Sondheim Sensibility: Harsh Truth About Life By STEPHEN HOLDEN

April 30, 2010
Sondheim Sensibility: Harsh Truth About Life By STEPHEN HOLDEN

A wonderful, little-known song that leaps out of the biographical revue “Sondheim on Sondheim” is a taunting show tune, “Now You Know,” from the 1981 musical “Merrily We Roll Along.” One of that revue’s six numbers from “Merrily,” it encapsulates Stephen Sondheim’s skeptical worldview as tartly as anything the composer has written.

“I mean, big surprise: people love you and tell you lies/Bricks can fall out of clear blue skies,” Leslie Kritzer sings with chipper, smart-aleck zest. Her character from “Merrily,” Mary Flynn, is a tough cookie and best friend of the embattled songwriting team at the show’s center.

“It’s called flowers wilt/It’s called apples rot,/It’s called thieves get rich and saints get shot,” she continues.

Even God, who is seldom glimpsed in the Sondheim universe, makes a fleeting appearance, only to be dismissed as a disappointment who “doesn’t answer prayers a lot.”

That song’s solution to despair is to grit your teeth and soldier on: “It’s called count to 10/It’s called burn your bridges, start again.” The only palliative to the bitterness of experience is a therapeutic imperative: “Now you grow.”

“Now You Know” is a high point of “Sondheim on Sondheim,” the biographical anthology of his songs, conceived and directed by James Lapine for the Roundabout Theater Company at Studio 54. The show, which also stars Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams, Tom Wopat, Norm Lewis, Euan Morton, Erin Mackey and Matthew Scott, blends performances of Sondheim songs, famous and obscure, with interview footage in which the composer, who recently turned 80, discusses his life and creative process.

Mr. Sondheim may be the last great songwriter, in a lineage that runs from Jerome Kern through the Gershwins to Leonard Bernstein, who pushed the Broadway musical from a brash, vaudevillian entertainment into a loftier realm. But of all of them, Mr. Sondheim went the furthest in deconstructing and reinventing a populist art form as a highbrow version of itself.

Mr. Sondheim’s music examines the entire pre-1960s tradition, from Gilbert and Sullivan and Viennese operetta, through the Gershwins’ satires, Cole Porter’s burlesque musicals and beyond. The pastiche songs of “Follies,” particularly, recycle the styles of classic show tunes, matching or outdoing their antecedents in quality while subverting their escapism. His competitive relationship with the past, a kind of serial patricide, culminated with the “murder” of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II.

In this revue’s videotaped interviews, Mr. Sondheim goes out of his way to praise Hammerstein for teaching him the craft of writing lyrics. But if you compare the two, the inescapable fact emerges that Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics programmatically repudiate his mentor’s optimistic, inspirational ideology.

Hammerstein’s lyrics are synonymous with America’s post-World War II “Father Knows Best” ethos of moral rectitude, in which confident breadwinners and their perfect little wives are busy multiplying and building a safe new world of peace and freedom. The basic building block of this sanctuary of hope and optimism is a happily married couple who fall in love at first sight and march blissfully, hand-in-hand, into the sunset.

The climactic song in Mr. Sondheim’s “Company,” “Being Alive,” magnificently sung by Mr. Lewis in this revue, replaces the anticipation of happily ever after voiced in the Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad “Some Enchanted Evening” with fear and trembling. Instead of a cozy, familial bond, intimacy with another person is portrayed as a terrifying prospect that involves:

Someone to need you too much,

Someone to know you too well,

Someone to pull you up short

And put you through hell.

For all his songs’ universality, the Sondheim philosophy is specific and exclusive. Directed toward his own class — an urbane, well-educated, culturally cosmopolitan gentry — his lyrics define what might be called the Manhattan sensibility: humanist, proudly intellectual, psychologically sophisticated, hyper-articulate, liberal, Jewish and disenchanted. The closest Mr. Sondheim has come to being multicultural was in the 1976 musical “Pacific Overtures.” Set in 19th-century Japan, the musical has songs that propose an intriguing East-West hybrid, part Broadway and part Asian.

