforward music, reaching
back beyond Berlin to barbershop and Stephen Foster, and almost to
our own time with an ironic parody of the Carpenters. Not everyone
feels comfortable watching Lee Harvey Oswald singing along with John
Wilkes Booth, but, in stretching the possibilities of the musical,
Sondheim is seeking to prove that the form has just as wide a range
as the straight play. And for that we should all be grateful.