In the early 1980s, the librettist and director James Lapine asked the composer Stephen Sondheim what sort of musical he wanted to write. The pair were in the early stages of creating “Sunday in the Park With George,” their first collaboration of many, and the response given by the older to the younger man was very Sondheimish indeed. “Theme and variation,” said Sondheim, or as Richard Schoch puts it in his heartwarming essay collection, “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” “not, then, a story to be told, but a perspective to be taken.”
The Sondheim perspective is the subject of 11 essays by Schoch, a show-by-show analysis that seeks, at least notionally, to extract usable takeaways from the Sondheim canon. The chapter on “Merrily We Roll Along” is subtitled “How to Grow Up”; the one on “Sweeney Todd” promises to teach us “How (Not) to Deal With Injustice”; “Gypsy” unlocks “How to Be Who You Are,” and so on through the Sondheim playlist. This conceit of art as self-help is common enough — Jane Austen has come in for a lot of it, as have Shakespeare and the 19th-century Russian novelists — as to practically be a subgenre at this point, in which publishers take a subject they are nervous may be too nerdy or niche for a general audience and try to reframe it in more popular terms. It rarely works, trying to turn apples into bananas — there are lots of helpful things you can take from Sondheim, but they don’t map onto “life lessons” in quite the way the book suggests — but it doesn’t matter. Beyond the headings and the odd memoirish aside, the author largely ignores the premise of the title to quickly and mercifully move on to other things.
Schoch is a professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast and a former New York theater director who approaches Sondheim from the inside out, that is, as someone who has wrestled with how to perform and direct him. And what a joy the author’s take on it all is. I was happy simply to be in Schoch’s company, wallowing in Sondheim trivia and enjoying a series of smart, close reads that sent me down at least one YouTube wormhole per chapter. Schoch reminds us that Sondheim wrote “Send In the Clowns” for Glynis Johns, who had “a modest octave and a bit in range” that required “short phrases firmly closed off with consonants.” This is why Judi Dench — not a singer, either — performed the number so piercingly in the National Theater’s 1995 revival of “A Little Night Music,” and why Catherine Zeta-Jones, in Trevor Nunn’s 2009 Broadway revival, did not. (On hearing the opening bars, I recall, Zeta-Jones assumed a stricken Torch Song expression as if something terrible was about to happen — which, of course, it was.)
Stritch! Schoch writes about Elaine Stritch being sent home, abject, self-loathing, from the cast recording of “Company” after her ninth flubbed take of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” reminding us that Sondheim favored cranky, brilliant leading ladies who drove everyone mad until they hit their mark. He takes us on a tour of Sondheim’s major themes, writing in relation to Gypsy Rose Lee, “She possesses the truest talent of all: the talent of being yourself.” The use of artifice in the search for authenticity is a recurring theme of Sondheim’s, raising questions of where in his characters the composer resides. That Sondheim, a gay man who by his own account didn’t have his first serious relationship until he was 60, became one of the great chroniclers of straight marriage remains curious. But while Schoch uses the example of the Baker’s Wife in “Into the Woods” to write movingly of his own coming out in his 30s, he doesn’t get into Sondheim’s life.
This is, I suspect, partly down to the suspicion that Sondheim would find parsing his musicals for biographical clues tawdry, and you can sense Schoch, at times, writing as if the subject were peering over his shoulder. Sondheim was famously generous to younger composers and writers, but he could be intimidating, too. (I met Sondheim twice and the second time, he took issue with something I’d written about him — or rather, about his pet poodles — in the wake of the first meeting. I can truthfully say that being glared at by Sondheim was one of the most crushing experiences of my life.)
The downside of a structure that unpacks one musical per chapter is that you may be tempted to skip those musicals you don’t know so well. But the freshness of the takes on the familiar shows is great. Thanks to Schoch, I returned to “Sorry-Grateful,” a song from “Company” that he calls the beating heart of the show over more obvious showstoppers like “Being Alive.” I think Schoch is right, and after reading his interpretation it seems to me that “Sorry-Grateful” stands for much more than that, too: the regret and self-doubt and ambition and joy that characterize not only Sondheim’s work, but the city in which he lived and thrived. “Sorry-Grateful” nails the typifying New York gesture of looking over the shoulder of the person you’re with to see if there mightn’t be someone more interesting standing behind them.
Sondheim never chased “relevance.” He despised commercial principles if they weren’t backed up by solid artistic rationale. A musical about a late-19th-century French artist doing a painting; a bunch of middle-aged people bickering at a dinner party; a load of old showgirls staring down obsolescence — none of this should have worked. And yet he was Stephen Sondheim, the greatest composer-lyricist of the second half of the 20th century. There’s a lesson in that.
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