The Sondheim cynicism didn’t come out of the blue. Expressions of wised-up disillusion, like “Now You Know,” have Broadway ancestors in the lyrics of E. Y. Harburg, Ira Gershwin and even George M. Cohan. But it was Mr. Sondheim’s 1970 show, “Company,” that codified the Manhattan sensibility — a radically unsentimental, emotionally realistic honesty that found its pop-record equivalents in Paul Simon in New York, and in Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman on the West Coast.

The origins of that attitude included confessional poetry and the rise of psychoanalysis as a kind of alternative religion, both of which provided Mr. Sondheim with the self-scrutinizing language to put in the mouths of his introspective characters. Simultaneously, the moon-June-spoon ideal of eternal romantic love began its steady decline as the principal subject of popular songs.

Advancing technology also played a major role in the transition from optimism to ambivalence. The birth-control pill, which helped propel the second wave of feminism, and rock ’n’ roll’s hedonistic ethic and amplification both undermined Hammerstein’s patriarchal sentimentality and toughened the sound of pop. At the same time, the mystique of psychoanalysis superseded the more simplistic self-help doctrine of “The Power of Positive Thinking” as the culture’s spiritual panacea. If you could reach deep enough into your repressed memories, it was argued, you could exorcize your demons.

In his relentless demolition operation, Mr. Sondheim ultimately embraced the Manhattan sensibility’s demonic extreme — murderous, misanthropic rage — with “Sweeney Todd” (1979). But where do you go once you’ve had your anti-hero proclaim, “We all deserve to die!”

After “Merrily,” a summing up of his generation’s growing pains, told in reverse, Mr. Sondheim’s search for meaning and connection to the future began in earnest with “Sunday in the Park With George” (1984) and continued with “Into the Woods” (1987). Both exalted the creation of “children and art” as a refutation of the nihilism of “Sweeney Todd” and as a self-conscious, morally high-minded investment in humanity.

Grudgingly and on his own terms Mr. Sondheim even affirmed Hammerstein’s belief in true love with “Passion” (1994). But as usual with him, there was a catch: the love being conjured might also be described as pathologically obsessed.

The one human connection Mr. Sondheim has always celebrated unambiguously and without strain is friendship. Its most eloquent expression is found in another song from “Merrily,” “Old Friends”:

Time goes by

Everything else keeps changing

You and I

We get continued next week.

The relaxed, swinging tune that evokes a cocktail singalong has the same bittersweet ache as the lyrics that culminate with a toast: “Here’s to us! Who’s like us? Damn few!” This is intimacy without fear.

In most cases, however, the relationship of music and lyrics in Mr. Sondheim’s songs expresses a core ambivalence. As his words explore the complicated, often harsh truths about life and relationships, his swelling ballads convey an unalloyed romantic yearning in the harmonic language of Puccini.

With the Freudian mystique of the 1960s and ’70s on the wane, and the language of psychotherapy reduced to the banal pop scripture of reality television, the Age of Sondheim may be fading. An emerging technological view of humanity and its discontents that largely bypasses the post-Freudian model proposes an unsettling new ideal of the human being as a perfectible machine that through cloning is theoretically immortal.

Antidepressants and performance-enhancing drugs, from steroids to mental stimulants to Viagra, are modifying human behavior. Replaceable body parts, plastic surgery and gender re-assignment are undermining the traditional idea of the individual as a being with a singular identity and destiny. Hand-held devices have turned us into robotic mobile power stations continually transmitting and receiving information in computer language that has seeped into pop songs.

These developments are profoundly antithetical to the dream of sadly civilized enlightenment evoked by Mr. Sondheim’s songs. In this emerging world, the truth of existence is rooted more in quantifiable physical reality than in ideas and emotions. Musically it is embodied in hard digital beats and in performances staged as competitive sports events.

As we lunge into the 21st century, there is no next Stephen Sondheim waiting to step into the master’s shoes and perpetuate the tradition that he carried to its pinnacle. There is only new and different in a largely unimaginable future in which we are simultaneously more and less human than in the pre-digital age. Like it or not, and however we do it, now we grow.

“Sondheim on Sondheim” continues through June 13 at Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, Manhattan; (212) 719-1300, roundabouttheater.org/index.html

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 4, 2010

A music column on Saturday about Stephen Sondheim and the “Sondheim on Sondheim” revue, at Studio 54, misstated part of a lyric from the song “Old Friends.” It is “You and I/We get continued next week,” not “You and I/We can continue next week.”